Posted on 03/14/2021 9:14:07 AM PDT by .30Carbine
In the fall of my 29th year I was married to my second husband. He was a mechanic at a local car dealership, which was handy because I worked as a part-time rural mail carrier and my 2 vehicles often needed repairs. I also worked nights at two different jobs; one was at the neighborhood country store, and one was as a bartender at a mid-range restaurant, known for its beer selection, in the same town where my husband worked.
The restaurant policy was to give the workers a free shift drink at the end of the night. One night my husband came back into town to have a drink with me there, and then we went out to a couple of other bars. By the end of the evening we were pretty toasted, and we landed in the seediest dive around, a pool joint, at closing time.
My husband had a tendency to change personality when he drank. The drunker he got, the meaner he became. We had been married about 4 years; I had noticed his rages accelerating, but he had never hit me.
At last call I turned from the pool table where a couple of other guys were talking to me, to look for my husband bent over his beer on a bar stool. He wasn't there. His jacket was gone, too. I asked the bartender if he knew where my husband had gone.
"He went to get the car, I guess," he said. Well, I knew that could not be the case, as both of us had cars parked very nearby, being that this bar was across the street from where my job was. I started to feel a little nervous then. I got my things and headed out to the parking lot. It was somewhere between 2 and 3am.
My husband's vehicle was nowhere in sight, but as I unlocked my car, got in, and started it up, I heard the squeal of tires coming around the corner onto Main Street. It was him, and I knew I was in for an argument, probably about the two guys I had been talking to at the pool table. I headed out onto Main Street and turned left toward home. My husband pulled right up onto my bumper. We never should have been behind the wheel at all, and it was (in hindsight) a miracle that we both survived the trip home.
The fight started in the driveway. Our neighbor's house about a hundred yards away was dark and quiet. My husband followed me into the house where the screaming and finger pointing continued. I argued back, protesting my innocence. It only enraged him more. I was afraid that this time he was going to hit me. I thought for sure if he started hitting me, in the condition he was in, he would never stop.
My dad, it suddenly occurred to me, would be up, watching the Turner Black and White Movie Channel about then. I often called him before I went to work at the P.O. early in the morning. I staggered over to the phone, which in those days was hanging on the wall (this was way before cell phones).
I was barely able to make out the numbers on the dial I was so drunk. My husband continued to scream in my face. He suddenly reached out and ripped the entire phone off the wall! He threw it across the room. It jangled and burst into pieces. I was in absolute terror for my life.
My dad had raised me to know how to shoot. Both my husband and I had guns hanging on a rack in the living room, with the ammo stored separately but nearby. I went for my .30 carbine and its clip, which had 10 rounds in it. I was so drunk that I could not line up the clip with the well of the magazine to load the gun. While I was struggling with it, my husband tore it out of my hands.
I turned and ran for the front door as fast as I could. I made it off the deck and down the seven steps before I fell, landing on my hands and knees in the dew-covered grass in the front yard. I was crying and screaming. My husband followed me out and walked down the steps. I heard his work boots on every wooden plank. I heard him load the gun and chamber a round.
"Daddy! Daddy!" I screamed. "Save me! Make him stop! Daddy! Make it all go away! Daddy! Save me!" The only excuse I have for crying out for my dad was my drunkenness. I never called my dad "Daddy."
My husband did stop! He turned around and walked back into the house! I got up and stumbled to my car. I thought I would lock myself in and sleep until daylight, but the keys were in it. I never leave my keys in my car, but to my surprise there they were! I drove away, just a couple of miles, to a pull-off near a brook deep in the woods on a private, dead-end road. I rolled up the windows, locked the doors, shut the engine off, and went to sleep.
It was so cold when I woke up. I drove back to the house. My husband met me in the driveway. He had his uniform on and was going to work. The sun was shining; that seemed so incongruous.
"I will be back this weekend for my things," he said through the little crack I made in the window. When he drove away I got out of the car and went inside.
Over the rest of that week I felt something like a cancer growing in my guts. This was my second marriage, and certainly not the second of my relationships. They had all failed. I was a failure. I could not do life. I had nothing else to try after years of sex, drugs, alcohol, and myriads of other habits and distractions to try to cope with this world. I wanted to die. The feeling just kept growing as I got up each day and went about my business on autopilot – going to work at night or to the P.O. in the daytime if I was scheduled. I was scheduled that Saturday. When I got home his things were gone.
