Purpose

This is probably more than any of you expected....it is much less than originally planned to share.

Describe a time in your life when you experienced prolonged suffering and your efforts to understand this suffering in both spiritual and psychological terms.

I have dealt with physical, sexual, mental, emotional, and economic abuse. I have felt the loss of my grandfather who was my hero, my best friend, the one man who did not abuse or misuse the authority he possessed in our relationship. He was the father I should have had in the two that my mother married. I have lost my sense of self, nearly my mind, and even my freedom. Yet, the most significant loss I have experienced is the death of my 5-month-old first-born son Donovan. I did not know what to do, had no idea. I was alone with him and we fell asleep on the couch. He was alive when he went to sleep, when we woke up, his lips were blue and he was not breathing. I ran across the hall to the landlord’s apartment and tried to pound on the door because I didn’t have a phone, but he did not answer. I ran upstairs to the lady in the upper apartment, who also happened to be a nurse. She came down and began CPR and ordered me to hush my screaming and instructed me to go pound on the landlord’s door until he answered, so that I could use his phone to call 911. All the while I was hyperventilating and freaking out so bad that my legs were weak, and my limbs were heavy, my thoughts raced with no order or coherence. I felt frozen but my body was following direction.

By the time the police got there, the first responders had my son on a gurney, doing infant CPR and taking him to the awaiting ambulance. The police came in and began tearing my place apart, ripping down curtains, flipping the couches, tossing things off shelves onto the floor, drawers to the dressers emptied; everything that could be upended was. There was an officer that was quick firing questions, or what I can recall, accusatory remarks at me as if I had murdered my child. All I wanted to do was run out to the ambulance and be with my son but I was detained as the police continued to rampage through my apartment. By the time I made it to the hospital I was questioning my own part in my son’s condition! It was nearly another hour before the doctor came into the waiting room, and I was still alone, my family coming from up North, almost 2 hours away. It was like those scenes in the movies where the doctor comes to break the news to the wife and family of a deceased person. “Please sit down,” I remember hearing the doctor say. I was devastated! As the doctor led me into the room where they were trying to resuscitate him, I was in a haze. Entering into the room it was an out of person experience in that I was there, but I was not all at the same time. His little hands were curled, and the beginning of atrophy set in. the tubes were still in his mouth from intubation of the breathing bag. He was gone.

For the next 10 years I continued to blame myself for his death. Also during the 10 years I swore I would never again be unprepared in an emergency situation and I completed nursing school to be sure. However, I was slowly losing my grip on reality and sinking into a deep depressive type of state, deeply grieving and beginning to hear accusatory voices in my mind that said it was me, that I was the reason, that just me being his mother killed him, that I must have somehow caused his death. All of this was in contrary to the reality of factual medical evidence that deemed SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, to be the cause of my son’s death. I had another child with the same man two years later, but less than a year after my second was born we split up, no able to grieve together. Over the next year and a half, I moved back North to my hometown and met another man who I married and had 3 more children. We were together for 8 years married for 7 of them and all that time I was still very unstable, dappling with drugs and alcohol, becoming a ‘functioning addict’ from all appearances. At one point, my now ex-husband began to drink so regularly and badly that he would come home and rage on us. After so many times of the police having to come to the house, he was instructed to stay away after a particularly violent episode where he pulled the phone out of the wall, which is a federal offense. I sank deeper and deeper into drugs myself. My youngest was about 3 months old when I found out that my grandfather was dying of cancer, and it was the proverbial feather that broke the camel’s back. I lost it, had no idea of how to cope, and had a breakdown. I went from functioning addict to jumping down the rabbit hole. When my grandfather died a few months later, it was so bad that within in weeks, I had dropped my children off with my mother and disappeared for nearly 3 years. In and out of jail, rehabs, drug houses, the issues of near-death experiences and God showing up and saving me from me.

Through all of this, it never changed the Truth of accepting Jesus as my Savior at the age of 6. He never left me in my suffering, He never turned His back on me, He never disowned me, and He certainly intervened many times in my journey. He did wait patiently for me to come to the end of myself, to come to the point that I threw myself at His feet one night in a jail cell telling Him I did not know why He would not let me kill myself, telling Him I did not know why He wanted a piece of s*** like me but here I am, I don’t want me anymore!. He has not let me have me back. He has taught me that I do not understand much as I thought I did. That He knows what it feels like to have a Son who died, but that like His Son, mine was alive in Heaven and waiting for me. He used my pain and suffering to draw me into Himself, to learn to depend on the Spirit’s inner leading, to continue to put one foot in front of the other when all I can see is the next step, to be still and listen intently for His direction, to speak the words that He placed in my heart to this person or that person, to give my time, attention, a hug, a few dollars, to this person or that person. I have learned discernment, Truth, direction, Trust, Forgiveness of myself and others, Hope, Grace, Love, my own finiteness, and His infiniteness. I have learned that life is experiencing, fully, step by step, day by day, the goodness of God, to expect that He will indeed work all things together, especially those unsavory, painful, sufferings that seem not to have any purpose. I do know that I can relate to a multitude. That I can comfort others with the comfort that I have given. That there IS purpose to pain, to bring out of me, others that precious oil of compassion, empathy, that element of patience and connectivity that produced unity, endurance, character and hope.

If I went through every lesson I have learned, I will have spent years writing. In fact, I have countless journals to attest to that.

Some of these lessons I leaned into the Spirit and penned a book called Truth Seekers Perspective Shifts and it is available on Amazon and there is a free sample for anyone who is interested in reading or knowing some of the things that I have learned throughout my life. It is just a short glimpse, only 71 pages and the first volume of a series. But it is some very real lessons and wisdom that God has blessed me with in my life.

Thanks for reading this to the end. This is a shortened version of what I had originally planned to share.