Tumultuous

Greetings! This is my testimony and again, my hands are shaking as I consider posting it because I am nervous to share my little story with the world because that means sending it out there like a little child, all vulnerable and open to hurt... But as I've begun to learn from Glennon at Momastary, fear is silly. Live life out loud, what's the point otherwise... So, with all that being said. This is my testimony, or at least part of it... 38 years is a lot of ground to cover! So, read it if you'd like and may it hold some small nugget of truth for you.

================================================


My life was tumultuous from soon after my birth when, at four months old, we moved in what would be the first of six cross country moves before my sixth birthday. My father was in the Air Force when he and my mother met and got married. He decided to get out of the Air Force when I was two. He fancied himself a preaching man and following God meant a quick succession of roach infested rentals, food-stamps and poverty.

Imagine my relief at the end of the road on that sixth move, then, to get to live the hometown of my Granny and Granddaddy! Better still, my father had a job and a church! A white steeple, country Southern Baptist church no less. My sister and I relished our little house in the country, living close to cousins and family for the first time in our lives. Our little church became our home away from home. Mom was pregnant with our next sibling and life was hopeful. I got baptized, by my father, into that church, shortly before my seventh birthday. A week, to the day, after my birthday, my brother Adam was born! He was beautiful and perfect and we were all so happy. Three days later, he died. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome they called it but all it meant to me was my brother was gone and my mother was inconsolable and our little world was turned upside down. Mom started carrying a baby doll to church and questioning if there even was a God. So, as you may imagine, that little country church quietly asked us to leave. My father found another church, clear across the country, but that church, in my heart, was my last.

The next two years saw two more baby brother’s born but my mother was never the same after Adam died. It’s hard to be a preacher’s wife when you no longer believe in God.  Fast forward to me at eleven, three more cross country moves later. My father had joined the Air Force again, he had four kids to feed now. This time we moved about an hour away from my other set of grandparents and this time, we bought a house! Soon after we moved I turned twelve and my sister was nearly fourteen. As you may imagine, we argued quite a lot. My mother told us, time and again, that if we didn’t stop bickering we were going to drive her crazy and she would move out. I don’t know why I was so surprised when she started packing up to leave, taking my brothers with her. She told my sister and me that we were the reason she was leaving. In my heart, she stopped being my mother that day.

My father, however, was blindly devoted to her and, in a bid to win her back, he got back out of the Air Force, again. We abandoned our house and moved into my mother’s one bedroom apartment, all six of us. We lived there for the summer until my parents decided that the Air Force was better than poverty, my father went back in and, a month after my 13^th birthday, we moved across country, again.

The next few years were bewildering at best. My mother lived with us but had her own room. Hustler, Playboy and, even more mortifying for me at that age, Playgirl were out on tables like most people’s McCall’s magazines. Of course, our house was popular with my sister’s and my friends because there were no rules. Then yet again, when I was fourteen, my mother left. On her way back to pick up some more of her stuff, she also picked up a toothless hitchhiker named Wayne. An awkward three days ensued where Wayne and my mother sat across the table from my father while we all tried to eat. In very short order, my mother was pregnant and Wayne was gone.

My father, as ever, took her back, pregnant with another man’s baby and all. They announced they’d keep it and he would raise it as his own. My mother, however, wasn’t as young as she once was and, when the early stages of pregnancy proved to be too uncomfortable for her, she terminated the pregnancy. Despite it being ‘only’ a half sibling, I was sad. I imagined it being a sister. Around this time, I stopped eating, started smoking, living on white cross and diet coke. There was nothing else in my world I could control but I could control my weight.

Mom left, again, and this time my father started drinking. He’d buy alcohol for my sister and me  and any friends we wanted to have over. One of these times, while he was drunk, he said to my sister “I have a hard time remembering that you’re my daughter sometimes” in a way a father isn’t meant to speak to a daughter. She moved out when she was seventeen, with her girlfriend.  Too young to leave, I found regular babysitting jobs every night of the week and snuck out into the early morning hours with kids I knew were trouble. Being at ‘home’ made me tense and my only thought was escape. My first suicide attempt was around this time, involving an ambulance and my stomach being pumped.

I survived the next few years best I could, staying away from home as much as possible, when, at seventeen, I met Josh. He was a bit of a ‘bad boy’ but I decided better an honest bad boy than a crooked preacher. So Josh became my savior, as blasphemous as that may sound. He loved me, his family became my family, getting married at eighteen. My new family were wonderful people with a beautiful, peaceful home. They were also devout atheists. I embraced them wholeheartedly and their ‘faithlessness’ with them.

The final nail in the coffin of my faith came again at the hands of my father, this time in my mid-twenties. He had remarried and I embraced his new wife and her two kids as family in my heart. My father molested my sweet beloved step-sister, when she was only eleven years old. He was convicted of it and is still on a list because of it. With his conviction, any faith I might have had was shattered.

Over nineteen years, seeing the birth of our kids and several moves of our own, Josh and I were often happy but, despite our deep love for one another, our lives without God were never quite peaceful. Josh had his own set of demons to fight and our demons made fast friends and imbedded themselves pretty deeply into the fiber of our lives. Evidenced in my near constant depression, years of therapy with eventual diagnosis of Bipolar and PTSD, our first recreational use of and then eventual entanglement with the law for marijuana, leading to our drinking to replace the pot while Josh was on probation… We searched every imaginable source for peace but, as you can probably guess, it eluded us at every turn.

Still… with my babies, I’d pray with them before bed and before meals. I figured “I teach them about Santa too, where’s the harm? They can decide what to believe for themselves when they’re older”. So they knew a little about God, what little a seven year old girl might know. Then, one day, when my daughter was about four years old, as we were driving by a church, she asked me what it was. I told her “That’s God’s house baby.” Then, every time we’d drive by that church, “Mommy I want you to take me to God’s house!” So persistent was she that Josh and I finally Googled for the church closest to our house and we all went. That church was Flatland.

When I came to Flatland, I thought I knew about Jesus. What I knew didn’t even scratch the surface of the inarticulate-able majesty that is Jesus Christ! His name has become as sweet as honey on my lips and His light is all the more brilliant for having spent so many years in the dark. I’ve learned that Salvation is just the beginning! You actually get to know Jesus here on Earth! Not know of Him or about Him but KNOW Him! I’ve learned that the little song I sang as a girl had spoken the most profound truth in my whole life; “Jesus Loves Me!”    Now, finally, this I know.

========================================================

                I was asked to share a scripture that was particularly meaningful to me and I want to share Hosea 2:14  “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her” because He spoke tenderly to me so many times when I was in the wilderness and finally, despite my fear to do it, I listened to Him.