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In the wee hours of an autumn morning I slipped to the bottom of a deep pit of personal hopelessness. I sat in that pit distraught beyond comprehension. I was a thirty-six year old woman who loved her family and had been entrusted with the privilege of serving her Lord in so many ways in the local church. I sat there completely confused and utterly determined to never enter a church again unless the Lord showed me why I could not fully trust the God who had saved me and had kept me alive through all manner and degrees of illness and traumas---even when my mother tried to murder me.

Through the early hours of that autumn morning the Lord so sweetly held my sobbing heart in His hands as He opened the door to a long forgotten and tightly locked room of my heart. As I slowly entered that dark room I ‘saw’ a very large safe in the corner. The Lord had already opened it for me. When I saw what it contained the anguish that flooded my heart made me try to turn and run away. But God...held my heart in His hands and assured me that He was sufficient to enable me to finally bear the pain---the pain I had buried so deep so many years before.

Inside of that long forgotten room of my heart I finally faced in Christ the wrong childhood thoughts that had pervaded my life and the memories that brought again the anguish from a childhood of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse from my mother.

I had long ago let the hatred for my mother out of my heart when I knelt at Calvary to be saved. I was only fourteen years old then and a root of bitterness and a great deal of anger remained repressed. It remained buried just deep enough below the surface to allow me to lead nearly a normal life but shallow enough to keep me personally miserable without knowing why.

That autumn night was the longest and hardest night of my life. I am still thanking God as I write this that before daybreak came He enabled me to finally surrender my life to Jesus Christ. That moment I became fully determined (stubbornness turned to steadfastness) to trust God in all that He is with all that I was. Precious was the reality of the promise that the Lord gave to me when I first began seeking Him for answers: "The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me. Thy mercy, O LORD, endureth forever: forsake not the work of thine own hands." (Psalms 138:8)

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