If you are new to this blog, I will tell you that much of it is a chronicle, told in a consecutive order. The first installment of this chronicle was titled "When God Spoke - and the Lost Memory". That is the beginning of this story, and I highly encourage you to read that post first, before going to this one. It will set the stage for what is to come, and it is my prayer that it will bless you and touch you.
This story picks up where that one left off.
It was now 1982, and I was working in Fort Worth, Texas for a company called the National "Write Your Congressman", going business to business selling subscriptions to heads of businesses for a legislative research firm.
Arch Bonnema had hired me for the position based only on faith and on God's leading. I had been driving a rental car which had been rented for me by an acquaintance, whom I paid for the rental every week. My children were still in Virginia with their father, and I had moved from Mineral Wells to Arlington (between Dallas and Fort Worth) into a little duplex with the idea that I would make enough money to get my children back. It was a long, hard road.
Arch saw my plight with the rental car, (and with another car I had bought - a transaction which had turned out very badly!) and loaned me his wife's 1965 Mustang to go on my sales calls until a better solution could be found. He had just recently moved to Dallas from Minnesota himself, and was in the process of moving his family down to Texas to join him. Though not much older than I was, he was a man of strong faith and wisdom. I was still a new Christian, hungry for knowledge and wisdom myself, and he became not only a manager - my boss - but also a Christian mentor. I had an insatiable thirst to know more about Jesus Christ, about the end times, about Revelation. Arch had answers, and was glad to share that wisdom. He was also an incredible sales manager.
When Arch left for Minnesota to get his family and finish the closing on the sale of his house, he brought back a little red Ford Pinto Station Wagon. He agreed to sell me the station wagon and let me make payments to him. I promptly named the Pinto "Bean" since I thought it bore some resemblance to a red pinto bean.
Bean and I went to work to make enough money to bring my kids back.
My biggest problem seemed to be my looks. Business men in Texas in the early 1980's often didn't want to listen to pretty women about business or politics. I changed the look of my clothing to a strong "Dress for success" look, cut my long hair into an extra short boy cut, and - because I was in Texas - dyed it light blonde. It seemed to help, and my sales improved.
I finally put together enough money to drive to Virginia and get my children. My four year old son didn't recognize me because I looked so different. We drove for a day and a half with he and my three year old daughter in the back seat when I said something - I don't remember what - reached back and rubbed my hand on his little leg and his foot for reassurance, as I had done so many times before. I heard his sweet little voice from the back seat say, "Now I know you're my mommy!" It warmed my heart. He said he was glad I didn't burn up in the fire! Confused, I asked him, "What fire?" He said that he and his sister thought that when I said I was fired from Motorola, they had thought that I was burned up in a fire! They thought they would never see their mommy again! I had to explain what the term "fired" meant.
After we arrived home, though, bad things kept happening to us. Weird things. Out of the blue things. For example, (this was before a time of children's car seats, and my children sat in the back seat when we drove) one day, my son was in my car with me. My daughter was in the car of a fellow who happened to be a boyfriend at the time. My son suddenly, unexplainedly, opened the back door of the car and fell out while the car was moving, and fell on his head! In a panic, I rushed him to the hospital. While I was there, my boyfriend showed up with my daughter, who had suddenly, unexplainedly, opened up the car door and fallen out too! There weren't any cell phones then. We didn't have any way to call each other and tell each other what had happened. It just happened. And during that same period of time, there were other sudden, unexplained things which happened to us, too, which I cannot chronicle here.
Arch looked at all the things that were happening to us and decided that it was all happening for a reason. There was a supernatural reason that these things were happening, and he told me that, because of my background before I had become a Christian, Satan was attacking me. Satan hates to lose one of his own, and there were "strongholds" in my life that needed to be broken. He and his wife, Sherry, decided to move me, with my children, into their house to get to the bottom of those strongholds and see that they were broken.
To backtrack: I had grown up in a Roman Catholic household, where no one really knew, sought or understood the truth of who Jesus Christ was or what He had really done. In high school I started looking at all sorts of other beliefs, and continued on that search in college. I studied Buddhism. I studied Taoism. I studied Hinduism and Shintoism. I studied metaphysics and witchcraft. In the Air Force, I lived with a high priest of the Wicca and thought I was communing with nature. My first husband was a practicing Buddhist and together we had owned two schools of martial arts where we taught Chinese Kempo, Tae Kwondo and Shotokan. I'd picked up a lot of negative spiritual baggage before I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord.
It had happened this way: My first husband was an alcoholic and a veteran of the Viet Nam war who had been attached to Special Forces. He was a third degree black belt when we had the karate schools. He also was in the Air Force. He would drink a 12 pack of beer a night, the pupils of his eyes would pin, and the next thing I would know he would chase me from one side of the house to the other, get me to kneel on the floor in a corner, and then he would decide whether to beat me into a bloody pulp or to decide that I wasn't worth the effort and leave. He was hallucinating and thought at those times that I was a Vietnamese enemy combatant. He would never remember what happened the next day.
