My Woman at the Well Testimony

I found the following in my Blogger archives and repost it now after removing all the computer language. Apparently, after a period of time you can't edit these blogs without copying them into Word and removing the computer language. I had attempted to post another blog in its original spot and it turned up here. I discovered it when I read a comment about something I had written that my mother had said ("I wish I knew what I did,"). It posted originally in August 8,2011. I prepared this testimony to share at Celebrate Recovery and sent it by mistake to someone who knew me as a reporter for the Reynolds County Courier in Ellington, Mo. (November 2005-November 2006) . He said he was surprised to read this story about the "quiet, mild-mannered reporter" that he had seen at the chamber of commerce meetings. I had actually been thinking a lot about the difference Jesus Christ has made in my life, and when he wrote that I decided I should share it with unsuspecting others, and just to remind myself where I came from. The woman at the well, you might recall, is the woman who had had five husbands and the one she was living with now was not her husband. I, like her, was "looking for love in all the wrong places." Jesus told her if she drank from the water He would give her; she would never thirst again, and this is the testimony of Jesus in the life of a thirsty soul. My earliest memories are of making mud pies underneath the white, latticed porch of our house at 711 Park Lane,Topeka, my mother stepping out on the porch to hand me some onion salt to put in them. I was content underneath that porch, surrounded by the smell of rain and onion salt, hearing the gentle rumble of thunder in the distance. My dad was probate judge of Shawnee County (Kansas) from the time I was 5 until I was 11. He wore a suit and went to work every morning, and we ate dinner together every night. I grew up with the smell of turpentine and linseed oil as my mom painted – a Royal soldier, dressed in red, on a white horse in front of a castle, a woman seated by a vase, with eyes that follow you around the room. Mom acted in plays, did makeup and sketched cast members. My little brother, David, and I shot water pistols into each other’s mouths. We had a red Angora cat named Rudolph and a chubby, brown and white English Springer Spaniel named Debbie who brought home other dog’s dishes. I remember once she brought home a quart carton of milk. I still miss when we were a family. When I was in the third grade, we moved from to 2541 Seabrook. I did not want to move, I could not believe we were moving. I thought this was my darkest hour. In a way, it was, because nothing would ever be the same after that. I cried a lot. The cat stayed with the family it used to like to go visit all the time, and the rest of us went on to the new place. I suppose we moved because we needed another bedroom. My brother and I shared one at the old house, and we would get our own room at the new house. “Jesus died for your sins,” my little friends would say. “You have to ask Him to come into your heart.” But they didn’t tell me what that meant I enjoyed Sunday school, but I never heard anyone use terms like “saved” or “born again.” I do remember when I was about 5, going down for a nap and singing “I love you” to God. When I was about 12, I memorized a creed confessing belief in Jesus and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. We didn’t talk about God at home very much, although when I asked my dad where I came from, he said, “Mommy and I prayed for you,” and I’m pretty sure we said our prayers at night with Mom or Dad. We had a prayer we used to say: “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, listen to a little child.” I don’t remember the rest, but my brother used to think it went, “Gentle Jesus, Mickey Mouse.” After my father died in February 2011, I inherited a box full of scrapbooks filled with newspaper articles about him and by him. I found out that he spoke publicly against divorce and about the importance of church and home in family life. In his talks, he referred to children of divorce as children “orphaned by divorce.” He said that 80 % of the children in the juvenile court system came from broken homes. He believed a family court should protect children of divorce. Somehow my parents’ relationship began to be characterized by arguing. Even at the old house, my dad would say that Mom was making “an issue” of something. In the new house, I remember waiting for Dad to come home and only then would I be able to fall asleep. One night, after waiting a long time for Dad to come home, I heard him come in and then, outside my bedroom door, I heard them arguing. I’m filing for divorce on Monday,” I heard my mother say. I was never so filled with fear. Before that, the worse thing I thought that could happen was our move to the new house. How would I survive this? Dad moved out and married a woman with two children as soon as the divorce was final. They moved into a house six blocks from us, and my brother and I saw our dad three times a week: Tuesday, Friday and Sunday, and sometimes we went on vacations to Colorado with him and his new family. Mom now had to get out and find a job. She had been a drafter at an airplane plant in England, so she was able to get a good job drafting for an engineering firm in Topeka, but at some point she got laid off from that job. She had a hard time after that. She tried real estate for a while, she worked as