pg. 26 — lightandlifemagazine.com
urfm You are the church
“I walked the streets all night crying. I didn’t try to
meet anyone,” she said. “I always called out to God.”
She wasn’t yet a Christian, but she appealed to God
for help.
Her husband decided they would move to Phoenix
with their son, and he promised a new life for them.
“We go to Phoenix. As soon as I get there, he puts me
out of the car and says, ‘Go to work,’” she recalled.
A man picked her up, held a knife to her throat, and
tried to rape her. Something more powerful than herself
rose up on the inside, and she began to fight for her life
through her words. The man let her go. He drove her
back where he picked her up.
She eventually convinced her husband to let her and
their son return to Seattle to avoid the Arizona heat.
“I went back to my mother’s house, and I never lived
with him again,” she said. “But did my life get any easier?
No, I went from one bad relationship to another.”
More Trauma
At age 25, her sisters convinced her to date a man
whom they said was a good guy with money. He became
“the most horrific man in my life story.” The Vietnam
veteran tried to push her out of a moving vehicle and
throw her out of a high-rise hotel room.
She moved into a domestic violence shelter but
eventually “went back into that violent relationship,
because I had nowhere else to go.” She tried to commit
suicide by taking pills, but a voice — whom she now
believes to be the Holy Spirit — immediately told her to
drink coffee. She then told her abuser what she’d done,
and he took her to the hospital up the street where the
staff didn’t believe she’d taken
the pills. He continued
his abusive behavior.
She tried
another shelter
and then she —
and the three
children she now had — moved to Oklahoma with a
woman she met at the shelter, but her abuser tracked
her down and forced her and the children to return to
Seattle. On the way back, however, he decided to leave
her in the desert to die. After he left her, she cried out
to God. She didn’t know God, but she cried out, and the
man returned and picked her up.
In Seattle, she and her children escaped the man. A
lawyer helped her obtain a restraining order to protect
her from the man, who never bothered her again.
Finding Jesus and George
Friends and family members all around her began
becoming Christians. While walking one Sunday, she
saw the sun shining out of heaven on a church building
that was down the street past another church building.
“It was seriously like Paul talked about,” she said.
“I knew on the inside that I had to go to church. I ran
home and I changed my clothes, and I told my kids, ‘I’ll
be back.’”
“That day, I received Jesus
as my Lord and Savior,
and my life was changed.
Since that day, I have
never been the same.”
She went into the church the sunlight had hit, and
she realized, “All that time I have been calling out to
God, it was Jesus that I needed, and I had no idea that
in order for me to get to God, I needed Jesus. That day,
I received Jesus as my Lord and Savior, and my life was
changed. Since that day, I have never been the same.”
A few weeks after attending services at the small
church, she was asked to help with the children’s
ministry.
“It was one of the greatest things that ever happened
to me. God began to teach me how to teach the children.
That’s how I learned to study the Word of God,” she
said. “I would just feast on His Word and take it back to
the children’s ministry.”
Through a dream, she later sensed God leading
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