Awakening

The Story of Rita Vater

 

My long burgundy dress swished around my legs as I took my place on the risers with my church’s youth choir. Jack had made me paint the entire exterior of our four-bedroom house in the blazing Arizona heat to earn the money to buy that dress, which I had worn for summer choir tour performances in California.

Today wasn’t a typical choir performance. We were singing to honor the memory of Jack, my controlling, mean stepfather, who had died earlier that week of a heart attack. Someone at the church thought it would be a good idea for the youth choir to sing at his memorial service, so here I was.

The congregation was small; my family changed churches every few years, and we hadn’t been at this one very long. My mother — who was 32 years old and eight months pregnant — my three younger sisters and my 2-year-old half-brother sat stoically on a pew.

A microphone loomed in front of me. Moments earlier, a few people had spoken into it about how good a man Jack was. Those people didn’t know that what they said wasn’t true.

I couldn’t take my eyes off that microphone. Everything in me wanted to break rank with the choir and step up to the device that would magnify my voice many times over. My words would carry to the farthest corners of that sanctuary, announcing to these deceived people who Jack really was. A child molester. A cruel and angry parent. A man who had turned my fun-loving mother into an emotionless robot. A stepfather who had visited my bedroom many nights …

Oh, if I only had the guts.

But I was 15 years old and a quiet girl, and I stayed quiet that day. I sang the song with the choir and sat down.

 

***

 

My real father was a military man, an E-6 in the U.S. Army. He and my mom married young, had four daughters and moved every two years. I made friends easily, but I quickly learned to keep my distance because they would only be my friends until we moved to our next location.

Dad was gruff and harsh. He wasn’t a lot of fun. When I was young, he treated me like a boy. I have many pictures of myself as a baby wearing t-shirts and jeans. He never made me feel like I was a disappointment to him, though. In fact, I believed I was his favorite.

Because I was the oldest, by the time I was 9 years old, I was the only one of my sisters who could come home from school by myself. Many times, Dad would be home in the afternoons because he worked odd shifts, and we would be alone.

Our house was strewn with Playboy magazines. My dad was always reading them, which I thought was normal.

“Come here, Rita,” he said to me one day, a Playboy rolled up in one hand. “You want to take a nap?”

Of course I did. I savored the secret feeling that my dad loved me best. “Crawl up,” he said, lying down on the couch and motioning to his upper body. I settled down on his broad chest, and I could hear his heart beating and his lungs filling with air as he breathed. As I dozed off, he lifted the Playboy magazine over my head and began to read.

 

***

 

Mom and Dad divorced when I was 11 years old and we were living in Germany. Dad had an affair with my mother’s best friend, a woman I used to babysit for. He eventually married her. Mom, my sisters and I moved to Phoenix and in with my grandparents in their two-bedroom house. My mom took a job as a secretary, and not long after, she married her boss, Jack.

Jack was the first Christian I had ever met. He was 57, older than my grandparents, and he sold houses. Mom and Jack bought a brand-new house in suburban Phoenix furnished with model-home furniture. Jack carried a Bible around and made us pray at mealtimes. He also made us go to church.

At home, Jack was controlling. He would force us to eat food at the table. If we needed money or wanted to go somewhere, we were required to ask Jack. When my parents were married, I talked to my mom if I needed anything. Now Jack was the doorkeeper, both literally and figuratively.

Jack and my mom spent most nights in their room with the door shut, watching TV. The night I started my period for the first time, I was desperate to talk to my mom, so I stood outside their room and gently knocked.

The door cracked open, and Jack peered out, his spindly arms and legs framing his potbellied torso. He was the last person I wanted to talk to about such a personal matter.

“I need to talk to my mom,” I said as calmly as I could. I could see my mom lying on the bed behind him, and I was sure she could hear me.

“What do you need to talk to her about?”

“I just need to talk to her, okay?” I glared at him, willing my mom to get up and override this ridiculous conversation.

