Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  I said yes—although I was less interested in finding a church than I was in taking some steps toward repairing my relationship with my mother.

  Our relationship had been better since I’d gotten clean, but it wasn’t entirely mended. After all that had happened between us, she still didn’t fully trust me. I’d simply put her through too much. For my part, I had a tremendous amount of guilt over the lies I’d told her about going back to drugs and alcohol. (I still do.) Though she’d been so proud of me for getting clean, there was still a distance between us. We didn’t laugh and hang out as easily as we had because she was always a little bit on guard with me, unwilling to let me all the way in. I thought that going to church with her would be a way to show my mom that I was truly back.

  Unfortunately, the early churches my mother and I tried felt cliquish. We thought it might be easier to fit into a smaller congregation than at one of the huge megachurches, but neither one of us ever felt welcomed at the ones we tried. My mom was more motivated than I was, and therefore more likely to give a place a second or third chance, but I was disappointed by the whole experience. Impatient, I’d hoped and expected to feel more drastic changes sooner, and I used the lack of connection we were feeling at those smaller churches to stop going altogether. I did start praying a little on my own, though.

  It was a hard time. My life felt so empty. I missed Allen terribly, though I knew we weren’t right for each other. I also knew that I needed some time alone without a boyfriend; whatever was missing in my life, it wasn’t a man. But the loneliness was crippling me.

  One night that winter, I had a strange experience. It was a Friday night, and I was alone, taking a shower. Standing under the hot water, I started to cry, and then to pray. I’m clean again, God, but something’s still missing. I’m so, so lonely. Show me what it is that I need.

  I stayed there until the hot water ran out and I’d spent my tears. Another fun Friday night at Alisa’s house, I thought as I climbed into my bathrobe. Come for the snacks, stay for the breakdown with God in the shower.

  But as I started to towel off my hair, I had the feeling of a pair of hands resting on my shoulders. It wasn’t a creepy feeling at all, but an intensely comforting one. It was a touch of love, and forgiveness, and comfort. The only description that sounds right is to say that it felt like home.

  I knew immediately that I was in the presence of my grandfather. I had never truly processed his death. As I’ve said, he passed two weeks before that night at the beach house. (It was a blessing that my grandpa had died when he did. He would have killed the guys who assaulted me; it’s better that he never knew.) That night, I felt him with me, his spirit filling a void in me and lifting the ache of loneliness that had been my near-constant companion for so long. I felt that God had sent him to comfort me.

  It was such a tremendous gift to be able to have one more chance to tell my grandfather how much I loved and missed him. I told him how very sorry I was that I had not properly mourned his death. And that night, as I fell into a deep, refreshing sleep, that wonderful sense of companionship and forgiveness stayed with me.

  That moment in my bathroom made me feel like I’d been given a view of a much better place. It was only a stone’s throw away, but I had to get there, and I didn’t know how.

  In April 2011, my mother signed us up for a women’s retreat through my aunt Kathy’s church. It was up in the mountains.

  I was surprised she’d signed us up without talking to me first—and, frankly, more than a little bit annoyed. The retreat meant an entire weekend away, in the middle of nowhere. What would I do if I hated it?

  My mom is smart. She didn’t tell me that I had to go. She simply mentioned that she’d already sent a check to cover the two of us, and that she’d lose the deposit if I didn’t show up. At that point, I was trying to show her I was committed to fixing our relationship, so I agreed to the trip.

  But I wasn’t happy about it, and when the Friday we were supposed to leave arrived, I was secretly relieved to hear that there was a massive snowstorm up in the mountains. We didn’t have chains on our tires, and without them, there was no way to get up there.

  “Too bad. I guess we can’t go,” I said. But my mom was dedicated; while she was waiting for me to get off work, she got snow chains put on her car. Then we discovered that the roads up the mountain were so dangerous, the highway patrol had shut them right down; you couldn’t get through, even with the chains. We talked to my aunt, who was already up there, and she confirmed that the driving conditions were terrible.

  “Next time,” she said, eliciting another secret sigh of relief from me.

  I tried to console my mother. “Bummer, Mom. But if the road is closed, there’s nothing we can do. They’ll give you your money back.”

  My mom wasn’t giving up that easily. She says now that she had a feeling about it: “God wants Alisa there.” So she woke up the next morning, Saturday, at first light, and called the highway patrol. Sure enough, there had been a thaw, and the roads up the mountain were open again. We were on our way.

  I got in the car and sulked like a sullen teenager. I thought I’d been granted a reprieve. After I was done whining about how early it was, I fell asleep in the passenger seat, leaving my mom to do all the driving on the treacherously slippery roads. She’d chosen a less-steep back route, but we’d only made it a third of the way up before the highway patrol closed that road down, too.

  Still, my mom did not head for home. Instead, she pulled over to the side of the road for a bit, and then she drove on back down the mountain and stopped at a Target for some shopping. Late afternoon, she got word that they’d opened the road again. Once again, we were on our way.

