I published a different form of this blog many months ago. This is the final version that I presented this week. Thanks to the guidance of one of my writer friends, it is shorter in many areas and now has an outline, which I needed for clarity to make sense of my own life events. My life story divisions are: Journey to Faith, Journey through Grief.
My Women’s Connection Testimony
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I
don’t know if I’m Irish or not, but I’m wearing green earrings so you can’t
pinch me. I see a lot of my friends here, thanks for coming, but for anyone who
came because you heard they were having lamb, prepare to be disappointed. I’m
the Lamb. Prayer: Lord if the story you have written in my life can help someone here with the story you are writing in hers, I pray for your Spirit to use my words. Thank you for letting me honor my son's life and memory today. A writing teacher once told
our class not to put on our book bios how many generations our families have
lived in Montana because no one outside of Montana cares. But since I am in
Montana, I feel free to say that my great grandparents homesteaded in eastern
Montana in 1913. Who else here is from
Wolf Point? When I was one, my Dad got a job with the Highway Department,
now called the DOT, so we moved from Wolf Point and followed his job to a series
of small towns in western Montana.
My younger brother was born in Philipsburg,
MT in a small hospital that did not recognize the damage that RH factor had
done to his body. RH factor refers to the protein that makes your blood type
either positive or negative. When an RH negative woman carries a baby with RH
positive blood, the mother's body reacts by forming antibodies that attack the
baby. This is more likely if there have been previous children because the
antibodies grow stronger with each pregnancy. By the time my brother's health
issues were obvious, Roddy had already been damaged by cerebral palsy. He would
have hearing and speech problems, mental and physical disabilities all of his
life. The doctor said he would not live past seven and, if he did, would be
unable to do or understand anything. He recommended putting my brother in an
institution before we got too attached.
Fortunately, God was not limited by this
pathetic prognosis and Roddy is almost 66 years old. Last year I helped him sign
up for Medicare and later this week, for Social Security. He graduated from
special ed. at Sentinel High School, and worked as a janitor until he retires
this month. He still lives in his Missoula home with my now 98 year old Dad
and, though Dad is still mostly able to take care of the house and yard, Rod
has taken over responsibility for driving. He is a Griz fan, loves all kinds of
music and stereo equipment, recently bought a new car, and most importantly,
trusted Christ as his Savior as a young boy. I had the privilege of leading him
to the Lord.
I was
six years old when my sister came into the world, two years after Roddy was
born. Our Mom developed a psychosis during childbirth that would last the rest
of her life. Although she was not diagnosed with schizophrenia until I was 14
and she had, what was then called, a nervous breakdown, I essentially lost my
mother when I was six. At that time treatment was basically tranquilizers,
which did not do anything for a patient's delusions, hallucinations and
paranoia, but made life more peaceful for the rest of the family. I’d like to
read you one of the poems that should be on your table now.
Beautiful Economy
On March 25, 1960
my brother was entering this world
in a hospital too small to recognize
the danger he was in.
A blood disorder had given him
cerebral palsy.
He would never hear, speak, learn or
move
the way most people do.
The damage was irreversible.
On October 8, 1962
my sister was entering this world
and my mother was leaving it
for a world of conspiracies and
intrigue.
For unknown reasons she became
paranoid schizophrenic.
She would never reason, feel or
function
the way most people do
The disease was incurable.
What kind of God
would give my father
a handicapped son
with a mentally ill mother?
The kind who knew
my dad would spend
most of his life
alone in his marriage,
but together with his son.
Through the long years
they would always have each other.
Nothing in this world
is ever wasted
in the beautiful economy of God.
I don't
want to give the wrong impression here, most of my life was quite ordinary. I
went to high school, babysat, did chores, and had part time jobs like everyone
else. I had a little more responsibility for helping raise my younger siblings
than many of my friends, and seldom had anyone come to my house, but most of my
life was normal. And the part that was hard--the anger, the sorrow--I stuffed away
into a secret place inside.
Early in their marriage, my Mom converted to a
different religious group. Like everything except biblical Christianity, it
taught that you must work for your own redemption. My Dad didn’t convert, but
my older brother and I were raised in that denomination. Although many schizophrenics'
paranoia focuses on the government or law enforcement, my Mom's main delusions
centered around her church so, when I was 14, Mom asked me to leave the church.
