A story of a Christian

[Lauralea]

We each have an individual story to tell. If we are Christians, we may have a story of how God has led in our lives. Here is my story. It is true.

 

I was 12 or 13 when I learned about accountability when my five year old sister and I went for a walk in the woods. We were behind our house in Carmel New York. My mother warned me there was a swamp with quicksand back there and not to get lost and I decided it would be fun to get a little bit lost. It is really hard to get a little bit lost and soon we were really lost and in the swamp. I was up ahead looking for quicksand- at least it would get me first, I reasoned morbidly- when I heard a stressed out little voice behind me. “Laura” she said, “Please don’t leave me.” I realized in that moment what I had done, endangering my sister whom I loved dearly on a whim, and I prayed.

I had prayed before, the Now I lay me down to sleep type of prayer my aunt taught me during one of our annual trips to see my Dad’s family down South, but this prayer was special because I realized my own sinfulness and my need of God. It was a “Please get us out of this mess and I’ll serve you” prayer. And he did. I climbed another hummock of grass in the marshy swamp and heard a noise that sounded beautiful for the first and only time in my life. It was a car, and where there were cars, there must be a road, and where there was a road, there must be a way out of the swamp. I looked up ahead and saw a little hill we climbed. We were quiet on our way back to the house, my sister still afraid, me losing the sense of the prayer and promise to serve Him but not fully. Years later, it became a reality.

Fast forward to my sophomore year in college when a classmate and I were driving to a junior high school for a social science project. I heard my name clearly yet quietly. It was winter, the windows were closed, the radio was off, and he hadn’t said anything. An hour later, in the noisy lunchroom at the junior high, I heard it again but reasoned someone had said my name and my ears picked it out of the din. He dropped me off in a nearby town where I had lunch and took the bus out to the highway leading to Grand Valley State.

Everyone knew there was no bus from the city of Grand Rapids out to the school, and so they would pick up hitchhikers, not that it was a good idea. That day, I stuck my thumb out and someone I could neither see nor feel pushed my arm down. I was not fully a follower of the Lord, then, but I knew the voice of the Holy Spirit. In my mind, I asked if it was okay to hitchhike, and twice I received the impression No, but I stuck out my thumb and got a ride immediately the third time. Meanwhile, a red station wagon had gone by.

That station wagon picked up two young women with their groceries at the light in Standale, where the road was four lanes wide, so probably would have picked me up if I had had my thumb out. It takes less time for 1 woman with no groceries to get in the car than 2 with groceries, so the station wagon would probably have been in front of the blue sedan in the other lane when the road narrowed.

I was thinking about the unexplainable events that had just occurred when I heard my name again. I started to say something to the driver, who motioned to be quiet and look ahead. In front of us there was a terrible head on collision in the middle of occurring. Two students in a red convertible from Grand Valley were thrown from their vehicle and killed instantly. It was very bad. They had collided with the blue sedan. The woman who had been in the sedan was injured but conscious and walking around as blood ran in small rivulets down her face. She didn’t look good, but she would survive. If I had gotten in the station wagon it would have been in front of her car, and I would have been in the front seat without a seatbelt on- I never wore one back then- when the road narrowed. I would have gone through the windshield, and three people would have died that day, on that busy stretch of highway going out to Lake Michigan. I went home and prayed the payer of thankfulness, and asked God again that if He was really there He would help me to know and to serve Him.

Soon after I purchased an ancient Bible in a Goodwill nearby, and treated the old book with reverence and awe as I learned the words of life. My cousin Pam and I were close to one another but did not know the Lord, and I know my Grandmother prayed for us. We both were converted that fall before she died at Thanksgiving.

I felt the Spirit of God filling me as I lay in my bed and prayed the Lord’s prayer one night across the street from Lake Michigan. It was like my whole body was filled with light and for a little bit I did not need to breathe. After that I stopped reading the philosophy books I had been studying in college and started reading the Bible. Some were New Age and I could sense they had a kind of power, but it was the wrong kind. Others just did not have much meaning once I found the Lord.

After I graduated from college I was fasting and praying for God to lead me. I had received a pamphlet that contained the chapter “The Invitation” that was a chapter from Desire of Ages and when I read it, I could sense that whoever wrote it knew the Lord like the disciple John did - my favorite Bible author. It was published at a Christian farm and health food community about an hour away and I was impressed to go there one Saturday. After I arrived, I sat down under a tree and in my mind I heard a voice “I’ve brought you here and I’ll be with you here and wherever I lead you, and I’ll tell you when to go.” Back then, they had one rule for determining whether someone could stay there, which was if they felt the Lord had led them, so I stayed.

