This week is a very significant one in my life because it marks 20 years since I began following Jesus which has been the best choice I’ve ever made. I have learned so much (and still have so much to learn!) about what it means to live life abundantly as He desires for me.
It’s a significant week for another reason, too. The catalyst that provided the opportunity for me to receive Jesus into my life was a very traumatic event. I’ve never called it that, “traumatic” until this week but I believe it’s an appropriate word.
David Crowder has a song called "Shadows" and the lyrics are so perfect for the experience I'm about to tell you...
"Life is full of light and shadow, o the joy and o the sorrow,
And yet will He bring dark to light,
And yet will He bring day from night,
When all seems lost and we're thrown and we're tossed,
We will remember we're resting in the shadow of the cross."
I was 15 in June of 1998, getting ready to graduate from 9th grade and begin high school. My 6 year old brother was finishing 1st grade and our 5 year old brother would be heading to kindergarten in a few months. Summer break was so close and the excitement about 2 months of no school was all over the place! But, first, there were state math, history, science and language arts exams to take. This was the first year that I was actually trying to study and felt like I should put some effort into passing these tests. I knew that I would be going to a new school the next year and wanted to at least start off on a good foot. So, I studied at home.
Studying at home was a test of its own kind. Anywhere from 5-12 of us lived in that one bedroom apartment in Queens, New York City (yep, I’m a proud New Yawker!). On rare occasions it was simply my mom, her boyfriend, my 2 brothers and me. More often though there was also my best friend (we kept each other alive and sane) along with people who were too high on drugs to leave or dealers who found it easier to stay in one place instead of traveling to deliver their goods.
A few months earlier, in April of that year, I knew things were getting out of control when the night before Easter I pleaded with my mom over and over to, “make sure they’re all gone in the morning, so we can have Easter”. My request began at about 4pm that Saturday afternoon and was always met with, “of course they’ll be gone, I know it’s Easter tomorrow”. At about 1:00 in the morning I dragged myself out of the bedroom where my brothers had fallen asleep and in the darkness of the living room crowded still with 5 adults continuing to sniff, smoke and shoot various drugs I put my hand on my mom’s shoulder and asked one more time, “please, make them leave before the boys wake up…please…” She said she would.
That was the first time mom didn’t make an attempt at celebrating a holiday.
It was as if mom and I both knew, without speaking it out loud to each other, that things were not going to improve after that. Maybe she felt like she had fallen too far to stand back up, maybe she was being selfish in choosing her desire for drugs, maybe she lost hope in ever being the mom she once was… whatever the reason was the result of her letting go of the responsibility of being a mom was that I tried to do it for her. I tried and I tried and I tried and I kept it together as best as a 15 year old could.
I lived to keep my family together. I had learned from my first year in school not to tell the truth about the drugs in our house because if other people knew I would be taken away from my mom… So I never told the whole truth about home.
I knew well by 15 that if the government took us away from each other things would not get better. I had lots of friends in foster care, the system was failing everyone I knew and I didn’t want to become part of that.
Besides…I reasoned with myself that things weren’t really all that bad anyway…
On that Wednesday night in June I was on the phone with my best friend and we were studying for our biology state test the next morning. It was a strangely quiet evening with only mom’s boyfriend and one of his friends at the apartment. Mom had gone out to dinner with a friend but surprisingly she had made us dinner before she left. I had tried to convince her not to leave us with her boyfriend who had a habit of drinking too much and then breaking things or hitting people. She went anyway, said she’d be back before 9:00.
“Hey, Yvonne, get some clothes on your brothers, they’re here to take you…” her boyfriend said in a panicked voice.
I looked up from the book I was reading practice tests out of to see a police officer standing in the bedroom along with the social worker who had been there last night.
“what…?” I said as I took in what was happening. “um, I think, they’re taking us… taking us from mom…” I said to my friend.
The police were there. This had never happened before. I’d seen many social workers at our house in my lifetime but never with police. They usually came at separate times, not together. The presence of the officer sent me the message that this was for real, we were leaving.
