Laura came on Pure Heart Weekend last month, and she gave me permission to share her painful, but triumphant story. I take a risk in telling it, but I promise you that the ending is real.
Chapter 1. Laura’s biological mother, suffering from a mental disorder, had abandoned her family when Laura was only six months old. One day, while her husband was at work, she simply walked out and left two little children at home. A neighbor noticed Laura’s brother, age 2, walking around the yard alone. He had filled Laura’s bottle with unsanitary water from the yard, to help calm her down, but thankfully she was not ill long. Life was starting off as bitter as that water.
Laura missed out on one of life’s most necessary ingredients for a healthy life: attachment. Our first attachment is to our mother’s body, to her voice, and to her love. Laura was abandoned, leaving a deep emptiness, a hollowness that soon easily attached to the next woman, Daddy’s girlfriend, who became his second wife.
Chapter 2 started around age 10, when, sadly, her father left this woman. Torn apart by their divorce, Laura made the decision to go with her “Momma,” the second-mother that her desperate heart needed. Sadly, it was Pappa Joe who added the second chapter of misery to Laura’s story. He was the elderly father of her step-mother, and he molested Laura for many years as a little girl, just as he had done to his own daughters. Sexual abuse is a silent killer of the heart, silencing the voice and fragmenting the mind.
Laura never told her step-mother about the years of abuse until she was sixteen. And when she finally told her story, the step-mother snapped at her with indifference, Life is hard . . . the rest of us have dealt with it . . . so now you deal with it!
Can you imagine the misfortune of it? Pappa Joe was only in Laura’s life because he was the father of this step-mother she had chosen over her own father. Laura was not biologically related to this man. Sadly, she had four other biological grandparents from her own mother and father; however, she didn’t see either set much because of the first divorce. Chapter 2 hardened and deepened the foundation of shame, and the deep sense of brokenness and unworthiness in Laura’s heart.
Her teenage years were what you would imagine. Being raised in a moral no-man’s land, Laura lived the typical life of drinking and sexual involvement with boyfriends. Sex, love and intimacy were a jumbled mess in her soul. One was the same as the other, and at age eighteen Laura was pregnant. What do you think the advice was from her step-mother? Get an abortion, and so ends chapter three, with more brokenness, pain, and unworthiness.
By the grace of God, Laura had gone to a Vacation Bible School as a five year-old, where she clearly remembers believing and receiving the Lord Jesus as her savior. There was just enough conscience in her heart that Laura reeled in agony and guilt after her abortion. Not knowing how to connect with God, she spent the next three years in a downward spiral of drinking and drugs, trying to escape the pain in her heart.
Her downward plunge hit a hard rock bottom one Saturday morning. Laura had started the night before drinking with friends. When she was offered some pills, she took them, for she was with friends, so she thought. Laura passed out and remembers nothing of the night, but awoke early the next morning to find the evidence around her that she had been raped by several men during the night. She was devastated. Sick with humiliation and shame, she jumped up, pulled on her clothes and hurried home.
She spent the next couple of hours kneeling at her bedside, praying, confessing, crying out and begging for God’s presence. The agony in her heart was wrenching, and when Laura had cried her eyes dry and had spoken every prayer and pleading she knew to make —-the phone rang.
The voice on the other end said hesitantly, “Laura . . . you were suddenly on my mind this morning . . . are you okay?”
Laura told Brandi the story of what she had earlier woken to, and Brandi said, “We need to get together, immediately! Meet me at the park.”
Laura drove to the park where she and her godly friend met on the swing set for a desperate heart to heart conversation. Brandi helped Laura with wisdom and prayers, and when the prayers ended, Laura lifted her hand off the wooden swing and looked down. Someone had carved a heart into the wood, and carved “Psalm 6:9” inside the heart. The two young ladies looked at one another with amazement, wondering what Psalm 6:9 said. Brandi ran to her car to get her Bible. Here is Psalm 6:8-9,
8Depart from me, all you workers of evil,
for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.
9The Lord has heard my plea;
the Lord accepts my prayer.
On this day, Laura knew that the Jesus Christ she accepted as a 5 year-old at VBS, was the Lord who heard her prayers. And boy, did He answer them! Laura’s life changed dramatically, as she began to attend church with Brandi. Within two years she met a remarkable man of grace, to whom she has been married for eleven years now. They have two beautiful children.
Last month at Pure Heart Weekend, Laura came face to face with a vow she had made years earlier. I will never, ever forgive myself for the abortion. But she came to realize that if God can forgive her, then she could forgive herself.
It was one of our more remarkable prayers at a Pure Heart Weekend. As she gave the Lord permission to remove her own bitter-root of unforgiveness against herself, she saw the Lord standing before her. She asked him if she might receive from Him the power to forgive herself. He answered her Yes, and He removed the bitter-root of self-judgment from her heart. Then she asked one more thing: May I have the chance to see my baby and say I’m sorry?
We sat silently with Laura, not saying a word. Suddenly her weeping intensified. Moments later, between her sobs, she said, “It’s a girl . . . and her name is Isabella.”
Isabella means “Devoted to God.” A perfect name to remind Laura, that He heard her prayers on a broken hearted Saturday morning, and He led her to the one swing in the one park where His word for her had been inscribed on the swing. Psalm 6:9, today, is of course, inscribed on Laura’s heart, and she, too, is His Isabella.