by Eric Metaxas
April said that when it was over, some women in the church helped her up again, and when she rose, she said, “It felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my soul, spirit, body, and mind.” Her nose was running, her mascara was smeared all over, and she could barely walk straight as she made her way back to her pew in the back of the church. But for the first time in her life she had experienced God’s unconditional love and forgiveness and she would come to see that it wasn’t a temporary fix: It had changed her forever. She realized that before this healing she had been walking around with a deep pain and wound in her heart and that it had affected her and all she did and thought. Now, at last, she felt free.
But the healing wasn’t finished. When she left church that day, she was in a state of shock over what had happened. She didn’t say a word of it to her boyfriend (now her husband), Jose, who was with her. Neither of them had really figured out “all of this God stuff.” They were attending the church but hadn’t really understood or bought into all of it yet. They were still on a journey, individually with God, and with each other as well. All April could say to Jose that day was, “Babe, he forgave me. He forgave me.” After what happened in church that day, she knew she was no longer bound by what she had done, by her past. She no longer felt like a murderer. God had forgiven her, and she felt that forgiveness and that freedom in every part of her being. Part of that was God telling her that she needed to accept his forgiveness and forgive herself, to see that she was just a scared girl who had made the only decision she knew to make at the time. She knew what she had done was wrong, but God that morning had overwhelmed her with his love and complete forgiveness.
That evening as she lay in bed next to Jose, they were both trying to process what had happened. April remembers that Jose was speaking when suddenly it was as if she were being taken to another realm. She could hardly hear Jose’s voice anymore. There was a kind of echo and she felt as though she were drifting. Her body became somehow numb and she stared at the ceiling and suddenly she had a vision. She said it began like the drawing from an Etch A Sketch. At first she saw a small figure and then as the vision became clearer and more detailed she could see that the figure was a little girl playing happily in a green field surrounded by daisies. April knew the girl’s name was, in fact, Daisy. The girl turned around and April now saw that she was about five years old, the age her daughter would be if she had brought her to term. April saw that the little girl looked a lot like she did. It was obvious the girl was in Heaven, full of joy and life. Then the girl spoke: “It’s okay. I’m okay. You need to let me go.” April knew God was showing her that she could now move on and finally forgive herself.
And so she did.
SEEING JESUS
I’ve been friends with Eva Meyer since 1990, when we met through friends at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Darien, Connecticut. Eva grew up in the rather tony suburb of Westport, Connecticut. Her father, the late Dr. C. J. Meyer (without a jot or tittle of doubt the smartest person I have ever met; just speaking with him required great powers of concentration), was a physicist whose interest in finding a unified field theory was as serious and fascinating as he was, though he was kind and gentle as well. Despite having such a wonderful father, however, Eva has faced some tremendous challenges, many of them having to do with a tumultuous family life.
At the heart of the tumult was Eva’s older sister, who essentially gave over the care of her six children to Eva’s parents and to Eva—which is to say mostly to Eva, since Eva was taking care of her mother and doing whatever her busy father could not do. It’s no exaggeration to say that all who know her know Eva as the definition of someone with a big heart. So her love for these children has been extraordinary to anyone familiar with the complicated situation.
It began in the early 1990s. Eva had been given the care of her sister’s first daughter, then five weeks old, and then she had been given the care of her sister’s first son when he was a newborn. She raised them and loved them as her own, giving years to caring for them. A large part of her motivation in sacrificing for them was her desire to shield them from the chaos of their parents’ substance-abuse addictions and all that entailed. She couldn’t turn them away, knowing what their lives would be like if she had left them to their mother’s care. But since they weren’t legally her children, she was subject to the whims of their mother. So she had all the responsibility of caring for them and loving them, but none of the rights of a mother. Caring for these children whom she so loved was therefore a joy and an agony both. Saying good-bye to them when their mother capriciously decided she wanted them back was deeply painful, but Eva was powerless to do anything about it.
Then in January 2002, ten years later, it was all happening again. That was when Eva’s sister again gave over the care of her children to Eva. But by now there were six of them, ranging in age from eighteen months to ten years. The three youngest were all under five.
Eva’s sister had arrived in Connecticut for Christmas with them, coming all the way from Seattle. This time Eva had really thought it would be different, that her sister had really finally gotten her life together. Eva had paid for all of their plane tickets. But over the next few days it began to dawn on Eva that she had been duped again. Her sister’s soon-to-be-ex-husband had flown out west to be with his children, but her sister was already living with a new boyfriend. It was clear she had no intention of trying to make things work with her husband, of trying to raise these children with him. She had brought them all to Connecticut at Eva’s expense with the plan to dump them on Eva and then disappear with her new boyfriend.
