Both Will and I were running away from our damaged lives, but instead of running to each other, we ran in different directions. He ran to drugs; I ran to motherhood. All the pain and shame and anger we both felt aren’t things you can ever outrun. Will and I were doomed from the beginning.
THREE WEEKS BEFORE my due date, Will showed up at my mom’s house and finally admitted he had a problem. We got him to agree to enter rehab after our child was born. It might seem like the birth couldn’t have come during a crazier time, but to me it didn’t feel that way at all. To me, it felt like my child was born in a moment of pure goodness and love.
And when my daughter arrived, I couldn’t wait for the doctor to hand her to me. I stared at her little face with tears running down my cheeks. She had the sweetest little mouth and the most beautiful brown eyes I’d ever seen. I named her Sabyre, and she was my angel sent from heaven to heal my broken soul.
I now had two beautiful, healthy children . . . and one crumbling marriage. Will checked into rehab as promised, but while he was gone I realized I was ready to start a new life for my kids. And I was ready to do it on my own. I didn’t want them to grow up with parents who fought constantly. I wanted something better for them and for me, plain and simple.
Simple, maybe, but definitely not easy. During our divorce proceedings Will took my car, so I had to ask friends to drive me back and forth to the diner where I worked the midnight shift. I’d earned my associate’s degree a few weeks before Sabyre was born, and I was desperately trying to save enough money to go back and earn my bachelor’s degree. More than anything I wanted to show my kids that, no matter how deep the hole you fall into, you can always claw your way out. But, boy, was the hole I found myself in deep.
One night a friend drove me and my kids home after my shift. It was around 4:00 a.m. when I opened the front door to find there was no heat or electricity. I immediately knew Will was responsible. Because he and I were still legally married, he was able to shut off my utilities and take my deposit money. By then I understood that addiction can be stronger than any love he might have felt. Love for me, love for his child, love for himself.
Standing in the darkness, I felt the cold winter wind blasting right through the apartment. It was one of those moments that makes you take stock of your life, and I stood there doing just that. I had no heat, no electricity, no money, and no phone—and my children were freezing.
“Are you serious, God?!” I screamed into the darkness. “How much more can I take?”
I bundled up JP and Sabyre, put them in their double stroller, and started walking to my mother’s house seven miles away. It was the longest, coldest walk of my life. The streets were dark and empty; all the other families were safe and warm in their homes. And here we were, out in the street, trudging slowly into the frigid wind. I walked on, block after deserted block, constantly tucking my children beneath a blanket to shield them from the icy gusts. But I was feeling the cold in my bones, and I knew they must be, too. And with miles still to go I began to worry that we were in real trouble.
Just then, I saw the headlights of a car heading toward me. The car drove up alongside us and stopped. It was a taxicab. “Can I give you a ride to where you’re going?” the elderly cabbie asked.
“I don’t have any money,” I said.
He got out of the cab and came up to me. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Let’s just get those little babies in the car.”
The cabbie drove me to my mother’s house and helped me to the front door. I thanked him over and over and told him I’d find a way to pay him back, but he just shook his head and smiled.
“Someday you will do something good for someone else,” he said.
I never learned his name or saw him again, but I also never forgot what he did and what he said. I often wonder now if God sent that man to save us. Whether He did or not, we were rescued that night.
WILL AND I were divorced six months after the wedding. My kids were all that mattered to me after that, and I was determined not to bring any more bad influences into their lives. I went back to college to finish my degree, and I got a good-paying job as a waitress at the local country-western bar. Things were definitely looking up for my little family. But I was also very young and very lonely. Still, I figured that after Will, the consequences of my choices in men could hardly get any worse.
Tragically, in 2002, they did.
For a while I dated a man named Steven. We didn’t stay together for long, but our breakup was friendly. Steven would drop by my house every once in a while to pick up something he’d left there. One winter afternoon, he pulled up in the driveway on a gleaming black motorcycle. JP, who was six years old, took one look at it and said, “Cool! Can I go for a ride?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. Steven gunned the engine, and JP, standing mesmerized on the front porch, begged me to let him ride. But I held firm; I didn’t want my son on the back of anyone’s motorcycle.
Just then Sabyre, who was three and a half, had to go to the bathroom. I ran her inside, and when I came back, both Steven and JP were gone. Now, I knew Steven was a gentle man and would never intentionally harm JP, but that didn’t make me any less furious. I stood on the porch boiling and thinking, How dare he take my son? I also felt a hard, sickening feeling in my stomach, like someone had hit me with a bat.
Then I heard the sirens.
I threw Sabyre in her car seat and jumped behind the wheel, following the wailing sirens. Four blocks from my house, I saw a police car parked sideways closing off a street and about a dozen people standing around. I ran up to a bystander and frantically asked what happened.
“There’s a wreck,” he said. “Some guy crashed.”
“Was there a motorcycle?” I screamed.
The man looked at me, and I saw fear flash in his eyes. Softly he said, “Yes.”
