This is my life in Christ.
I went to see Jesus Christ Superstar and asked God to show me him as clearly as I could see that guy playing Jesus on the stage. I didn't go home after that musical. I was going back to my dysfunctional aunt and uncle's house, because my mother had already known she was dying of cancer when she left Dad a few months earlier and didn't want to burden her mother with taking care of her, two teenagers and one four year old brother. The next morning I woke up absolutely knowing God was real.
I had no idea what to do with that information, but on the way to school, I told my friend. She just happened to know about a Bible Study going on before school by some missionary.
He was the guy who mentored me and introduced me to a whole community of Christians. Several of them were also interns at the same hospital my mother was in and out of with her cancer. They laid hands on her and prayed. Then they told me God would heal her.
She died. She died, and I and my little brother were quickly whisked away to Dad's house 1500 miles away, in a subdivision 15 miles from town, and I didn't know how to drive, once more had my driver's licences. THAT's what God did to me.
EXCEPT, had he not done that to me, I would have never been forced to get to know my dad and take my first steps to figuring out how to be an adult by taking care of my five year old brother. (Tell me you would have come to love your son even more without all those trials. Can't say it, can you?)
And I rebelled against God for the first time in there. And I ended up being a druggie at college, barely making it through college only to find out I've got no skills to do what I wanted to do with that degree. (I wanted to be a high school English teacher. I stink at grammar.)
And I didn't make it unscathed. I went to friends house to tutor their son, and was returning home on a dark road by hitchhiking. Five guys picked me up and raped me. While raping me, one guy raised an ax over my head to tell me to shut up. I only had my coat on by that time, and I lowered the hood to give him a clean shot at my neck. He then raised a baseball bat above my head, and the same thing happened. I was not killed, despite desperately wanting to be killed. THAT was what God gave me. LIFE with a lot less pride!
And he gave it to me to get me to see how far I had fallen, and get me to go to drug rehab. (And, if you don't think that was God, I did not know that the friend I was helping by helping their son also was on the board of that rehab, until he told me about it. He was a pastor.)
So, I went through rehab, and helped others as they helped me. And about that time, I graduated with a degree in Communications, nix any use for the other part that says "Secondary Education," and poof! Got no where to go and nothing to do.
EXCEPT, God did that to me, because had I not failed miserably, I would have gone on to get a degree at Penn State in Communications, (was accepted, except didn't go because I would have had to live with Dad which meant no partying), been successful in some way in Communications, except at the wrong time and place to meet hubby. (Had we not met, both of us would be dead.) And, had I been a success, i would have gone on to teach high school English, instead of learn to help kids in schools to not even fall into getting stoned, as well as help other druggies through rehab. That rehab gave me my first full-time job, 15 weeks after graduating. (The college degree gave me a summer of cleaning other people's houses. lol) And after that job was over, I went on to find another job helping runaways and throwaways. (Which is when I met hubby at church.)
AND, had hubby not just gone through one hell of a marriage, getting physically abused by his wife (talking knives and razor blades here, not merely some slapping by a little woman), he would not have had two kids who were stuck with their insane mother so her insanity didn't include twisting them up one way and the other by disparaging their dad so much that they were terrified every Friday night when they had to go see him, and then cried every Sunday afternoon because they had to go back to the insanity that was their mother. And those two kids would have both gone crazy and not had their kids, who have now had their own kids.
So, he and I married. And after the problems we had right before we met each other, I asked God to give us a rest. He did.
Two years, two days. Then hubby broke his back. Not paralyzed, but his doctor called him Quasimodo, until he was fitted into a back brace. And he'd never be able to go back to what he did (HVAC mechanic.) And I was trying out the housewife thing, (and found out I'm not), so I had no job, thus no income. And God took care of all that.