I hung up with my friend and quickly called my brothers’ grandparents who had been mine as well since I was 5. “Mom’s not home and they’re taking us!” I quickly blurted out. Then, to the police, “Where are we going?” The social worker answered, “A temporary shelter in Manhattan.” I told my grandfather on the phone and heard his voice crack as he said they’d figure it out.
The next few minutes seemed to happen in slow motion as I tried to make sure the boys had clothes and shoes, I stared at my mom’s boyfriend in disbelief as he said nothing in protest. We walked out of the building into the darkness of that rainy summer night and got in the back of the police car that drove us away…
I held back my tears, my brothers were trusting me, they clung to either side of me and kept asking what was happening… I just held them as tight as I could and said it would be okay… I was certain that in just a few days we would be back with mom. I knew that this would be the wake up call that would cause her to make things right again.
I didn’t know, I didn’t know then that 20 years later I’d still be waiting for my family to “be okay”.
There are moments in life that feel so overwhelmingly dark and you think there’s nothing that could be any darker. That night was one of the darkest moments of my life. Everything my 15 year old self held dear was being torn apart as we drove away from home. I felt like I had completely let my mom and brothers down. I had failed to keep us protected from the government. I had not been able to teach my brothers to keep family secrets. They didn’t know how like I did, mom had taught me but I didn’t pass the lessons on. They didn’t know how to hide red marks, if they were hungry they said so and most of all, they didn’t know drugs were not actually allowed in people’s homes.
Two days later was June 19th and we found ourselves being moved from the temporary shelter to our grandparents house. The social workers asked me what I would need to help me get through this well and all I knew was that I needed my best friend so I told them I needed to go to her church. Every time the doors were open. I told them church would help me. Truth was I had only been to her church once a few years before.
That very first Friday night I found myself at youth group in the multicultural, pentecostal church that became my refuge during the most difficult years of my life.
I didn’t know it then but, my friend had been praying that God would do whatever it took to get me to believe in Him. God answers prayers, y’all.
After that first youth group meeting I was able, for the first time ever, to be completely honest with an adult. I had already been taken away from my mom so I felt as though I had nothing left to lose.
I told that youth leader about the drugs, the rundown apartment, the alcoholic, abusive boyfriend, the times I had done the urine sample for my mom’s drug tests so they would come back clean, learning how to steal food from grocery stores… I told him almost everything there could be to tell. And then, he told me something that changed my life forever.
After patiently and compassionately listening to the story I had to share he looked at me and he didn’t say, “Jesus loves you! Repent and believe!”. He didn’t say, “Your mom has sinned and is going to hell unless she believes and repents.” While those things may well be true, he allowed Holy Spirit to guide his words and that message went straight to my heart, my gut some might call it…
“Wow, I’m really sorry those things have happened to you. But, you need to know that this wasn’t God’s plan for your life. Or your mom’s life. Or your brother’s lives.”. Those words meant so much and still mean so much to me. Hope is what drew me to Jesus. Hope is what I cling to, still, today.
Drug abuse wasn’t God’s plan.
Physical, emotional, sexual abuse wasn’t God’s plan.
Lies weren’t God’s plan.
Hunger, loneliness and silence weren’t God’s plan.
God had better plans.
God HAS better plans.
When I began to think that maybe there could be more, maybe there could be better, than what I’d experienced, not only for myself but, also for the ones I love so much is when I began to let God work in my life. That moment that I thought was the darkest turned into the very thing that allowed me to experience true hope. We have an enemy and he is clever. He's a good liar, twister of truth, deceiver... but he's already been defeated and his power is nothing compared to what Jesus has for us!
My hope is not some false, fairy tale kind of hope that probably won’t happen. No, my hope is in Jesus, the One who conquered death and all that death holds with it. He rose from the dead. He didn’t just overcome it, He did much more than that. He endured it…He lived through it and came out victorious! I have hope because I know He did it and He offers His victory to each one of us…including the ones we love so dearly who don’t yet know the victory He offers them…
Because of the shadow of that cross where He died I can live in the light of hope!
Because of the shadows the enemy cast over my life I know the value of this hope!