Jack paused, savoring his position of power. “Oh, did you start your period?”

How did he know? My eyes teared up, and I looked down. “Yes,” I replied. “I really need to talk to my mom.”

Life felt out of control. I couldn’t even have a conversation with my mom without getting this awful man’s approval first. I hated him.

 

***

 

It wasn’t long before Mom was pregnant with her fifth child, and she wasn’t even 30 years old. The night that Mom was laboring in the hospital, Jack, who had stayed home for some reason, knocked on my bedroom door.

Our white carpet had been dyed brown that day, and I woke up to the sound of Jack creeping into my room and a heavy wet carpet smell filling my nostrils. I opened my eyes, groggy from waking from a deep sleep.

“Jack?” I whispered. “What are you doing in here?” Fear coursed through me.

This was the late 1970s, an age before cable television and MTV. I didn’t know about sex and what led up to it. All I knew was that my mom’s husband was in my room in the middle of the night, and I wasn’t sure what he wanted.

“I love you, Rita,” he cajoled. I could smell his putrid breath, the result of a medical condition. “Come on, Rita. I don’t want to have sex with you because you’d get pregnant. Just let me get in your bed.”

His hands groped under my sheets and blanket, and I pushed and shoved his octopus arms away, hissing at him to get out of my room. I kept my voice low so my sisters wouldn’t hear. He tried to kiss me all over as I squirmed into a ball.

Finally, my efforts paid off, and Jack slunk out of the room.

Should I tell? A million thoughts raced through my mind as I pulled the covers tightly up to my neck. The image that won out was that of my mom in the hospital with her new baby boy, soon to come home to four daughters and Jack. I knew that if Jack left, she couldn’t take care of all five of us by herself.

I can’t tell her. She just had a baby. If I tell her, she’ll have to leave him, and how is she going to do that?

I kept quiet.

 

***

 

After Mom brought baby Arthur home, Jack still snuck into my room about once a week, and I would push him away until he left. I finally asked my sister Raunda to sleep in my room, and Jack stayed away as long as she was there.

When Raunda got tired of sleeping on my floor and announced she was moving back into her room, I broke down and spilled my secret about Jack. I begged her not to tell our mom, and she agreed to stay in my room and keep the information to herself.

Those nights in my room, Jack had pleaded with me to let him touch me, sometimes offering me money to do things to him. He would insist that he loved me. During the day, he was awful and mean, often making veiled sexual comments. He would say things like, “You have a lot of pimples, no one is ever going to love you.” He would tell me that my shorts were too tight, and he could see everything. If I were in the hallway and not walking fast enough, he would shove me out of the way.

One day Jack and Raunda got in a fight, and she told our mom about Jack’s nighttime visits. Jack said that wasn’t a very nice thing to lie to my mother about, and I moved in with a family from our home church for my sophomore year in high school.

I lived across town and saw my family on the weekend, usually at church. When I returned home for my junior year, one of Jack’s daughters had moved in, figured out he was molesting my kindergarten-aged sister Roxie and called Child Protective Services.

Jack never was removed from our house. Instead, we all went to therapy together.

I sat in the corner of the room in a chair as the therapist talked to Mom and Jack. I never talked, and I was never talked to.

That was family counseling.

 

***

 

Less than two years after Arthur was born, my mom was pregnant again.

“You have to forgive me,” Jack said one evening when we were alone. “The Bible says so.”

I looked at him, incredulous. This hypocritical man who had never once apologized for anything he had done to me and my sister, who treated us like he was our slave master, wanted me to forgive him? What a joke.

Jack leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, waiting for me to agree with his proclamation. He looked so old with his rickety body and nearly bald head.

A feeling of control swept through me as I realized I could say no. I wanted to say no.

“I can’t do it,” I told him, looking him right in the eyes. “You can’t make me forgive you.”

And I meant it.

 

***

 

Finally, my mom was taking me to get my learner’s permit. A license would grant me some freedom, the ability to get out of the stifling environment of home — even for a little while — where Jack wouldn’t even let us out of the front yard to hang out with our neighborhood friends.