I had a side business that I was building, and was listening to some good teachers and mentors. Those teachers and mentors told me that I needed to read positive books if I wanted to be successful. "Magic of Thinking Big." "Think and Grow Rich." "The Power of Positive Thinking". "How To Win Friends and Influence People". And many others... but they said that if you wanted to learn to influence others, you needed to learn to ask good questions, and the best question asker was Jesus Christ. He knew how to ask the right questions. They said if I wanted to learn the best success principles, I should read the Bible, start with the book of Matthew, and learn how Jesus asked questions. I saw how successful, how wealthy and how happy these people were, and started reading every night: first a chapter from my positive book, and then a chapter from the Bible. I had worked my way through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and was in John when, one night, dead tired and bleary eyed, I reached John chapter 3. I forced myself to stay awake to read the chapter when I got to chapter 16: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever should believe in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life." Immediately, I was awake as the realization hit me. I had a small son, but before I had him, I had miscarried four other babies. I could not fathom giving my son as a sacrifice for anyone else, and yet God loved me so much, that He willingly sacrificed His son for my redemption, regardless of how bad I had been! And that Son had not only died, but He had risen from the dead in his own body by His own will for my sake! A Jesus Christ who could do that could do anything! He could heal me, my soul, my spirit, my body, my life. I immediately fell to the floor and asked His forgiveness and asked Him to be the Lord of my life.
That was 1980. Now, back to 1982. I had indeed asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life, but my life before that time had attracted demonic forces that worked against me and my children to attack us at every level. Those forces had to be dealt with.
So we moved in with Arch and Sherry, and I continued to work for the National "Write Your Congressman" while mentoring with these beautiful friends. I became involved in a little church called Dallas North Community Church and became friends with the pastor, Paul Mills. The president of National "Write Your Congressman" was another Christian man, David Adamson (whom we called Grandpa David). He also became a friend and a mentor.
I continued working Fort Worth, and then started working the counties around and south of Fort Worth. One day I was working from business to business in a poorer section of a county southwest of Fort Worth when I started to go to one of the businesses on my list, and it just looked too poor to deal with. It looked like a shack and I decided to skip it and go to the next one. As I was leaving and driving down a dirt road to the next business, I heard a voice in the car, "Trust me, and everything will be all right." Shocked, I looked around the car to see who was sitting there. There was no one. I said, "What?" The voice repeated, "Trust me, and everything will be all right." I knew it had to be my Lord, and knew I had to trust Him, with everything. I turned my car around and went back to the shack I had previously skipped, and they not only bought from me, they paid cash.
A few days after that, while driving north towards home on the interstate just as I was leaving that county, I heard the voice again, "My child, my beautiful child, I have so much better for you." Again, shocked, I said, "What?" And the voice repeated, "My child, my beautiful child, I have so much better for you." And then I heard the most beautiful song - a song I had never heard before. Incredulous, I said, "Lord, if that's from you, then please don't let me forget this song until I've had a chance to write it down and score it." The sunlight shone brilliantly gold into the car as the song burned itself into my spirit - and stayed there. (It was 1992 before I finally had a chance to sit down to a piano, and put that song on paper, scoring it with all it's harmonies).
I turned my car around and went back to the shack I had previously skipped, and they not only bought from me, they paid cash.
About a month after this happened, Arch, his wife Sherry and I decided that the strongholds had been handled, mostly broken, and that we might be ready to move out. I was concerned, though, about any breaking from their help, their mentoring, their closeness. I asked them, when things became hard, what should I do? Arch looked me in the eyes and calmly asked, "Who's your source"?
The fact was, they were not my source. They were the tools. Jesus Christ was, and always would be my source. My true source. I could trust that, if I'd be willing to live it.
I moved out of Arch and Sherry's home and into a little house in Waxahachie, Texas. Shortly after that move, Arch called me into his office and said, "The Lord has spoken to my spirit that you need to move back to Washington State and be close to your family". I argued that this couldn't possibly be true. Within less than a day, David Adamson called me and said, "I don't understand this, but the Lord has spoken to my spirit that you need to move to Washington State and be close to your family. If you want, I can arrange to transfer you up there." Right after that, my pastor, Paul Mills, called me and said, "I don't understand this, but the Lord has spoken to my spirit that you need to move to Washington State and be close to your family."
None of them had talked to each other about this.
Finally, my father (who, along with my mom and brother, also had become Christians by this time) called me from Washington State and said, "This may sound weird, but the Lord spoke to my spirit that you need to move up to Washington State and be close to us." It was out of the blue. He didn't know, never talked to and had never met any of the people in Texas.
The Bible says that you know when God speaks, because He always verifies what He says by two or more witnesses. I had four. I began to make arrangements for the move.
The next installment will be called, "When God Spoke, and The Move Across The Country."