  I had woken up by then and was in a completely horrendous mood. How much effort were we going to expend in getting up this mountain for this stupid retreat? It should have been a two-hour trip, and it had taken us the better part of two days. We finally arrived at the retreat center around dinner, by which time I had fully regressed to my horrible, teenaged self. I refused to get out of the car.

  “Go in without me,” I told my mom. “I want to sleep.” I was in no mood to meet a bunch of random strangers, especially since they’d all been bonding together since the night before. “But you’ll miss dinner!” my mom protested. “That’s kind of the point,” I said, shrugging the blanket up over me.

  My mom let dinner slide, but she was not prepared to let me sleep through the two speakers scheduled for the after-dinner slot. I woke up to her shaking me, hard. “I’m not going to let you do this. You are not sleeping the whole weekend. I can see that you don’t want to be here, but you are here, so get over it. You are going to participate.”

  I rolled my eyes but slouched in after her. My aunt was completely embarrassed. She’d been so excited that we’d agreed to come, and now I was shaming her in front of her church community by making it clear I was there against my will.

  I slumped down in my seat, arms crossed over my chest, not caring what I looked like or what anyone thought. And I’m embarrassed to admit that I have absolutely no idea what the first speaker talked about. I couldn’t hear her over the voice inside of me that was cursing my mom and my aunt and the stupid luck that had brought me to this stupid conference center on this stupid mountain with all these stupid people telling their stupid stories.

  I marinated in that nasty mood for a good long while. But the second speaker’s story caught my attention, and I found myself listening in spite of my foul temper.

  Grace told us that her son had died at seventeen. He was the light of her life, her reason for living. Her marriage wasn’t great, but she’d stuck it out for the sake of her son. Her job wasn’t great, but she kept it because she wanted to be able to provide for him. And he was a terrific kid: sweet, popular, good-looking, a straight-A student, and an athlete—until just before Christmas, on his way to pick up presents for the family, when a speeding car cut him off on the freeway, forcing his car off the road.
He died at the scene.

  Grace told us that, after his death, she went completely off the rails. She told us how angry she’d been at God for taking her beloved son. She told us how much she hated his best friend for surviving the accident, and all the ways that she fantasized about trading the friend’s death for her own son’s life. It was dark, deep, painful stuff.

  When she was starting to crawl out of her grief and find a place of healing, her daughter, who was of course also struggling with the death of her brother, started getting into drugs and alcohol. The daughter’s problem became a serious one. After trying everything, Grace realized—as my mother had—that there was nothing she could do to help her except cut her off. When Grace described that time in her life, she made a very simple statement that I’ll never forget as long as I live. She said, “I’d had two children, and both of them were lost.”

  Hearing her say that, I understood what my parents had gone through while I was using drugs. My biggest revelation of that weekend didn’t have anything to do with me or with the rape. It was the thought of my parents and what I’d put them through—not only with the trials, but the aftermath with my drug use and erratic behavior bordering on suicide. I was overwhelmed with terrible guilt and retroactive terror.

  Then, as if someone had switched on a light, I could see clearly that I could be forgiven for everything I’d done to my parents and to myself and to everyone else, if only I could ask for forgiveness. For the first time, I understood that Jesus had died so that I might have a new start. All I had to do was trust Him and give myself over to Him.

  I can’t describe it except to say that I felt different—lighter, somehow—as if someone had presented me with the perfect solution to a problem I’d been struggling fruitlessly with for years. People were milling around about me, hugging each other in fellowship and going up to hug Grace, but I sat very still in my chair, as if moving too fast would startle the understanding right out of me.

  The leaders of the retreat led us in prayer. To close, they played us a song, “Praise You in the Storm,” by the Christian band Casting Crowns. In it, the singer expresses his dismay that the terrible storm outside is still raging. He confesses that he doesn’t think he can go on, but he does not lose hope. Although he feels abandoned, he knows that he is not alone. I listened carefully. The lyrics were beautiful to me, a perfect expression of what it feels like to be struggling and afraid, sure that God has forsaken you.

  For years, I had been searching and searching for something—anything—to take the pain away. I had lost years to drugs and abusive relationships and to a mechanical, dry sobriety, with very little joy or meaning in it. Between Grace’s speech and this song, I was being led, very gently, toward the path that would deliver me out of all the pain I was in. The answer was right there in front of me. All I had to do was praise Him.

  I went to bed quickly, without saying anything to my mom or to my aunt. I’d been so difficult all day, they were giving me a fairly wide berth anyway. I needed a little space to fully understand what I’d just been given a quick glimpse of. Had I truly heard what I’d heard? And if it was that simple, could I do it? Could I turn my life over to God?

  I hardly slept, tossing and turning with questions. The next morning, I came into the main room of the retreat to find a number of craft tables set up. I like to do crafts. I’m not super-talented artistically, but I am visual, and I find it very meditative to create with my hands—especially when I have a lot on my mind, as I did that morning.