I believed I was in the true church and intended to go back when I left home. But
God used that request from my mentally ill mother as a turning point in my
spiritual journey.
Away
from the teachings of my church, I began to create my own god in the cafeteria
style that is still so popular today. I incorporated evolution, of course,
ancient aliens were popular at the time, as was something about the lost
continent of Mu, although I can't remember anything about it. But a
create-your-own-god is not like a build-a-bear workshop, there is nothing
tangible to hold onto when you are finished.
Meanwhile my older brother, Clell, had been
invited by one of the dorkiest boys in high school to some teen Bible studies.
My brother, in turn, started inviting me to their once a month parties. Since I
had no social life and went to a high school where all parties and most dates
involved drinking, a Christian youth group seemed like a safe alternative.
Eventually I felt guilty for attending the parties but not the actual Bible
studies, so I started going to those too. We were studying the gospel of John. It
was in John that I found out there is nothing we can do to work our way to
heaven. Jesus was asked that very question by the religious leaders of his
time—What can I do to work the works of God? Jesus said, the work of God is to
believe in the one He has sent. We do not have a works problem, we have a sin
problem, and the penalty for sin is death. Jesus came to pay for our sins by
dying on the cross. His Son was God’s love gift to us, the only work we need to
do, is to accept that gift. By God's grace, when there was a conflict between
what the Bible said and what my former church taught, I believed the Bible. After
all, one of the tenets of that faith stated that we believed the Bible was the
Word of God. But we didn't study it, certainly not in the main service, and
just a few scattered stories from the Bible in Sunday school.
Eventually I started attending Sunday morning service, not just youth group. But
something happened that forced me to look deeper at what I believed. When my friend
Donna and I were both 15 years old, Donna died of hepatitis. Suddenly, death
did not just come for old people, it had come for Donna, it could come for me.
I needed to know if what I had been learning in the Bible was true. I knew
I needed to trust Christ as my Savior, but I did not want to let Him control my
life. I wanted the steering wheel. My whole childhood had been driven by my
Mom's mental illness. I wanted to control my adult life. Being a teenager, I
didn't realize that we never get to hold life's steering wheel.
Unfortunately for me, the church I attended was one of those that gave an
altar call every Sunday, asking those who needed to receive Christ to come
forward. I remember week after week, standing for the last song, convicted,
resisting, gripping the pew in front of me until my knuckles turned white, but
I did not go forward. And the conviction didn't end when I went home. The Holy
Spirit is very good at his job and there, alone in my room, trying to go to
sleep, He would remind me that I needed to trust Jesus, that the alternative
was hell. Still I fought for control. I knew that if I asked the Savior who had
suffered and given his life for me, to save my soul, the only right response
would be for me to give that life back to him, but I didn't want to. I wrestled
with the Holy Spirit for a year. Do I
look that stubborn?
Finally
in October 1972, in what was probably the worst prayer for salvation ever
spoken, I told Jesus He could save me if He wanted to, but not to expect
anything from me. It did not feel like a great spiritual victory, it felt like
utter defeat. I could not resist the Spirit's conviction any longer. I
surrendered. The next night I prayed a more submissive prayer, but the deed was
already done. Lousy prayer, lousy attitude and all, Jesus had saved me that
night. The Holy Spirit, who had for so long pounded on my heart from the
outside, now assured me from the inside, that I belonged to Him. I’m so
thankful for the dorky kid that invited my brother to the teen Bible studies,
that taught me the book of John, who led me to the One I had unknowingly been
looking for all my life—Jesus.
I don't
want to yada, yada, yada over the next part of my life, but I am 69 years old
and only have 25 minutes to speak. So briefly, I lived at home and attended U
of M my freshman year because I had so many scholarships, I got money back at
the end of registration. It was better than high school, nobody cared about
what you wore, if you were rich, pretty or popular. I no longer felt like a
guppy swimming in a piranha tank, but in many ways, nobody cared at all. Where
I really wanted to go was Western Baptist Bible College, now called Corban, in
Salem, OR. And my sophomore year, much to my Dad's objections, I transferred
there. It was there I met my husband Reed. In the odd ways of God, Reed had
also grown up in Missoula, went to the only other high school, and my little
church was actually a split off of his, but we had never met. It was not love
at first sight, or even 20th sight, but there is something irresistible about a
man who keeps loving you in spite of yourself. We got engaged at 19, married at
20, and moved to Helena, MT where I put Reed through Vo-Tech aircraft mechanic
school and have lived off that investment for almost 49 years.