The youngest of the six was Jonathan, eighteen months old. Eva’s heart was so scarred from the back and forth with these children that she was determined not to let herself open her heart up to Jonathan. She simply could not let her heart be torn in that way again, so she held him at arm’s length emotionally. Eva saw that her sister had used Eva’s love for the oldest two, whom Eva had taken care of from their birth to age four—to manipulate Eva into paying for nearly everything, doing nearly everything, sacrificing nearly everything. Then she had held them as ransom, away from Eva for the previous eight years. And now she was back, abandoning them all again, all six of them now.
After Eva’s sister had left, the reality of it all sank in. She realized there was a baby in the next room with no one but her to care for him. There was simply nothing she could do now but deal with it. That night, Eva went to bed burning with anger at her sister. She had never experienced such anger and hate for anyone as she did that night for her sister. She fumed over how much pain her sister had caused these children—and her parents and her—because of her selfishness. She had stolen years from Eva’s life by abandoning the children the first time, and now she had done it again.
Eva lay in bed, crying out to God at the injustice of it all. “Where are you?!!” she cried. She pled with him in her anguished prayers, telling him that she simply could not possibly go through this again. The injustice of it burned inside her. Her anger overwhelmed her and a real and hideous hate bloomed in her heart in a way that frightened her. She lay in bed weeping and weeping, and crying out to God over and over.
“I wanted my heart to petrify,” Eva told me, “so I could be spared the pain of loving yet another child. I could not bear another decade of heartbreak, being jerked around by my sister’s unpredictable whims of dysfunction. Another decade of emotional blackmail. I can honestly say, I have never in my life felt such loathing as I did that night. I felt like I was going to be swallowed whole by rage. I was drowning in it.”
As Eva was rolling over in bed, trying to silence the screaming fury in her brain, she glanced out her bedroom window. It looked out over the driveway. The neighbors’ bright garage light always cast the silhouette of the trees between the two lots onto her white curtain. But this time, the silhouette looked different. It looked for all the world like the Shroud of Turin. Eva found herself staring a
t it, trying to make sense of it, but she couldn’t. And the more she stared at it, the more vivid the image became. She said it was like developing a print in a darkroom, watching the image grow stronger and clearer with each second. Eva said that the image grew in size and seemed to come closer to her. And then she realized that it was indeed Jesus she was looking at.
“At first, he looked like a giant negative,” she said. “His eyes were burning like balls of fire and his right hand was raised. And he was clearly right outside the window. Or in the window.” When it became clear to Eva that she was no longer merely looking at a shadow produced by the trees, she was filled with terror. She was awed and speechless.
As this image came yet closer, she pulled the covers over her eyes, hoping she was simply imagining it. But then she pulled down the covers and peeked out and there he was, even closer now, standing in the room between the window and her, at the bottom left corner of her bed. Eva saw that his eyes were still burning like fire, and she felt that she could hardly breathe. She was consumed with fear and now she began to become painfully aware of the rage and hatred inside of her. It was an unbearable feeling, and as it came to a head, she desperately found herself blurting out, “Have mercy on me, Jesus!” And then she spoke words that echoed what Isaiah famously spoke when he found himself in the presence of God: “I am a woman of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips!”
She was surprised that it came out of her mouth, but it did. She was still seized with terror, and as those words came out of her mouth she expected to feel God’s wrath visited upon her. She knew that for the bitter hatred she was feeling she deserved it. But the instant the words left her lips she saw that the image was beginning to become clearer. It was Jesus—his face, his beard, his linen robe, his hand raised up over her in silent benediction. She saw him clearly now, and Eva understood that he was praying over her.
Suddenly all the fear melted away and she found herself being bathed in his love and a warm, comforting presence. She said that “waves and waves of the safest, warmest love enveloped me. I felt like I did when I was a baby and my dad rocked me in his arms till I fell asleep. I kept whispering . . . oh, please, Jesus . . . stay with me . . . I love you . . . thank you, Jesus . . .”
Jesus stayed at the foot of her bed all night until after sunrise, and during this time she soaked up every drop of his presence. During the whole time his presence comforted her. But Eva says that no words can possibly do justice to what he imparted to her that night. But the words that come to mind for her are “courage” and “strength” and “peace” and “joy” and “overwhelming love.” The rage and the hate she had felt a few hours before had vanished. They seemed a distant memory.
After dawn, Eva began finally to drift off to sleep but then woke herself up, just to make sure he was still there. He was. “He was as real as I was,” she said. It was about seven when she last glanced at him, still silently praying for her. She felt that she didn’t want it to end, ever. He had “somehow managed to untangle all the knots in my heart,” she said, “all the strangling, choking hatred and hurt and fear inside of me.”
Sometime shortly after seven she must have fallen asleep, because she was awakened just before eight by Jonathan crying in his crib in the next room. Immediately Eva jumped out of bed and ran to him. Seeing him standing in his crib, sobbing and confused, her heart broke like a dam. The love she now felt for him was surging, overwhelming. She swooped toward him and swept him up in her arms, and she hugged him to her, rocking him and comforting him, telling him that she would never, ever leave him. Eva says that the love she felt for Jonathan at this time was unlike anything she had ever felt before. Her anger toward her sister and toward the whole situation simply didn’t exist anymore. The love she now felt for this little boy was all that seemed to be there, and in the midst of it she had a very keen sense that Jesus had given him to her, that she was free to love Jonathan with her whole heart as her own.
