So How Did I Get In That Mess In the First Place?

Well, it wasn’t God’s fault – as if anybody thought that anyway. I was “born again” at age 17. I just didn’t know that was what it was called. Brought up a Christian, there never was a time I was unaware of Jesus, I just sort of considered Jesus and God as something not very integral to my life prior to my born again experience. In the winter of my 17th year, however, I was invited to go on a youth retreat with a local Presbyterian church. I wasn’t particularly interested in Jesus but I had friends going on the retreat and was interested in one boy especially. Also several of my close girlfriends were going so of course I wanted to go! My parents were more than happy to allow me so off I went on the most monumental week-end of my life.

During the week-end there was a wonderful man who spoke to us and gave his testimony. He had been an actor – the Aqua Velva man in commercials – but now he was an evangelist (and perhaps still an actor too). God spoke to my heart through him and at the end of the weekend, when we were called to take a “step of faith,” I was moved to go forward to the altar. This was totally unlike me. I was a person who never did anything on my own. I asked my friend Janet if she wanted to go up with me but she was uninterested. I was compelled to go nevertheless and stood to make my way to the front. Some adult had left their briefcase in the aisle and I knocked it over with an earsplitting thump, but still I went forward and accepted Jesus along with a few other teens who were moved by the weekend.

I wasn’t one of the “troubled” teens that stood out to the adults who were ministering to us all week-end. None of the adults really knew me or seemed to care whether I came to the front or not. This moment had nothing to do with any of them. This was between God and me and it’s a moment I’ve savored over and over again for so many years… probably the most pivotal moment of my entire life.

It was not too long after that when a moment came that I thought I had lost my salvation. A Sunday school teacher in that same church taught a faulty lesson from the Bible interpreting a piece of scripture to say that if you curse God you will never be forgiven and will be doomed to hell. This is not correct, but he taught the scripture that way. In a moment of teen rage, I cursed God. After I had done that I thought I was doomed and had forever lost my salvation. I lived with that belief until I found the church I just left. One of the ministers at my old church replaced that teaching with the correct interpretation when I was 37. I confirmed this new teaching with other learned ministers elsewhere and, after a time of study, realized I had not lost my salvation. Still, I’m an idiot, and had some struggles when I turned forty. Maybe it was midlife crisis, who knows, but I began to backslide, and that’s when I found the Internet, stopped going to church regularly and began to get into writing the erotica, etc. As I said, I justified it by saying it was a ‘marital aid,’ but somewhere inside I knew that was wrong. I don’t exactly know WHY it is wrong, but it IS wrong. So, it is not that I stopped believing in God and started writing erotica, it’s just that I justified and ignored the voice in my heart and conscience, etc.

There was a point in my life when I briefly considered myself an atheist and that was when I lived in Germany. My first husband was an Army G.I. and we were stationed in Bad Nauheim for awhile. During that time we visited the memorial that used to be Dachau Concentration Camp. In school I had never learned about the Holocaust. I had the worst American History teacher to ever walk the earth. I learned about the Holocaust living in Germany and I was horrified. When I saw the pictures and read the stories my belief in God disintegrated. I couldn’t believe that any sort of compassionate and all-powerful being could exist in a world that could contain this purposeful and unimaginable evil. This time of atheism went on as long as I could force myself to disbelieve, but I couldn’t NOT believe. I realized that so many of “us” atheists are people who really DO believe but we’re mad at God and the only way we know to hurt Him is to not believe in Him.

I can’t explain it. I don’t know why He allows the things He allows. I don’t like it. I rage at it. But somehow I not only believe He lives, I also believe He is all powerful and all good. It’s crazy. It does seem nonsensical, but I know that my redeemer lives and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes-I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!