We moved
to Denver so Reed could get aircraft experience and I could finish college, but
became trapped there by the job scarcity of the recession. When we finally got
so sick of the traffic, pollution and crime, that we were ready to take
off for Montana without jobs, the company let Reed transfer to their Billings
facility. Our favorite souvenir of our four years in Denver is our daughter,
Britten. In Billings we had just bought our first home and I was seven months
pregnant with our son Will, when the company Reed worked for went bankrupt. The
other mechanics found jobs that paid as much or better than they earned before.
Reed did not. We had no insurance for the coming baby. We were broke and afraid
we would lose the house. In case He had forgotten, I kept reminding the Lord
that WE WERE THE CHRISTIANS! Why was he blessing these other people? That
experience is what I came to call, God's
Providential Leading Brilliantly
Disguised as Disaster. The Lord knew that where we really wanted to live
was western Montana, near our families, and He used all those seeming
catastrophes to loosen our grip on our life in Billings so we would be willing
to move to Kalispell when a job opened here.
Our son
Tracy was born here. When he was one year old, I was at a Bible study for young
moms and felt the Lord telling me He was going to do something different in my
life. I thought perhaps he would call us to the mission field. What actually
happened was 3 1/2 years of depression. I had reached the point where not only
could I not stuff one more thing into my secret place inside, the door had
popped open and everything was spilling out. I do not have time here to do justice
to that part of my life today, and I do not want to minimize the depression any
of you may be facing, so briefly, I fought suicidal feelings with logic and
willpower for a whole year. It was one time being that stubborn helped me. I prayed, of course, sang worship songs, but
the Lord's plan was not to end my struggle, but for me to walk through the pain
into wholeness. That was the something new He had promised. The main
encouragement I want to give you is—God
is real. God is good. Hang on until
life is good again, too.
Eventually
I could pray without feeling like my prayers were hitting the ceiling, go to
church and Bible study without feeling like a failure, read my Bible,
understand it, and believe it again. Feel all my feelings instead of banishing
the hard ones to my secret place. I could enjoy my life again. My children grew
up. My daughter met a godly young man at a Bible College in Bozeman, got
married and only 14 years later, gave me my first granddaughter, Brie.
When the baby was a just a couple months old, my son-in-law transferred from an
engineering firm in Helena to the Kalispell branch. They bought a home minutes
away from ours and had a second daughter in 2020. My oldest son, Will, who I
thought might grow up to be a hunting outfitter, or a hermit, decided to become
a nurse. He met his wife Emily at nursing college in Helena. There is an
amazing story about that, but I don’t have time to share that here either. To
my delight they live in Kalispell also, brought another granddaughter into our
lives in 2019 and, as of December 2024, a grandson.
Tracy,
our youngest son, began to doubt his faith in his teens and struggled so much
at Christian school that, much to the school's relief, I home schooled him the
last three years. But his secret struggle was with alcohol and drug addiction.
Things eventually spiraled out of control so much that he was willing to come
home to get sober and, when that was not enough, to go to rehab at Rimrock in
Billings. Something so remarkable happened on that trip, I want to share it
briefly here. By that low point in his life, Tracy doubted everything
about his previous faith in Christ. Somewhere between Townsend and Toston, we
pulled over on the shoulder of the road so our very anxious son could pace and
smoke. He said, "I will never believe in God because I can't see Him and
He can't see me." I prayed for the Lord to show Trace that He is real and
He is good. At that very moment a car pulled up behind ours on the highway. The
driver said he was on his way to a meeting in Helena when God told him to turn
around and go talk to us. He encouraged Tracy and prayed for us. Tracy said,
"I will never doubt God again because of what He did for me today." God is real. God is good. I want you to
know that, too.
That does not mean his path to sobriety was easy. I even prayed for a
time that God would make Trace physically unable to drink alcohol. After he had
gall stone removal and, while recovering from that, surgery to remove a tumor
on his adrenal gland, I mercifully retracted my prayer. It happened gradually,
but we finally got our sober, dependable son back. He was already a skilled
auto mechanic, but after helping Reed at the airport, decided to go to the same
school his dad graduated from, now called Helena College of Technology and
become an aircraft mechanic. Let me read you a text he sent after his birthday
in 2021: Thank you for dinner and my card. I am glad that you
can be proud to tell people how I'm doing again and I do work very hard to be a
good man now, but I couldn't have done any of that without you guys to help me
out. Thank you for helping me to pick my life back up and to be able to go to
college and do this. He was near the end of his training there, six weeks
from graduating, when a fellow student found him dead in his RV. Fentanyl
poisoning. Everyone who knew him was shocked. He had not used drugs in six
years. But even in all my brokenness, God
was real, God was good.