The next two things I saw are things that haunt me still.
I saw a fireman sitting on a curb with his head in his hands, weeping.
And I saw JP’s little black tennis shoes—with Velcro straps because he couldn’t tie laces yet—lying on their sides in the middle of the street.
WHERE IS GOD in a moment like this? some may ask. Where was God on that blocked-off street with the weeping fireman and the shoes ripped off my son’s feet? Why does Hebrews 13:5–6 tell us that God promised, “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you”? What comfort can that be on a day as horrifying as that particular one in 2002?
Back then, I wasn’t aware of the reality of God’s presence here on Earth. I hadn’t yet learned that our worst times must also be the times when our faith in God is strongest. I didn’t know that God is with us in our suffering, and that suffering can bring us even closer to Him. As hard as it can be for us to believe, our very worst moments are precisely when God’s grace is most brightly revealed. “We also glory in our sufferings,” it says in Romans 5:3–4, “because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” God is with us always. God never leaves us. God will never forsake us. I know these things now, but I would only learn them after I died and saw what I saw, there in heaven, alongside my angels.
BEING WITH GOD
I WAS AWARE OF MY GUARDIAN ANGELS ON MY LEFT, AND I instantly knew them and loved them and realized they’d always been by my side. But I was also aware of a being on my right, and instantly I knew who this was, too. And what overcame me was a profound, endless desire to praise and worship this being, for I knew immediately I was in the presence of God.
I have always referred to God as a him, and I guess I always will. But the being on my right was not a him or a her; it was just God. Nor did I make any distinction between God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, as we sometimes do on Earth. They were all One—the One before me now. There was no distinct form, certainly no face or body, just a blinding profusion of brightness. I wasn’t so much meeting God as I was recognizing Him. I already knew Him, and He knew me. I’d sp
ent my life doubting His existence and disbelieving His love for me, but in that instant I knew God had always, always been there—right there with me.
And while I say God was on my right and I had the sensation of turning to my right toward Him, what I really experienced was the understanding that everything around me was of God. The light, the brightness, the angels, the communication—everything was a creation of God. I understood that I was a part of Him, and that’s the moment I truly realized what being a creation of God truly means.
There was another sensation—a sensation that I wasn’t just aware of God; I was feeling Him. His radiance wasn’t simply something I could observe; it was something that overwhelmed every sense I had. In heaven we don’t have just five senses; we have a ton of senses. Imagine a sense that allowed us to not only see light, but also to taste it. Imagine another sense that allowed us to touch and feel light. Imagine yet another sense that isn’t taste or touch but some new way to experience something, creating a more amazing and rewarding connection than any of our earthly senses allow.
That is what I experienced in the presence of God—a beautiful new way of receiving and sending love. I was completely infused by God’s brightness and His love, and I wanted to enter into His brightness and intertwine myself completely with it. I felt a miraculous closeness to God but wanted to feel even closer.
This was the Creator of the universe, and I was in His presence! The sheer ecstasy of it! The beauty of it, the joy and the grace, the way my spirit soared and my heart burst—how I wish I had the words to convey just how miraculous this was. It was the blessing of all blessings, and I knew that I was changed forever.
• • •
In the very same instant that I saw and knew and recognized God, I immediately confessed that He was my Lord and worshipped Him with all my might. The Bible has a passage that says, “every tongue will confess and every knee shall bow,” and let me tell you, that’s what this was like. A complete surrender to His greatness and an overpowering desire to praise and worship Him. On Earth, there were times during worship in church when my feet hurt or my kids were fussing, and I’d think, Are we almost done? But this was different, very different. With every fiber of my existence I wanted to praise and worship God, and that’s all I wanted to do. And I wanted to do it forever. And I felt like I could do it forever. And so that’s what I did, happily, joyously—I praised God.
What drove my praise was the intensity and immensity of my love for God. There is simply no other love remotely like it. When I was in His presence, I just had the feeling that I loved Him so, so much—more than I ever thought was possible. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” Jesus said when asked which commandment was the most important, and that is how I felt—like I loved God with absolutely everything—everything—I had.
And you know, back on Earth, I had so many questions for God. “If I ever meet Him,” I’d say, “I’m going to ask Him how He could let someone molest me when I was a child. How could He abide brutality against children or the suffering of starving people or cruelty toward the weak? How could He allow such evil to exist in the world?”
Why, I would ask Him, was he such a punishing God?
But in heaven, all those questions immediately evaporated. In His presence I absolutely understood that in every way God’s plan is perfect. Sheer, utter perfection. Does that mean I can now explain how a child being murdered fits into God’s plan? No. I understood it in heaven, but we aren’t meant to have that kind of understanding here on Earth. All I can tell you is that I know God’s plan is perfect. In His radiance, it all makes perfect, perfect sense.