That afternoon I sat down in a reading room upstairs from their chapel and picked up the book Councils on Stewardship. It said that money from the sale of alcohol was ill-gotten gains and would not benefit the receiver. I had just gotten a part time job at a local tavern after graduation, but when I read that I decided never to go back and pick up my check. Later I went to pick up a check from an employment agency for working part time at Amway. I opened it on the way back and they had the exact amount they owed me in a computer generated check. In addition, they had a hand written check that was dated on my birthday, August first which was a Sunday, the day after I came to live with the Adventists and decided to not get the check from the bar. I mailed it back to them and told them they did not owe it to me, and they mailed it back and said they did, so I accepted it. I felt like the Lord was showing me that anything I gave up for Him, He would give back or provide for me.

About that time I met a couple. The husband was from Hungary and his testimony influenced me deeply. He had walked through three international border crossings. The first, the guards found him, took his money, and let him go. The second, he prayed, and he was invisible to the guards even though he was in a customs building. And the third, the guards nodded and smiled to him and let him pass without papers, again in an international customs building. Even though his experiences were different than mine, I knew it was the Spirit of God guiding him as well.

I stayed at the health ministry in Michigan about 9 months then volunteered in a Christian school for the handicapped in Tennessee for 14 months. I worked briefly selling religious literature in Pensacola Florida, where I was walking down a street one day and heard a voice in my mind “Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.”

I crossed the street to the door I had the impression about it and knocked. The woman who answered was a day sleeper and so was not going to invite me in, but I asked her for a glass of water, and she had me come in and sit down. I sold her several books, and a magazine on quitting smoking for her husband, who was there and nonparticipating, but did not object. After when I returned to deliver the books, she told me how surprised she was that her husband had not thrown me out, because he until recently had been connected with the Mafia.

When I was 28 I became ill about the time I moved from Wildwood to New York. I knew moving there at that time was not God’s first choice for my life. Soon after moving there I started having symptoms of an illness I probably already had, a form of cancer called Hodgkin’s disease, in the lymph nodes. Before they knew what was the matter, they put me on a flight back to Wildwood where I had lived for years, and while waiting at the airport I prayed silently for a rainbow to show me everything would be alright. When I got up to Wildwood I stayed at one of the doctors’ houses and his daughter gave me a picture of a rainbow. When I told her this part of the story she gave me another one she had done for her parents. I felt like the Lord was telling me things would be alright, but not in an instantaneous miracle, but that he would use people.

The women in the hydrotherapy department gave me fever treatments The hottest was a water temperature of 113 while they kept my head cold with ice packs and monitored my pulse. They did not put an ice pack on my heart because the biggest lymph node was between my lungs, and I requested no pack there. The hydrotherapist agreed as long as my pulse did not get over 120. It stopped at 116. My body temperature got up to 107.2 , and we saw shrinkage of the lymph node on my neck and my symptoms disappeared for almost a day. 107 is extremely hot, and I did not want any more treatments that hot. I thought of Jesus and what He was willing to go through for us. Usually when we have a really bad trial we cannot just say forget it and still have salvation. In this case, I could say no more hot fever treatments, and they would stop. But Jesus did not do that. He could have come down form the cross, but it would have cost us our salvation.

Because I had the fever treatments first, I had chemotherapy but did not need radiation.

Later I was able to fellowship and witness with other dear friends who had cancer because I understood what it was like.

I used to love reading the newsletters from the New York Van Ministry and the Lord worked it out so I could work there for a year. We had many miracle stories there, and at times I helped to edit the newsletter. One time in Manhattan a transit cop with a gun came up to me on the street where we had a table of Adventist Christian literature in front of the blood pressure screening van and asked me “Do you think the world’s coming to an end soon?” I asked him what he thought.

“A lot of people say it’s not.”

"In Noah’s day they said it wasn’t going to rain,” I answered.

“You’re right, they aren’t paying attention. The world is coming to an end soon.”

I offered him a Great Controversy but at first he politely declined. "I know it already" he said. I thought he was a Seventh-day Adventist. I could tell he loved the Lord. "Oh? I asked.

"Yes I'm a Jehoveh's Witness" he replied. "

I started praying silently. " I had a friend who was a Jehoveh's Witness and he read this and he said he found out things he didn't know. " I didn't tell him my friend became a Seventh-day Adventist.

"Okay" he said. "I read other things. I'll take it. I'll read it."

Muslims also came asking for literature and wanting to know more about Christ. I remember one gas station attendant who had received a Steps to Christ from the driver on the blood pressure van another time. When he came by, he asked for more to share with his friends. The driver went inside the station for a minute and the attendant came around to my side of the car and asked me to not let him leave until he had given him more Steps to Christ for his friends.