My communications degree taught me how to write a great resume. Before we met, hubby had spent his time helping kids at Christian day camps, and teaching them how to work on houses, so we both had the background to help kids, and were chosen to be group home parents to six teenage boys. Couldn't afford food or shelter, but both were provided because God knew we needed it.
Just enough time for hubby's back to heal, because that was the world's worst job. (One boy ran away every night, doorbell rang every night between 3-5 AM with cops returning him, and little did we know that kid had raped a 10 year old, until after we already gave our notice. Good thing though. God worked that out too. After the job, the kid wanted to be emancipated, and the courts asked me my opinion, so I was able to tell why he was dangerous in society. No emanciation. A warrant instead.)
We rebuilt our lives after that. Hubby could not go back on the streets doing HVAC work, however working on a federal government base doing steam pipes was doable, because the government is very protective of their worker's safety. AND he got the job when there was a hiring freeze because a friend of his was leaving his job and recommended hubby. Things were going smoothly for a while. (Not too smoothly, since I have always had trouble finding a new job, but after all this time, I'm fully aware God takes care of us.)
My grandmother died, giving us enough down payment for a house, but after spending so long being broke, we decided to buy a small home we could afford even if just one of us could work.
Good thing. God at work again. BRAC hit. (A committee in Congress that decided which bases would be shut down.) Used to be a government job was the safest job, because they don't downsize. There went hubby's pension. His livelihood too, but it was the government, so they gave five years noticed and retrained. Hubby got into Computer Networking classes when the average salary was $172,000 a year.
13 months later, when he graduated, they were making $40,000 a year. I had a home based business going, that was just going into the black. Gallstones passing through got me into surgery, and whoever moved me off the operating table pinched a nerve in my back that felt just like something was wrong with my gallbladder... except I no longer had one.
Lost my business and my health, but doctors wouldn't tell me what happened for 15 years. (Statue of limitation for malpractice is 3 years.) End of 1999, or the Y2K bug.
Hubby's temp jobs for that year were fixing the Y2K bug. After that was fixed, the computer field was glutted, and after that three jets rammed into three buildings, causing no flying in the US for three days, causing many businesses to fail, and, oh yeah, the dotcommers lost a lot of businesses. Soooo, $172,000 a year became $30,000 a year WITH a college degree.
Ends up, God was in all that too. Had I been able to work, I would have. Had I been working, I wouldn't have had the time to nag hubby to go see the eye doctor about that blind spot in his eye. Had the eye doctor not told him it was caused by a rupture that would have been a stroke if it happened anywhere else in his head, besides his eye, he wouldn't have gone to our primary, who then took blood tests, who then found out it was a deep depression. He had Hepatitis C. I took care of him through treatment, because he was too sick to go to doctors!
We also ran out of money -- including our savings and retirement -- and we got foreclosure on the house, but God worked out us living on $839 a month with a $550 mortgage for a year, until hubby found out Hep C hid other health problems and the chemo wrecked his body in new ways, and he was disabled.
God was in that too. We're still in our house. We still eat. We still pay the bills.
And then there was his cancer, which should have been major surgery with a 14 inch incision, except God provided the booboo that made the resident blab a different way of taking care of it, so it was removed by freezing it with a long needle.
And if we weren't both disabled, I wouldn't have been home, when he decided that feeling in his abdomen was indigestion, not a heart attack, until four days later when he just couldn't breathe. and I wouldn't have been able to visit him in the hospital for the next 8 months to deal with doctors and crises....
And mostly? God was there, when I asked his will for my husband, when he should NOT have lived! And my husband is with me today.
God never promised us a rose garden! He promised us he'd be there for us and grow us into being more like him. We don't learn patience, trust, joy, kindness, endurance, perseverance, etc. by everything working out hunky dory. We learn it the hard way! And that IS God doing that for us!
Of course it hurts! We have to let go of ego and trust God. He HAS proven himself trustworthy. We have proven to be untrustworthy enough already. He is very real. Being mad at him does NOT stop him from being real, and you know this!!!