In this way all the questions I had for God were answered without me even having to ask them. And yet, standing in His glorious presence, filled with His infinite wisdom, there was still one question I felt compelled to ask. No sooner had I found myself in heaven than I became thunderstruck by the most glaringly obvious failure of my life on Earth, and that is what compelled me to ask this question of God.
But in fact it wasn’t really a question for God at all.
It was a question for myself.
WHEN MY MOTHER WAS YOUNG, HER PARENTS changed hometowns like some people change shoes. By the time she was fifteen, she’d moved at least a dozen times. When she grew up and had her own kids, she repeated the pattern, packing us up and finding new places to live whenever things got too sticky. Then it was my turn. In the eight years after I had my children, we lived in twelve different homes in three different cities. Some people are stayers, planting deep roots. Some people are runners, always escaping something. I was a runner. When things went bad, I ran. But you can only run so far and so fast before you finally catch up with yourself.
Much of the time I was running away from men. I was fleeing nightmares dressed up as fairy tales. But if I am being truly honest about why I wound up in so many failed relationships, I can’t just blame the men. My relationships fell apart for different reasons, sometimes by my choice and sometimes not, but there was one thing that stayed the same, one obvious constant: me. I was someone who could not be alone, who feared darkness and solitude—a creature who turned to men to escape her demons.
And of course I was missing the one relationship that could have spared me all of this torment. I had not yet realized the most important partner anyone can have is God.
DON’T GET ME wrong—I’m not saying there was a huge conga line of men in my past. There really wasn’t. I liked being in relationships, so I usually stayed in them for a long time—usually too long. The sad truth is, I was introduced to men when I was just three years old, and that affected all the relationships that followed. I’m not going to tell you about all of them, because there’s no point in doing that, really. I just want you to know how I got from where I was to where I ended up—at the scene of a crash on a winter’s day, looking for my son.
After my divorce from Will, I got my job in the country-western bar. It was just like any other honky-tonk, a place where couples did two-steps and line dances and downed a lot of cheap beer. It was there I met a man named Nick. He was a little older than me and rugged and charming—and he was also about to ship out for three months of training. When he asked me for my number, I saw no harm in giving it to him, since I figured he wouldn’t be around.
While he was away we spent hours talking on the phone and sending each other long e-mails. And when he came back, he was kind and attentive and constantly saying how beautiful I was. One night he told me he loved me and that he’d never felt this kind of love for anyone before. By then I was in love, too, in the only way I knew how to be—head over heels.
So when I learned the truth about Nick—that he was married, with two small children—it was too late. He swore to me that his marriage was over, that he’d soon be divorced, that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, and I allowed myself to believe him. I’d learn soon enough that Nick told many other women he loved them like no one else. My poor heart was starting to feel like a piñata.
Even worse, I was now an adulterer.
Something clicked for me after that. I vowed I would never, ever let another man break my heart. After Nick, I let go of that reckless, blinding yearning for passion and romance and gigantic love. I built a wall around myself, and for years I never let anyone in.
Unfortunately I didn’t stop dating altogether. For a while I moved to Charleston to be with one man, then moved to Delaware when that didn’t pan out too well. There were a couple of airmen—flyboys, we called them—who were appealing to me, because they were set to deploy and thus would be out of my life before they could do any damage.
One of them, it hurts me to say, was also married, something that should have stopped me but didn’t. It wasn’t that I was an uncaring person; it’s that emotionally I had all but bottomed out. I didn’t stop and think about how my actions were causing someone else pain. And anyway, I told myself,
it wasn’t me cheating. That was his problem, not mine. The truth is, my relationship with him was easy for me: no feelings, no commitment, and no broken heart. Today, it kills me to think of the wives and the children of cheating men. I’m sure I’ve contributed in some way to a family falling apart, and that fills me with immeasurable sadness. I should have had so much more respect for other people—and so much more respect for myself.
But back then, I was juggling my life the best way I knew how. I went to school all day, spent a few hours with my babies before putting them to sleep at my mom’s house, then went to the bar and slung beers all night. I was exhausted, but, for the most part, I was happy. I had friends, I was saving money, and I was working toward my goal. My dream of finishing school and creating a better life for my kids was in sight. We were finally going to have the normal and wonderful life I’d always wanted, and no man was going to get in the way of that.
Then came Steven and the day he pulled up on his motorcycle.
WHAT IF SABYRE hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom that very moment? What if I’d pulled JP inside along with us? What if I hadn’t dated Steven in the first place? What if the world had spun slightly differently that day?
When I came out and saw JP was gone, I also noticed Steven’s helmet sitting on the driveway. He hadn’t even bothered to put his helmet back on, and I knew JP didn’t have one, either. I stormed back inside seething with anger, waited a few minutes, then got in my car and drove to my mom’s house nearby. I figured Steven might have taken JP there, but he hadn’t. I drove back home and tried to busy myself with work, but when I looked at the clock, I noticed JP had been gone half an hour. All at once, I felt that sickening heaviness in my stomach, and an urgent thought popped in my head: Get your shoes on.
Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again Page 9
