The Healing Hope Newsletter
August, 2009
mjduck@comcast.net
“My father was a drill instructor and he treated my brother and I as though we were in boot camp, Trudy recalls. “’If I say jump, you ask how high on the way up!’ Mom just followed dad’s orders.”
When she invited Jesus to be her Savior at age eleven, the first person Trudy told was her father. He responded flatly that it wouldn’t last. As a result of her experiences, God, she concluded was as strict as her dad.
Despite the warnings of friends, when she was nineteen, Trudy became engaged to Pete. But after he raped her multiple times, she broke off the relationship. When she found out that she was pregnant, however, Trudy agreed to marry him.
“The Christmas our son was five months old, Pete said that the child was too young to appreciate a tree and presents.” Lying to Trudy about his intentions, on Christmas eve he took Nate to friends and wouldn’t let Trudy go along. “When he came home hours later and bragged that our son loved their Christmas tree and even tried to open presents, I was angry. He’d deliberately robbed me of my first Christmas with Nate. Pete had already let me know that he wanted a divorce and that night I told him he could have it.”
Trudy had been single for eleven years when her pastor’s wife asked if she could give Alex, a widower with three young children, her phone number. “The first night, Alex and I talked on the phone for three hours. After that, he called just about every night for six weeks.
“We married and I loved the idea of being a mom to Alex’s children.” But most of them rejected their new stepmother. “One of his sons punched me one evening and I had to have him arrested. That was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
“We’d been on a vacation and were stopping to camp for the night when Alex spotted a McDonalds outside the camp ground. He dropped the boys and I at the site and drove with the girls to get our dinner. But he couldn’t remember where the camp was and became terribly frustrated.” It was two hours before they returned.
It wasn’t long before he was unable to perform jobs at work that had been routine for fifteen years. A neurophysiologist diagnosed him with possible Alzheimer’s Disease and he went on disability retirement. Alex was only 41 years old.
“I panicked. When I read a book describing the ways in which Alex’s health would deteriorate, I cried and cried.” Her dreams had been shattered.
For seven years, she took care of Alex at home. Their family situation was made worse by the fact that some of his children simply couldn’t accept what had happened to their father. To spare them, Trudy decided to put Alex in a nursing home. ”He deteriorated until he couldn’t feed himself, swallow without choking, walk or talk.” For years, she’d prayed for the Lord to heal him. “The next few years I prayed that he’d take Alex home.”
When her husband died, an autopsy confirmed what a physician conjectured: Alex had been misdiagnosed. He didn’t have Alzheimer’s Disease after all; he had viral encephalitis. The progress of that disease could have been halted years before (but not reversed) if it had been correctly diagnosed.
“I was angry at God, at the doctors, myself and anyone else I could think of.” During that period, she wrote in a journal when she was desperately angry and disappointed, then destroyed it. Although she didn’t understand why things happened as they did, she was finally able to accept the fact that God allowed the misdiagnosis and surrendered the entire situation to the Him. In return, He gave her his supernatural peace.
Trudy’s story does have a happy ending. Last year, she met Warren, a Christian and a widower. Soon, they will be married.
Blessings,
Marion Duckworth
Visit my new website: http://www.healinghopeonline.com/
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