Another man came up to me on the street in Queens where we had the blood pressure van with a table of literature arranged in front of the van. "Why are you doing this?" he inquired kindly but hesitantly. " We are Seventh day Adventists," I replied, " We are here to teach people more about health and more about Jesus."

"I am a Muslim," he said. "I would like to know more about Jesus. What would you suggest?"

After leaving the Van Ministry I began taking prerequisites for a Master in Nutrition at Andrews. Even though I did well there and subsequently teaching nutrition for 10 years, after that finances sort of deteriorated, maybe to get me where I am now.

I worked at a health ministry in Bakersfield for 10 years. One day I was feeling stressed and in a rush. I am learning not to rush into things when feeling like this. I took my foot off the gas while entering a big intersection at California Avenue and South H Street, while I wondered why I was doing this since I usually accelerated when crossing wide streets to keep from being caught when the light changed. That’s the last thing I remember until I woke up 45 minutes later and hurting all over. They had used the jaws of life to take my car door off after someone t-boned me in the driver’s door. I was in pain but my thinking was crystal clear and I was filled with peace. They had to take me to the level I trauma unit in the area and they did not even pause on the way in, after they ran tests on me one of the nurses told me how lucky I was. I knew it was more than luck. I was really thankful I did not have broken bones and it did not cause facial lacerations or any bleeding except a really big bruise on my leg. Later a friend who got the items out of the trunk of my totaled car said the guy at the shop said the front axle (and engine block probably) stopped the other car from coming deeper into mine and another 2 feet further back and… Makes me realize why I took my foot off the gas.

A few years ago the Lord impressed me not to move to a town out in the country about an hour from where I lived and worked in Bakersfield, but I moved anyway. Long story short, I bought a house, the economy crashed, the house value went down, I got laid off and lost in both houses. But I always had all the material things I needed.

After I got laid off, I was looking to rent a condo in Bakersfield because I figured I would need to eventually move. I woke up one morning and heard like a whisper in my ear saying " Go look at that condo you've been thinking of renting." So I went down and looked at the condo. They were willing to rent it to me but needed my bank statements. While I was eating lunch before going to the bank my best friend called and asked me if I could watch her elderly parents. She needed to take her daughter down to Bakersfield for classes and wait for her. I explained why I couldn't and she decided to drop her daughter off and get someone else to bring her back. After we talked, I was impressed I no longer needed to follow up on the condo.

That Friday night we had vespers at her house. I started to talk about my puzzling experience with the condo when the man who drove her daughter home told what had happened. He kept trying to pull out to pass a truck on the freeway but could not move his arm to turn the steering wheel. Then a car passed them speeding going the wrong way on the freeway in the lane he would have turned into. My friend has poor night vision, and she could have been in a head on collision, but God had other plans.

I always felt like some time I would like a pause in my life where I wasn’t doing anything too special but had time to have a deeper experience with God. In 2010 I got laid off from work due to the economy and since then while I haven’t needed anything a lot less money has been coming in from the types of things I have been doing.

I never planned to be home helping Mom, but a few months ago when home on vacation I could see walking was getting harder for her and she needed more than occasional help. At times it has been very challenging in part because she does not believe and in some respects our values are really different

Last week I took her to a nearby town. She was signing over her car title to me in order to save on insurance since I now drive for her. (She is 86) After taking the freeway back to the area we live in, we stopped at her long time mechanic for an oil change. I asked them to check the tires because I was unsure how old they were. I was assured they had plenty of tread, but I asked them to check them anyway. The oil change took a little longer than I expected, but when the man came to the waiting room to tell me my car was ready, he held up a 3 inch nail and told me it had been in our tire and the extra time was to patch the tire. So thankful we did not have a blowout or a flat on the freeway.

I know our stories are still being written, but this is some of mine. I hope it may be a blessing to someone else.

[Lauralea]

I want to say I do not believe miracles or providential circumstances alone are a sign of God's presence. Unexplained things may come from a variety of sources, and we should not base our faith on unexplained events.

I know there is more to my story about how I have served and helped others but his is what I have opportunity to share today, also I have not felt like sharing about things I have done, but someone pointed out that maybe this is an important part of showing what the Christian life is like.

[thx4mercy]

What an interesting story you have!  So many times of feeling impressed by God, but sometimes you ignored the impression anyway!  Don't we all?!  But I assume that you do that less and less as the years go by?

[Lauralea]

What an interesting story you have!  So many times of feeling impressed by God, but sometimes you ignored the impression anyway!  Don't we all?!  But I assume that you do that less and less as the years go by?

It depends on if I am living closely with God and seeking to follow Him closely.

[phkrause]

Awesome testimony Lauralea

[Lauralea]

Thank you Pkrause.

[Lauralea]

Thanks dgrimm.