an aide at St. Francis Hospital and as a dance partner at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. When she started dating, she started drinking. I could not stand this. Just like I waited up for my dad to come home before, I waited up for these guys to leave. I would walk across the hall constantly to see if Mom’s personality changed when she drank. She swayed and her speech was slurred, and she would never admit that she was drunk. In the daytime sometimes she would go to a girlfriend’s house who liked to drink, and they would drink together. In the summer when I would be home, she would be down at Mrs. Ogle’s house drinking and I would go to Mrs. Ogle’s house and bang on the door and ask Mom when she was coming home. Sometimes in the afternoon she would take the car and go somewhere and say she would be right back, or she would go to an appointment and take forever. I knew she was going to the liquor store, but there was nothing I could do about it. I wouldn’t know where she was, and this was before cell phones were invented. All I could do was wait and pray that she would make it home all right. My mother finally married another alcoholic and had my half-sister and half-brother. Mom was married to their dad about as long as she was married to my dad, and then they got a divorce. By then, I was on my own, so I wasn’t around while my little brother and sister were growing up. But we all hoped Mom would some day ask us to forgive her for all the things she did. After being mad and drinking and using drugs myself to numb the pain of my parents’ divorce and trying to control my mother most of my life, I finally found the Way, the Truth and the Life. Or, rather, I should say, He found me. I had a bunch of crazy experiences I don’t want to dwell on. But just real quick: After making $50 a week as a portrait artist in Buffalo, N.Y., where I went to follow a drug-dealer boyfriend I met in Lawrence, I worked as a go-go dancer in Buffalo. One night I accepted a ride by two guys I did not know and was raped by both of them at gunpoint. I was arrested in Mexico with some drug-dealing friends of mine and spent six days in the Women’s Prison in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I almost died from an overdose of PCP at a hippie wedding in the Rocky Mountains. I guess they might have gotten busted if they had taken me to a hospital. I had moved to Colorado to live with a childhood friend of mine who was a psychiatric nurse there. I had dropped out of teaching my first year out of college and didn’t know what to do with my life anymore, so I just lived from pillar to post, mostly, and eventually got to where I could play music and sing professionally. But before that happened, I was working in a restaurant at a hot springs resort in Idaho Springs, Colorado, and this Jesus Freak came up to me and said, “Jesus loves you.” “I’m glad somebody does,” I said. He took me to church in Denver, and for the first time I understood in my heart that I needed a savior, that Jesus was the Son of God and that He shed His blood in payment for my sin. I said the sinner’s prayer, but after the Jesus Freak took me home, he became physically inappropriate with me, so I kicked him out along with born-again Christians and church, and stayed away from church for seven years. During that time I went back to K.U. to take art classes, and then left to play music in Cheyenne Wyoming. I met George in a bar in Cheyenne, on my vacation from the band around Christmas of 1976. After drinking and smoking marijuana with him for a couple of days, I let him move in with me. We lived together for four months and then got married by a justice of the peace. He never had a job, he ran up my phone bill on long-distance calls, and I soon lost respect for him. I decided to divorce him, and then committed adultery with some guy in a band on the road. After the divorce, I went to Kansas and met this woman named Rita. I cocktail-waitressed for her at the Holiday Inn West, and later she got me a job playing at the Holiday Inn in Costa Mesa, California. While playing there in July of 1979, I met some people at the poolside. One of them, whose name was David, like my brother, told me Jesus had really changed his life. They came to hear me play in the lounge. The guy who played after me in the lounge played old rock songs and told jokes, but he also sang this song called, “Open My Eyes, Lord.” I thought that was really weird, but it made me want to try to play that song too, so I sang it and played it on my keyboard in my motel room. When I did, I felt the presence of the Lord. One night I took these European Christians to one of their meetings in my white Ford Econoline 200 van with orange shag carpet and when I went inside, there was that feeling of the presence of the Lord again. In my spirit I saw Jesus walk across the floor in sandals and a white robe. “He’s here, isn’t He?” I asked one of these European Christians. “Of course, He’s here,” David said, and he asked me if I wanted to pray. I said no at first, remembering my earlier experience with Christians, but finally relented, and when I did, I can hardly describe to you what happened to me. All I can say is, “Heaven came down and glory filled my soul.” Jesus took me back, filled me with the Holy Spirit and began to change my life. I heard the people thought my Fender Rhodes keyboard sounded too much like a church organ. Anyway, after the lounge let me go, I went and stayed at a Christian half-way house called The Lord’s