People Speak Newsletter
February, 2009
(Note: some have reported not receiving this month's newsletter, so we are re-sending it. Because of this error, you may receive more than one copy of this newsletter. Thank you!)
Dear Friend,
"Since the age of four I have been looking for love."
Terry was a toddler when her father abandoned the family. Since her mother was busy working, she recalls that "an old man next door was willing to provide me with plenty of what he called "love." When she was six, a friend of her mom’s began doing things to her that he said would be "our little secret". Four years later, another man began to sexually abuse her.
As a young teen, she sought men’s love and approval the only way she knew. At age sixteen she married Brad. The day she found out that her husband had been unfaithful, she swallowed a bottle of pills and spent a week in intensive care. Two more pills, the doctor told her, and she would have died.
"Four years and two kids later, I asked a pastor for help." Under the minister’s guidance, Terry and Brad prayed the sinner’s prayer and became active in the church. But Terry didn’t have the personal relationship with Christ that would change her on the inside. Still troubled, after nine more years, she left what she says had become a beautiful marriage and took their four kids with her. When the state gave Brad temporary custody of them, "I dove head first into cocaine and alcohol to numb my pain."
Divorced, Terry became intimate with the man who was to become her second husband and subsequently became pregnant. Eddy insisted that she have an abortion. Despite convictions to the contrary, she agreed. Later, despite Eddy’s physical and mental abuse she married him. "Once he held a hunting knife to my neck and said, "I know why O.J. killed Nicole." But he agreed to let her give birth to a second child because it was a boy. When Eddy hit her with his fist between the eyes, however, she filed for divorce.
"I was thirty-six years old and still on my confused and destructive journey to find true love." When she met and married a Christian man, she thought she’d found "happily ever after." But after six years, her third husband walked out of her life. She lost the business they’d established as well as their house and savings.
"With the encouragement of friends, I decided to give my life back to Jesus and live for him. For the first time, I felt clean and loved."
But when she attended a friend’s barbeque and went home sick, a man came into her bedroom and viciously raped her. "I fell apart, spent a week in the hospital and came home with nine different prescriptions."
Still looking for love, Terry began seeing a worship pastor she met on a Christian website and entered into an intimate relationship with him. Later, she discovered he used several aliases on the dating site to establish relationships with other women. When, in less than two weeks she lost her job and several important relationships, Terry took a handful of sleeping pills so "I could wake up in the arms of Jesus." Instead, she woke up instead in the emergency room.
The patient behind the curtain in the next bed was a man who had a bad cough and a history of heart problems. "I drifted off to sleep and when I awoke, heard the patient’s daughter sobbing. The man, whose life doctors were trying to save, had died." Terry, who wanted to die, had lived.
That night, "God spoke to me very clearly. He said, 'It’s my timing, Terry, not yours.'"
Since then, Terry has been devouring the Scriptures and is part of a nurturing church congregation. She says she’s found "the kind of love I’d been searching for the last forty years when I wandered around in Terry’s wilderness. It’s Jesus love---the kind of love that makes you feel beautiful to your very soul."
She’s still awed by the fact that "God loves even people like me. He had mercy on me all those years so that Christ could use me as a prime example of his great patience with the worst of sinners."
Blessings,
Marion
Website: www.marionduckworthministries.com
*Names have been changed
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