I sat on the rug in the middle of the living room as the sun was setting. I had a revolver in my hand. I was picturing how to hold it: To the side of my head, I decided. But just before I raised the gun I had a vision. I saw a vast dark space full of nothing but smoldering heat. I was the only soul there. It was the kind of darkness that presses against your eyeballs, and the kind of heat that makes the air difficult to breathe. I knew it was hell. I knew that if I pulled the trigger I would go there, that I deserved to go there.
I did not typically think about God, or heaven, or hell. I knew there was a god "up there somewhere." Anyone looking around at creation could see that. I also had been given a minimalist Roman Catholic education when I was very young, up to First Communion. My mother had later been "saved" in the "Jesus Movement" during the 70s. She spoke in tongues. I thought it was weird.
But in this moment I spoke to God out loud for the first time ever as an adult. It was also the first time as an adult that I used the name of Jesus Christ as anything other than a curse.
"God, if you're there, I really need you. I’ve made a complete mess of things. I don't know how to make life work. I've tried everything I know to do and I am at the end. If you're there, and if you can hear me, I need you. Is it true what I've heard, that Jesus Christ died for my sins on the cross so that I could go to Heaven? If it is, I need you to take over. Please forgive me for the mess I've made. Please show me how to live."
I went so far as to make a deal with God. I found out later you are not supposed to do that, it supposedly never works, but I also discovered God’s incredible mercy.
"If you bring my husband back, I’ll know that it’s you doing it, that you have heard me. I will read the Bible, and I will tell everyone what you’ve done for me."
That was it. I stood up. I felt as if I could go on. One might even call it peace. The feeling of cancer in my stomach receded. I put the gun away.
God did bring my husband back. I did read the Bible (my husband was jealous of that, too). One day a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses came to my door. "God sent you to teach me how to read the Bible!" I told them enthusiastically. During one visit they asked me what, if any, Scriptures I knew. "I know the ten commandments," I said. They knew exactly where to turn to find that passage, Exodus 20, and I was so envious of that ability! Later that afternoon before my husband came home from work I sat on the couch and read that passage over and over again.
On the first reading I thought, 'I've kept most of these. I’m a pretty good person.' By the time I had read the ten commandments through about five times I knew I was guilty of breaking every single one of them. I sobbed, literally sobbed, for over an hour. My heart was broken. If I had not already believed at that point that Jesus died for my sins, including the sin of murder when I aborted my child, I could not have endured the conviction I felt. God was holy; I was not.
One of the customers on my mail route was a pastor. He started meeting me at the mailbox and talking to me about what I was reading in the Bible. Eventually I was baptized by him. I joined his church. I quit drinking and drugs and years later cigarettes and even coffee. I learned and grew and changed by leaps and bounds! I even became a Sunday school teacher, first for children and then for women. I have been a Christian now for 26 years. Jesus has never left me nor forsaken me, though my husband, who never understood the changes I was going through, did. I call God “Papa” in my prayers, which is very close to “Daddy.” I know Bible verses now that explain why I screamed “Daddy!” on the night my salvation began:
Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.”
~Galatians 4:6 NIVFor you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received
the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.”
~Romans 8:15 NKJV
The power and encouragement in sharing our testimonies comes from seeing how God has moved in our very unique lives in very personal ways to deliver us from judgement through our faith in Jesus Christ, in his blood shed on the cross for our sins, in his death and resurrection. Because He lives, we also have new life.
Please post your own story of coming to faith in Jesus Christ. If you have a testimony of answered prayer, that would be appropriate here, too.
Dear Readers, please keep in mind that this is a devotional thread.
In 1 Peter 3:15 we are exhorted to “always be prepared to give an answer for the hope that is in you.”
Please share your testimony or answered prayer here.
According to Revelation 12:11 we overcome the evil one “by the blood of the lamb and by the word of our testimony.”
Do you have a story to tell?
“Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story - those he redeemed from the hand of the foe.”