His
grace was evident even in the way we found out about Tracy's death. Our son-in-law
happened to have meetings in Helena at that time and our daughter happened to
have invited us for dinner that night. Luke got to Tracy's RV after the first
responders, so he didn't have to be the one to find the body. He called our
daughter with the news and she told us, so we did not have to find out from
some unknown officer looking through contacts on his phone. Throughout Covid
protocols I wrote this reference on my mask Ps.139:16 "...all the days
ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."
I had believed that for many years, but when my son died at age 34, I had to
take that truth deep into my heart. Although it is never God's will for a
person to use drugs, March 22, 2022 was the time God had chosen for Tracy to go
home to heaven. God also provided a special comfort for me that first dreaded
Mother’s Day, but I don’t have time to share that story today.
Two years
after Tracy died, our daughter got a call from the Helena prosecutor's office.
She was considered a material witness in Tracy's case since she, through late
nights going through her brother's computer and phone, unlocked the evidence
that convicted the dealer. There are many places in Montana where law
enforcement is not even investigating fentanyl deaths, but the Lewis and Clark
County prosecutor took the case seriously. We agreed with her suggestion to ask
for a sentence of 40 years for the dealer, Neil. His public defender asked for
20 with 15 suspended. But Neil had received many such sentences in the past and
always went back to selling drugs. To his credit, he did not fight the charges
even though he knew, from decades spent in the legal system, pleading not
guilty would have dragged out the case and given him a couple more years with
his family before going to prison. His only statement in court was not in his
own defense, but an apology to us. This was after sentencing, when it would do
him no good.
I
wondered if I would be able to forgive him. I did not even know what that would
feel like. But a month before the sentencing, at our church Good Friday
service, hearing again about all Christ had suffered to provide forgiveness for
me, God gave me enough love for the dealer to forgive him. Now I knew what
forgiveness feels like. It feels like love for the person who wronged you. Neil
was sentenced to 38 years. We were glad. He had been selling drugs in the
Helena area for about that long. Although Tracy would have been ashamed to have
died from drugs, I think he would be glad to know his death kept a man who had
been dealing drugs for decades, off the streets of Helena for decades. I think
he would have been willing to die a humiliating death in order to save others
from dying.
Writing
has long been my coping mechanism, so I poured out my pain in poetry and in my
grief journal. Those two eventually became this book, Lament of the Lamb.
I give it to people in loss, especially an unexpected loss, to encourage others
in grief to trust God and so bring spiritual fruit from our son's death. And I
gave my book to the dealer in hope he could know, not only my forgiveness, but
God's. I pray for salvation for Neil and his family.
After
creating the first book on Kindle Direct Publishing, I decided to compile
decade’s worth of poems and several years of my blog, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Humility into these other four
books. I had come to realize even my most ardent fan would not be willing to
comb through my computer to look for my poems after I am gone, and the books
are much easier to foist off on my children. So although I cannot force them on
you, I have brought the books with me, along with the "Heaven"
booklets we give out in Tracy's memory. Tracy was very good about opening doors
for others, now he lives in heaven, and if there is anyone here who needs to
come to Jesus, let his story, and mine, open that door for you today. I would
like to read you one final poem.
Because of Christ
We once were enemies--God and I.
Though, I kind of liked knowing
he was around
in case I needed him to handle
something I could not manage on
my own.
In that case, I might ask him.
But I worried he might ask
something of me in return.
And that would not do.
I had plans for my life
and strength of my own to carry
them through.
Or so I thought.
And now we are friends--God and I
sitting at the same table.
Not that I did anything to earn
an invitation,
He invited me, must have been a
hundred times.
Until, out of excuses, I finally
came.
His strength, I found, was not so
much
in those grand interventions I
planned to ask for,
but in the small, daily graces
I hadn't even noticed
until we changed from enemies to
friends.
Because of Christ.
God is real. God is good. If you would like to trust in Him today, pray with me as I lead in this prayer of salvation . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment