By Teena Myers
“to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge…” Ephesians 3:18, niv
My mother found her in a tub of scalding water with fifty percent of her body severely burned. After six months in a coma an infection destroyed her vital organs. The death certificate said, “renal failure.” My sister died as she had lived – in pain but not in vain.
When we were children, Lori walked to a Baptist church. She later told me that she did so for the cookies and juice. After our family moved to New Orleans, we were swept into the drug culture. Desperate for a better life I converted to Christianity. Lori followed me to church.
Our father didn’t understand our newfound zeal for God and spat with disgust, “I’d rather have a daughter on drugs than involved in this Jesus stuff.” Lori fulfilled his desire. To our father’s distress, she returned to her drug friends and did whatever she pleased until her unrestrained lifestyle resulted in her incarceration.
The judge gave Lori a choice – jail or rehab. We found a Christian rehab for women with an opening. Lori listened quietly as the administrator read the rules she must obey to remain in the program. Every item was agreeable but one. To remain in the program, she could not call or write to her boyfriend serving a life sentence for murder. She immediately voiced her unwillingness to comply. She chose jail so she could remain faithful to an unfaithful man who was on a date with another woman when the murder was committed.
Lori did more than reject rehab that day. She rejected God for a man who did not love her. I thought she had crossed the line of no return, and God would reject her like she rejected him.
I was wrong.
Six months later, she walked out of prison and into the arms of another unfaithful man. He abandoned her after the birth of their daughter. The unconditional love of a baby gave Lori the incentive to change her lifestyle. She returned to church and joined an intercessory prayer group. Convinced prayer would move the hand of God to release her first love from a life sentence in prison, she never missed a prayer meeting. She even told her daughter the man they visited in prison was her father.
Lori obtained a respectable job in hospital administration. How could that happen without divine intervention? She had dropped out of school before she started high school. Her lack of education did not stop her from mastering the skills she needed. Employers wrote letters of accolades for her resume as she sought to advance her career.
God had not given up on Lori. Unfortunately, Lori served God as many immature Christian do – to obtain what they desire. After a decade of believing and praying for a miracle Lori lost hope that her first love would be released from prison. She interpreted an unfulfilled desire as “God doesn’t love me” and turned her back to God. This time I was sure God gave up on her.
I was wrong.
Lori drove her car into the bedroom of a house. No one was home. She walked away without injury. She drove drunk again and killed two people in a car wreck. Lori lived. A phone call in the middle of the night summoned me to the hospital’s emergency room. “She was seconds from death,” said the doctor. Her friends had pushed her out of the car at the emergency room door and left. She drove her car into another house. The owners pulled her from the car seconds before a gas line exploded, burning the house to the ground.
Death knocked at her door so many times she acknowledged only God could be keeping her alive. Lori thought God repeatedly spared her life because he loved me, and I was praying for her. She couldn’t have been more wrong. I thought praying for Lori was vain. I had scriptures to justify my belief, but I did not know God’s heart.
God did not give up on Lori. He brought her back to a place of sanity, and she found employment at a college. How does someone with an eighth-grade education survive the scrutiny of PhDs unless there was divine intervention? The college hired Lori to be my husband’s secretary. He never had a better one. I marveled at the depth of God’s unrelenting love, but what had become clear to me Lori could not see. God loved Lori. When Lori showed signs that old demons had returned, I thought surely God had given up on her this time.
I was wrong.
Before she lost her job at the college, God gave Lori someone to pray for her. Carol interpreted for the deaf in the classroom next to Lori’s office. From the moment they met, the urge to pray for Lori pursued Carol twenty-four hours a day: in the middle of the night, while she was in the shower, cleaning house, driving to the grocery store. One morning on her way to work, Carol said, “God, if you want me to pray for Lori today let her come out of her office to drink a cup of coffee, or smoke a cigarette, or go to the bathroom.” Carol drove into the parking lot and saw Lori come out of her office holding a cup of coffee, light up a cigarette and walk to the bathroom.
Carol’s prayers did not stop Lori from losing her job, but Lori changed. She stopped rambling incoherently when she spoke and slowly emerged from a deep depression. She told her daughter the truth about her father and forgave those she hated. That is when I learned she had been gang raped as a child but didn’t tell anyone. She admitted hearing voices, and an inability to perceive reality from hallucinations. Everyone battles sin, but Lori’s problems ran deeper. She checked herself into a mental health hospital and walked out with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
A path littered with wounded people struggling to forgive her made it difficult to find her way home. Her daughter, now the mother of a son, refused to reconcile. Lori met a man who filled the place of those she had driven away. He remained by her side through the good and the bad until the day he died.
After his death, Lori’s life stabilized. She found employment in a doctor’s office. The doctor offered her more money than she requested with the promise of a generous increase after some initial training. Everyone on his staff was a Christian. Lori had every reason to be encouraged, and she was.
She called me frequently. God became the center of every conversation. She talked about heaven and her fear that she would spend eternity in hell. I talked about faith and hope and love. She talked about mistakes. I talked about God’s ability to lighten the load of consequences. She talked about regrets. I talked about second chances.
She longed for the days when she went to church on Sunday and intercessory prayer on Monday. I longed for the days we walked to church together. “Come spend the weekend with me. We will go to church Sunday,” I said. She accepted. The hard life she lived had aged her. Even though she was six years younger than me, she looked decades older. I witnessed a different Lori that weekend. For the first time in twenty years Lori and I walked into church together. Her speech and behavior convinced me she was sincere about changing her ways and gave me hope she would succeed.
She didn’t.
Lori had been clean since the death of her boyfriend, and trying hard to hang on to the good things God had given her. Until an old friend she had not seen for many years visited. Lori’s mental health problems coupled with being alone in the world made it easy for her to slip back into self-destructive patterns of behavior. She was high when she stepped into the bathtub to wash her hair and turned on the hot water but not the cold before she passed out.
I prayed often for Lori as she lay in a coma clinging to life by a thread. But I didn’t pray my desire for her to live a normal full life. I chose to follow Jesus example in the Garden of Gethsemane. “Abba Father …not what I will but what you will” (Mark 14:36). I prayed, “Let there be nothing doctors or machines can do to keep her alive if it’s your time for Lori to leave this earth.”
One day, I received a call from her nurse. Lori was awake. She wanted to talk to me. That was the last time I saw her alive. Shortly after that visit, her doctor called with a dilemma. Her physical state had grown so weak if he put her on dialysis, it would kill her. If she did not have dialysis she would die. There was nothing doctor nor machine could do to keep her alive.
For most of Lori’s life, I thought God had given up on her. As I stared at her lifeless body lying serenely in a casket, I understood that he never did. To her dying breath, he fought to save her. Lori lived in pain but not in vain. She taught me what my finite mind could not imagine – the infinite depth of God’s love.
© Teena Myers 2015
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