~Psalm 107:2
Please encourage us with your testimonies.
How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!
Psalm 133:1
It would be so encouraging to read your stories of salvation!
Please come and share your personal tetimonies of salvation and/or your stories of answered prayer for yourself or others.
The Book of Remembrance
At that time those who feared the LORD spoke with one another, and the LORD listened and heard them. So a scroll of remembrance was written before Him regarding those who feared the LORD and honored His name. “They will be Mine,” says the LORD of Hosts, “on the day when I prepare My treasured possession. And I will spare them as a man spares his own son who serves him. So you will again distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not.”
Malachi 3:16-18
Our testimonies are as unique as our fingerprints.
Oh, thank you! “Gift upon gift” indeed!
God has blessed you with a second chance
this past year btwn the cancer/chemo/radiation, China19 threat, major abdominal surgery and almost a month in hospital, i really dint know if/think i’d even be here today...
but by the grace of God and the prayers of my FReeper family i too have been given a second chance
may God bless
As an unsaved kid contemplating my future I often thought about religion and heaven. I knew that I wanted to go there, but I just didn’t know how. I was not satisfied with the trappings of the Catholic church. It did not make sense to me that I could sin like the devil all week long and go talk to a priest behind a shade and recite a couple of prayers by rote and somehow, I was set.
I started to hear snippets of opinions about being good enough to go to heaven. I’d make a personal commitment to do right and within an hour I found myself back to where I was before I made the commitment. I said, “Heck, this is impossible! There is no way that I’ll ever be good enough!” So I basically gave up trying. Why bother?
When I was around 12 or 13 I went to a free movie at the local theater sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and was exposed for the first time to the concept that even though I was powerless to live the righteous life, Someone else had already done it for me and that I could live vicariously through Him. It made some sense to me and I’m really not sure if I acted upon it or not. I mean, I might have prayed the prayer at the end of the movie—but I doubt that I meant it. If nothing else occurred, a major league seed was planted in my soul that day which lay dormant for a decade.
Then when I was 23, I found myself in the Mormon church trying to deny the existence of hell and sin — but I could not do that. They were too real to me — and the flames of hell were all I could think about in the silence. About that time Campus Crusade for Christ started their “I Found It!” Campaign with billboards, pins and bumper stickers everywhere. People would ask, “What did you find?” and the answer was “I found a new life in Jesus Christ!”
I received, and read, the Four Spiritual Laws by Bill Bright and that old Billy Graham experience returned to me. At 3:45 p.m. I woke up from a nap wherein I dreamt of hell and fell to my knees by the side of my bed and asked Jesus Christ to be my Saviour. We’ve been walking together now these past 42 years and I’ve never had to look back or wonder why I couldn’t last at least an hour . . . He was doing it for me!
Since then my wife (who is now with the Lord due to ovarian cancer) and I have gone to Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, I pastored a church for five years until health issues drove me to an online ministry where the Lord led in the establishing of BaptistBibleBelievers.com an online library with hundreds of old, out-of-print books in the public domain. No one needs to actually join the site, but you can download the books by chapter to your own computer and use them in whatever way the Lord leads.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to minister online because of ecumenicity. My most recent online endeavor was ended abruptly when it was decided that my ‘doctrine was too much over the top.’ Sadly, almost every shade of New Ageism and works-based theologies are much akin to weeds choking out the Gospel wherever it can.
Grateful you are here today.
Jesus is the God of second, third, fourth, and fifth chances! He never gives up on us!
If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny who he is.
2 Timothy 2:13
Amen to that! What a beautiful telling of your story. Thank you so much!
Amen to that.
thank you
From a molested and abused child, to a suicidal teenager, to a man who has everything, God, through His Personifications as Jesus Christ, God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and the Great Unmanifest, has delivered me to joy in this world (I wish everyone could have a life as fabulous as mine!) and realisation of the immortality and eternal joy of the soul--mine and that of everyone.
Thanks to Him, I am exquisitely happy--and fortunate--in this life and looking forward to the life to come.
I raise my hands in worship over your testimony of God’s grace, redemption, and goodness! Hallelujah!
Joy to the world, the Lord has come!
Let earth receive her King!
Amen.
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