Personal Stories.

Yesterday, something pretty bad happened to me. I can't go into details, but it was something that triggered my childhood abuse. That evening my heart started beating fast and I felt angry and wanted to break something. I also knew from experience that I would have violent nightmares when I went to bed.

I couldn't sleep, so in desperation I took two sleeping pills. I passed out for maybe an hour and woke up stumbling all over the apartment. I had prayed earlier for God to help me out of my mess because I was thinking about running away from home again and other things;

So, I began to read a book I had just bought. It was not a religious book, it was an anthology of winning news articles. One of them was about an innocent man who was accused of killing his wife. This was before DNA could be tested. To make a long story short, he was convicted although lots of info that would have proven his innocence was left out of the trial because of the DA at the time.

So, this man lost his wife in a horrific way, and he lost his child who was given to his wife's sister. He was allowed visits with his son twice a year, but when the boy was twelve and knew why his father was in jail, he changed his name to his aunt's name and said he didn't want to visit any longer.

This is the lowest that this husband and father felt. He had already been in jail around 10 years.Fifteen years later, he was proven innocent and freed. They caught the man who did do it. He was a serial killer who killed other people after he killed this man's wife.

Anyway, What stunned me, since I was in a tizzy about my own tortured soul, was how the pain of losing his son turned this man to God. He said he prayed and two weeks later he felt and saw a burning light all around himself. It was full of love and compassion. He said he knew it was God and from that moment on he had peace of mind. He became a believer.

Meanwhile, his son was in college working towards becoming a minister. Wow. So, through this terrible tragedy both father and son accepted Jesus as Christ and were saved. What a story.What pain they had to go through in order to be drawn to God!

If I did not have the pain I have in my life, would I be a Christian? I don't know. My childhood pain had taught me to never treat my children in that way. Then, when I looked at the face of my baby I melted. I wanted to bring her up in a loving Christian way and I tried to do my best.

After reading the story of that man who was wrongly accused of murder, I felt better about my struggles with mental illness. I felt that compared to my suffering - his was worse and yet God brought through that pain the eternal life of the son and his father. Wow. Etern al Life. They both now have Eternal Life. It is evident how God can bring eternal good out of an ugly, evil deed as was done by a serial killer.