  I sat down at one of the tables, where a woman was showing a group how to make a simple angel shape out of pipe cleaners and beads. I chose pipe cleaners and beads in all my favorite colors for my angel—shell pink, purple, hot pink, baby blue, and black—and I gave her a glittery silver crown. When I was done, I sat back and looked at the little angel I’d made and felt very pleased with my handiwork. I had no idea how significant she would become—the first in what would become a collection of angels, and a constant reminder of the most important weekend in my life.

  During the session at the very end of the retreat, the leader asked if there was anybody who wanted to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Almost everybody else there had accepted Him already, and I’d been such a whiny pain the whole weekend that nobody even looked over at me. My mom and aunt were barely speaking to me by that point.

  I knew I wanted to stand up, but I was scared. All of a sudden, I found myself on my feet. I heard my mom gasp and start to cry, and my aunt followed suit. My heart beat in my chest so hard I thought for sure everyone could hear it.

  That Sunday, April 10, 2011, I stood up and turned my life over to God. I pledged to trust Him, and I asked for that forgiveness.

  Standing up there was one of the most frightening moments of my life. The guilt I felt for so many years had given me some measure of control, and some days that fantasy of control was the only thing keeping me sane. Asking for forgiveness and letting Him into my life meant giving up that control. But I could see that it also meant freedom, relief from the loneliness and pain and guilt that I’d carried around with me for so long. When I said that yes, I would take Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, the feeling I had can only be described as pure, unadulterated joy.

  There were lots of hugs all around, and then my aunt gestured for me to wait while she ran back to her room. She came back carrying a pink Bible. She’d bought it for me before the weekend, but I’d behaved so abominably that she’d planned to take it home with her again. She’d marked a passage for me. In the passage, God speaks to Jeremiah:

  “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.” (Jeremiah 29:11–15, NIV)

  It was another step down the path to righteousness. The word exile seemed so right to me—the perfect way to describe the way I’d felt since the rape. But here it was, a promise in His own words: No matter how deep the exile or how profound the loneliness, God would bring me back.

  My conversion story was not dramatic. One afternoon, I was sitting in traffic on the 405, listening to the radio and thinking about what I was going to have for dinner, and I understood that God was with me. After that day, I never lost Him again.

  Chapter Eleven

  I Will Bring You Back

  After that retreat in the mountains, my life changed. Accepting God into my life gave my whole life a deepness and richness that had been missing. The shoot that had always been curled inside of me finally had the space and light it needed to grow. And once I wasn’t neglecting this side of myself, I found that it flourished.

  God had delivered me back to myself, the person I was meant to be. Not the person I was meant to be before the rape—that girl was gone—but the woman who had survived it.

  I’d already learned the hard way that I couldn’t skate along in my sobriety. I had to show up to do what Tina had called the footwork.

  It wasn’t easy. I had to feel, really feel, the grief and violation that I’d been numb to after the rape and throughout the two trials, and I had to manage those feelings. I had to grieve for the perfectionist who thought she’d change New York and the world with her hard-hitting, groundbreaking journalism. And I had to do that at the same time that I was trying to forgive the broken drug addict who thought nothing of smoking meth in the same room as a baby’s crib.

  It was—to put it mildly—a lot to handle. But I had help.

  First, I’d found a great therapist. She specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder. Many war veterans exhibit symptoms of PTSD, but it is also common in people who have experienc
ed many different kinds of trauma. Basically, people who suffer from PTSD respond—emotionally, psychologically, and often physically—as if they are in danger, long after the danger has passed. It was a huge relief to discover that my thoughts and feelings, as well as many of my controlling behaviors, were common and treatable; I had thought I was the only one. Plus, knowing that I could go to my therapist’s office to talk about everything that still hurt was very freeing for me, and it gave me the freedom to start to think about a more outward-facing life.

  Then, in May 2011, my mom and I found a church we loved.

  It’s called Water of Life. It has about fourteen thousand members and three campuses. The main worship center seats more than a thousand people, and there are three video centers available at the main campus, as well as a Spanish-language service. Between four thousand and five thousand people attend the various services every Sunday.

  Finding Water of Life happened in a funny way. My aunt knew we were having some difficulty finding a home church in our area, and she encouraged us to try Water of Life. She’d heard good things from churchgoers she trusted, and thought it would be a good match for us because of the emphasis on Bible study. I’d been raised without any religion at all and hadn’t learned even the most basic Bible stories, even the ones most six-year-olds in Sunday school know. I had quite a lot to catch up on. But my mom and I didn’t think we’d be happy at Water of Life because the congregation was so big. We were worried that it would feel too impersonal.

  My aunt kept bringing it up, and I finally checked out the website. Needless to say, I was pretty amazed by what I saw there. This church had Bible study groups for everything you could think of. There were groups for those grieving a loss, for people going through a divorce, for single moms, for addicts in recovery.