House, for four months I worked in a sandwich shop called Hoagie’s until God spoke to me in the “Jesus of Nazaraeth” film where He told the Gadarene demoniac to go home and tell his friends what the Lord had done for him. In Topeka, I worked at Ed Marlings and USD 501’s music library, stayed about a year and a half, then went to California and worked with missionaries to migrant farm workers, Then I went to Louisiana to meet my old friend Rita’s ex-husband who had become a Christian and had made some gospel albums. I met my second husband, Richard, in Louisiana. He was a drummer with an evangelist and an alcoholic. While there, I also attended worship services at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, with some women friends. was no way I was going to try to live with an alcoholic, so after I broke up with him I came back to Topeka and then Bryan started calling me. He had seen my picture and gotten my number from a friend. He was in for rape; drugs were involved, he said. He wanted to marry me sight unseen; so, at least I decided to meet him in person first. I spent 10 months commuting to Angola from Baton Rouge once or twice a month to hang out with this guy. To make a long story short, it took me ten years to figure out I needed to be in recovery. Pretty soon I found out I was in yet another bad relationship with a potentially abusive guy and decided to break up with him after going so far as to buy rings and plan a wedding but God wouldn’t let me go to the wedding. He caused a torrential downpour that day and, since I have to make this story short too, my pastor in Baton Rouge suggested I might want to read Codependent No More by Melody Beattie. So I did, she read my mail, and I started recovery in 1989 – Codependents Anonymous, Al-Anon and Overcomers' Outreach. I had met a woman in Baton Rouge whom I worked for as a preschool teaching assistant in a recreation center, who wanted to be my roommate. She helped me get out of the relationship with Bryan, and then it turns out she was looking for a woman to live with for the rest of her life. But I kind of discovered that gradually. Meanwhile, we went to graduate school together in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and Knoxville,Tennessee. As soon as I let her know I would marry a man if I found the right one, she found another person to live with and moved away. I taught college in Kentucky for 2 ½ years, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri for 5, and then was terminated from college teaching. I was a reporter for three years, in Ellington, Missouri, Osage City, Kansas and Overland Park, Kansas, before they eliminated my job as education reporter in March 2008. Finally, I moved to Topeka for a temporary lead teacher position in a preschool classroom here. That’s when I discovered Celebrate Recovery. I had seen my first husband in 2008, and started obsessing about him. A lady at church even discerned that. I could not go on with my life. I was really stuck emotionally, hung up on this guy. I started coming to Celebrate Recovery in March of 2009, and at first I thought it was a little strange, a lot different than the other recovery meetings I had attended. But I began to look forward to coming, and God began to do a lot of healing in my heart and in my relationships. One time when my siblings and I were having one of our conversations with Mom, trying to get her to say what we wanted her to say, she said, “I wish I knew what I did.” And all of a sudden I realized, she didn’t know what she did because she was drinking. Therefore, I could quit expecting her to ‘fess up. Instead, I would simply have to forgive her, like Jesus did us when he said, “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.” At Celebrate Recovery I saw God fix a relationship with my sister that I could not fix. She would not speak to me for three months and I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t do anything about it, but I saw God miraculously work in that situation. I have seen that my feelings for my first husband were more about an obsession, a codependent attachment, than about God’s plan for me. I have listened to teachings and testimonies and felt the healing touch of the Lord. I have cried, I have laughed, I have sung and worshipped and eaten the best I’ve ever eaten here. I’ve met people who really care. I’ll never forget my first night at CR. Becky befriended me. She sat with me at the meal. When I found out how long the meetings were, I said, “I don’t know if I want to be here that long,” but I stayed and went to the worship and CR 101 and listened to Phil say how glad he was that everyone that was here was here. Then after he had his stroke, I saw how everybody stepped up to keep things going. I am now going through the 12-step study for the second time and getting to know a different group of women and watching God build those relationships. I just keep coming back. I think about, well, maybe it’s time to go do something else, and then something happens. I get mad or I obsess about George, I know I need a meeting, and even if I don’t have an urgent need, I know I won’t regret taking the time to come and participate. I get such a blessing every time I round the corner and see that huge sign that says God has a plan for your life. 'For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.' Jeremiah 29:11. I know I have not “apprehended,' as Paul said in Philippians 3:12 and 13, 'but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.'"