There I tried to pray again, lying on my straight white cot. “God, I’m so mixed up. I love You and I want to belong to You. God, won’t You please get me out of here and heal me?” Three months later I was out. I got my son back and lost him again soon afterwards. And for almost three years he was in a juvenile home. I took psychiatric treatments at my own expense despite my modest salary. I tried going to church again, but once more I tried suicide. Again I was rescued. Then, finally, a veritable stranger of 14, Blaine, my son, came to live with me. We had a small apartment in a housing project, and here God started to answer my prayers. One day our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Balker, said, “ I heard your son say both your little radios are burned out. Why don’t you and Blaine come over tonight and listen with us? We always listen on Saturday nights to a wonderful program called ‘Unshackled!’ ” That was the first week in February 1952. We spent every Saturday night with the Balkers and never missed a broadcast of “Unshackled!” And week after week I’d hear the different people whose stories were dramatized tell of receiving Jesus Christ as personal Saviour and becoming new inside and out. I longed for the peace and forgiveness that these people had experi enced. Finally, I went to a godly pastor and told him I wanted what the people on “Unshackled!” had. I told him I’d prayed and had gone to church, but I wanted to really know God. Patiently, he showed me Scriptures that helped me receive Jesus as my own personal Saviour For a week I walked on air, and for the first time in years slept peacefully. And then the gloom came again! It was then that I wandered nervously into the Pacific Garden Mission! Here on many visits I got spiritual counsel from Lorraine Flowers and Elaine Chobanoff, director of the Women’s Division. Here I got more help than I got from my psychiatrist. Once more when I got a new seizure he told me that my whole trouble went back to the beat ing I got from my mother when I stole a quarter. He advised that I get release by writing her and telling her off. Elaine had another solution. “You’re a Christian now, Jane. God forgave you —what you’ll have to do is forgive your mother" I knelt with Elaine and before God I forgave my mother. Then I wrote her a letter asking mother’s for giveness for all I had ever done to hurt her. It took three letters before an answer came. Yes, she would forgive me. And with that incident the seizures stopped. I paid a last friendly visit to my psychiatrist. He shook his head in wonder and can’t figure out to this day what really happened to me. Yet it’s quite simple: Jesus Christ has set me free! Reprinted by permission from the Pacific Garden Mission News, Feb. 1965.
I WAS THE CHILD WHO GOT THE BEATING. That Was my mother. It hurt her pride so much that her daughter would dare steal a quarter from her own father that she lost control of herself. We never spoke again of that ter rible beating. I pushed it way down in my memory. And far from starting out to be a delinquent, I kept true to a goal that I had set for myself: to somehow serve God in life. But everywhere I turned someone discouraged me. First Mother: “Religious life? Ha! You’re not good enough for that!” Then a clergyman: “ I advise you to forget it, Jane. You’re just not the type. Too inde pendent for a 16-year-old. You’d never learn to obey God! You need God, but I doubt that God needs you!” Soon I went out to prove them right. I headed delib erately into a round of parties and drinking and boy friends. Then next thing I knew I had married for spite —a man much older than myself, a slave to alcohol. And for eight years I lived a hell on earth. My temper flared as his temper flared higher. He drank more and more. And I drank more and more to try to drown my misery. I hated my husband and feared him . . . and still longed for God. Sometimes I felt so homesick for God that I cried, and the more I cried the more my husband seemed eo hate me. “ I want to go to church! Our son needs to go to church!” I tried to make my husband understand. “No wife of mine goes to church—and no son of mine will ever go to church except over my dead body!” he would rave. Our son, Blaine, was five years old, and the little fellow used to stand against the wall and watch and listen to his mother and daddy. His poor little eyes looked wild and frightened like a trapped animal. I loved the boy, and something in him made him cheerful and sweet when we were alone together. By the time he was six, he would go out of his cheer ful moods like the sun dropping behind a cloud. When I left my husband for good and took little Blaine to my mother’s, he just stood and looked at me as I said good- by to him. For one agonizing year I lived away from Blaine— in a room alone. A kind of wild desperation continued to grow in my heart as I thought of the troubled face of my little boy. During this period I began going to church again. But I found nothing. I went through sleepless nights. I lost my job. Once, twice, and then three times in that ghastly year, I went to pieces and tried to commit suicide. Finally, desperately, I beat on the front door of a minister—about 1 a.m. When he finally opened the door, about all I got was, “Come to church. In the meantime, God help you. There’s nothing I can do. It’s late and this is most irregular. Good night.” The rest of the night I walked the streets of Chi cago and sobbed my heart out. Finally, I was committed to Manteno State Hospital, no fight left in me.
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OCTOBER, 1965
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