My Testimony, part one
Their little hands and feet, their smiles, their laughter. I wanted to share it all with her. It felt so wrong. It wasn’t every day, all day, but some moments brought fresh waves of heartache. The tears would fall hot as I hoped they would keep playing and not notice my sadness. Things just felt wrong. When you lose someone, it feels like the world is rushing by and you are in slow motion.
Why is everyone acting so normal?
Don’t people realize the world just broke apart?
You resent the speed of life. You resent other’s laughter. You resent everyone who still has their mom. Some days you feel like your feet are just carrying you through the days, but your heart isn’t there.
It was this place, where the cavern left behind in my life and in my heart, made me slow down and turn inward to face some painful places. The gloss of being young and carefree had worn off. I could have turned to the old way of escape, but it seemed pointless. There had to be something more. My children needed me to have some answers. They would begin to wonder about the bigger things in life. What would I tell them? When they went to school and a teacher tried to tell them they evolved from an amoeba, or that the earth came together in some cosmic collision, could I tell them about the Creator? When they heard about heaven, what would I say?
I couldn’t ignore the bigger questions in life any longer.
I knew that God was real. I just had been avoiding Him for 10 years. I hadn’t prayed a single prayer. Why would I? He wouldn’t want to hear from me anyway. As far as I could see, I was nowhere near being acceptable to God.
Although I had walked away from it when I married at nineteen, I had been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. To be more precise I was a fourth generation Jehovah’s Witness, which meant deep roots in this religion. I had gone from attending “meetings” three times per week and having almost every aspect of my life defined by a long list of dos and don’ts, to never attending church and never uttering a prayer.
Until now when I found myself thinking about God. Maybe I was acknowledging that there was a void in my heart where He should be, too.
I felt ashamed of how far I had walked away from God. I was also hurt and disenchanted with not only my former religion but also my former tribe.
The decline of my belief in the Jehovah’s Witness religion had been a long slow process.
When my mom divorced my dad and walked away from our religion, on the brink of going through what many would call a mid-life crisis, I supported her decision regarding her break from the religion. As far as our religion, I continued half-heartedly for a few weeks, before my 14-year-old brother was approached by a family member on my mother’s side and warned to stop visiting his mom, as she was now a Satan follower. At that point, I was done with attending their meetings and needed a good long break from being around those loved ones that seemed to have their priorities wrong. Some were family and some were friends from our congregation, but these folks were the only tribe I had ever known.
According to the religion’s mandate, my involvement at school was purely academic, nothing extracurricular, in hopes I wouldn’t create friendships outside our religion. That wasn’t always how it turned out, thankfully, as one of my non-Jehovah’s Witness middle school friends would play a key part in my coming to a real faith in Jesus Christ.
But in the moment of my mother’s radical departure from all we had ever known, my foundation in life had dissolved.
My parents’ divorce meant the most important part of who I was, was no longer a cohesive unit. With what felt like a betrayal of the deepest kind, our people had turned on my mother.
My faith in God was shaken.
As I pondered my mother’s journey trying to connect the dots with where she had gotten so off-track, I remember her attempts to navigate life as someone entirely different. Just because she made a choice that this religion’s practices didn’t feel right, did it mean that she couldn’t be loved by God and love Him in return?
Watching her identity crisis, was probably the point that I shut off the questions and tried to pretend they weren’t buried deep in my soul.
My family’s devotion to our faith, an essential requirement needed to walk that life, creates a wedge between you and the rest of society. I had always viewed the world from an outsider’s view. When I chose to walk away from God, I had no reason not to jump in with both feet in all the so-called pleasures that life extended. But now, in the wake of her death, the fun didn’t seem fun anymore.
I remembered the six years that had passed since her decision. I had become a mother, and her life had continued to unravel. She went from one bad relationship to the next, quickly divorcing husband number two and then making her fatal mistake and marrying husband number three. It was a relationship so volatile that at one point she tried to end her own life. Shortly afterward, filled with regret over that moment of weakness and strengthened by new resolve, she decided to leave her third husband. But she would never have the chance.
I remembered the call that would forever change my life.
My husband told me I needed to come home right away, averting my plan of driving to my mother’s house to help her pack her things after picking up boxes from U-Haul. He only said “something” had happened, afraid to tell me, knowing our son was in the back seat of my car and I had to drive home.
I knew. Those kinds of moments never leave you.
I can picture what the outside of the U-Haul store looked like, as I was absorbing his words. I can tell you exactly where I was on the road home when the first crack in my composure happened and I thought I might not make it back. I held my screams until I could step out of the car upon arriving. The memory of the initial pain and shock I felt is indescribable. My mother’s husband had taken her life and then his own, a couple of days after being informed that she was ready for a divorce, after making sinister threats for several days.
I recalled different moments when I allowed the rawness of my grief to pour out. Maybe the crucial moment was post-funeral, when the shock was fading, and reality was knife-like on my awareness. I had chosen a place where no one could hear me and let grief pour. I poured out my frustration, beseeching the God that I had been ignoring for years. It wasn’t like I suddenly had answers to all my questions, but when I stood up and walked out of that place something was different. Somehow after my honesty with God, I knew that I had the strength to get through her death.
Gratitude flooded me now and I became once again grateful for the timing of my son’s birth, as it had given me reason to get out of bed, fight depression and live. Now as a mother of two, another three years had passed and something else was beginning to shift inside. When I thought about God, there was something deeper than hurt and shame.
Something small that wouldn’t give up, vying for attention.
A thought that maybe God was a loving God, and what had happened to my mom was simply evidence of evil in this world. Proof of a hardening that can happen in the heart of a man, distortion of his nature, and of the deadly influence the devil can have over a person. Evidence for that eternal war between God and Satan and his demonic forces who never miss a chance to steal, kill and destroy.
Finally, facing my questions, I prayed the first real prayers I had uttered in 10 years. Where are you, God? Can you help me understand who You are? Why did you let that happen to my mom? I can recall the window’s light coming into the window, as I felt tugging on my heart… to keep seeking.
“Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.” (Matthew 7:7 CSB)
I felt heard and was encouraged.
I began to seek the truth. Even that choice of word felt odd, because the Witnesses called their theology, the “Truth,” in a not-so-subtle attempt to discredit all other forms of Christianity. But, nevertheless, I sought truth. I knew that I needed something my mom had not found.
Hope.