A decade later, Eva was married, and just before Christmas 2012, almost ten years exactly from when this happened, Eva and her husband, Paul, were officially declared to be Jonathan’s sole legal parents.
GOD AND MARRIAGE
Perhaps the first story I thought about when I considered writing this book was the story of my very dear friends Paul and Lisa. It’s a genuinely amazing story. I couldn’t remember some of the details of the story, so I met Paul and Lisa at a restaurant in New Canaan on July 30, 2013, to hear their story again—this time to take notes. Although I had no idea, that date just happened to be their nineteenth wedding anniversary.
I first met them in the spring of 2004 in New Canaan, Connecticut, about twenty feet away from the restaurant where we had our lunch in July 2013. That 2004 dinner was at an evening event of something called the New Canaan Society, a men’s fellowship I’ve been very involved with since 1995, when we started it—in New Canaan, Connecticut, hence the name. I say “we” generously—generous to myself, because it was really my friend Jim Lane who started it. It began as a small men’s group in Jim’s house. Jim had just returned from a few years in London, where he had been working for Goldman Sachs.
When Jim returned to New Canaan he wanted to have some kind of men’s group—not necessarily a Bible study, but something where men could encourage one another. He knew that it should be as much fun as possible and shouldn’t feel like some overbearing “religious” group, but should simply be a group of men with the common goal of wanting to be real friends. Of course, any real friendship would mean that we would encourage one another in our commitments to our wives and children. It so happened that there were lots of men looking for something like this, and the New Canaan Society, as it came to be called, grew and grew. Within a few months our number had grown to twenty and soon leapt to forty. We quickly outgrew Jim’s family room and moved to his living room, which, given his position as a former partner at Goldman Sachs, was appropriately vast. Before our burgeoning numbers—and Jim’s long-suffering wife, Susie—forced us to leave Jim’s house for other spaces, we actually had two hundred men there every Friday. Those who couldn’t fit into the living room sat on folding chairs in his dining room and foyer, and some gathered in his family room, watching on closed-circuit TV. We still laugh about that, but it’s all true. It was around this time that Paul came to visit.
Paul was typical of the sort of person attracted to the fun and general bonhomie of NCS. He was a Harvard grad who was now a partner at one of the so-called white-shoe Wall Street law firms that cannot be named here, as the case may be (hereinafter designated as “the Firm”). He was also typical in that he was discovering that the tremendous worldly success he had dreamt about was now his but was not delivering the happiness and satisfaction he thought it would when he started out after it so many years before. He had a spectacular home in Fairfield County and all of the professional plaudits one might have hoped for. His wife, Lisa, was beautiful and tremendously accomplished, and they had two wonderful children.
Then one day in the fall of 2003, all of these things were threatened. Paul had assumed everything was fine in his marriage before then. There had been a disconnect between him and Lisa for some time, but he rather cavalierly dismissed it as typical of marriages after a few years, where both partners are busy with life. It didn’t seem to warrant serious concern. As he saw things, being a good provider made him a good husband and he was certainly being that. Paul usually left for work before his children had woken up and returned after they had gone to sleep, and he was so exhausted and distracted with thoughts of work at the end of each day that he had little capacity or desire to engage with Lisa. He remembered that his way of dealing with her periodic bouts of crying was to withdraw and simply hope it would go away. But this day Paul saw that something was a little more wrong than usual, and he at last felt obliged to ask Lisa about it. “Is something wrong?” he asked her. Her reply was a shock. In a cold and detached tone, she said, “I don’t
know where to start,” and then proceeded to tell Paul that she was profoundly unhappy in their marriage. She said emphatically that she could “not go on like this.”
Hearing these words from the woman at the center of the grand edifice of success he had been building all these years was a shattering blow. As he fully took it in, Paul came undone. He had been working so hard and so single-mindedly at building and maintaining this great edifice that he had no idea of his wife’s feelings and the depth of their troubles. It was as if he were putting the finishing touches on the highest parts of that edifice and was suddenly being told that the base had begun to rot and it would all come down at any moment. Hearing Lisa’s words and tone made him see this, that everything was collapsing. It was too much to bear, and Paul began to sob and did not stop for almost two hours. But Lisa, whose heart had been hardening over the last few years, said she was almost a distant observer. She could not feel any compassion or empathy. If there was any emotion, it was anger, as she wondered how this uncaring and unfeeling man in front of her could have been so incredibly and selfishly oblivious to her great pain.
But the devastating news that day led Paul to do something he had never done before. He viscerally understood that there was no human solution to this crisis, the crisis of his life. He was suddenly desperate and now, for the first time in his life he had no resources to draw on within himself. So he cried out to God, whom he had been ignoring since he could remember.