Mom and I climbed into our blue two-door Honda Civic on a hot Phoenix afternoon and stopped to pick up something at her office before heading to the DMV.

With four siblings, it was hard to get time alone with my mom, and today I had her all to myself for this important event.

The phone rang as soon as we walked into her building.

“You need to come home,” the voice told her. “Something has happened to someone at your house, and you need to come home right now.”

I sighed. Are you kidding me? It was always something. I was never going to get my permit.

As we pulled up in front of the house, we were greeted by a lone police officer standing in our yard. The officer ushered my mom inside out of the 120-degree heat to break the news.

Jack was very involved in church activities, and that afternoon while driving to a church function, he had a massive heart attack. He hit another car, which happened to be driven by a physician. The doctor performed CPR on the spot, but Jack didn’t make it.

My mom emerged from the house, hot and wilted and swollen with her eight-months-pregnant belly. She was so plain standing there, no makeup and a light-brown permed Afro. This woman was a far cry from the woman who had worn go-go boots and miniskirts not too many years before.

Mom didn’t cry.

I didn’t, either. Instead, happiness overwhelmed me.

Jack may have stopped coming into my bedroom, but he hadn’t stopped being mean, even after he got caught. He never stopped controlling my mom, telling her when she could wear makeup, ordering her not to shave her armpits or telling her how to fix her hair. Mom used to be fun and full of life, full of dreams for her career. That day, she was too numb inside to squeeze out a tear. She was 32 years old, a widow and about to have her sixth child.

How much can one person take? I thought.

My mind turned to God. I finally had something to thank him for. If there really is a God, Jack’s death is all the proof I need.

After Jack’s memorial service, we had no more need for church. Except for my sister Rosie, who loved church and had a sincere commitment to God, we all stopped going.

 

***

 

Jack had kept a tight rein on us. When he was home, he rarely let us out of the house, and we had to ask him for everything. My freshman year in high school, I chose to fail a home economics project rather than ask Jack for the money to buy supplies for it. Normally, I was a straight-A student.

I came up with all sorts of devious ways to get around Jack’s iron fist. He sold cookware for a while and would be gone at night at dinner parties, and I would sneak out and run wild, partying, smoking pot and drinking. I didn’t really have friends because of my confinement, but I had plenty of hookups. I met boys in the neighborhood and at school. They would come to my room when my parents were out, we’d have sex and they’d leave. I had no emotion about it.

One day soon after Jack’s death, our next-door neighbor’s grandson came to visit from California. His reputation preceded him. Jimmy and his band had been on The Gong Show and won, and his family frequently bragged about Jimmy and his manager and his band’s recording contract.

I was intrigued by this long-haired rocker who was eight years older than me and was the talk of the neighborhood girls. When he showed up in my front yard and asked if he could play our grand piano, I welcomed him into the living room and listened as he reeled off song after song. I pushed my blond Farah Fawcett hair away from my face and leaned into the music.

He was 22 years old. I was barely 15.

All I knew of boys was one-night stands, and Jimmy was different. He was a man, and he sensed that I was unhappy. He was interested, and he wanted to rescue me.

We beat a trail between our houses, getting together for sex and to smoke pot. He had a car and a job, and he bought me stuff. We dreamed of moving to California, away from all of my family complexities in Phoenix.

Soon I started to feel sick so often that my mom took me to our pediatrician. Without telling my mom, the nurse ran a pregnancy test and called me with the positive results.

“You need to tell your mom,” the nurse told me. But I couldn’t tell her. Jimmy could go to jail for having sex with a 15 year old. I felt scared and stuck. I decided to protect Jimmy and have an abortion, so he drove me to a Planned Parenthood clinic.

The abortion would cost $110, an enormous sum for an unemployed high school student. Planned Parenthood, however, arranged a loan for me. Meanwhile, the nurse from the pediatrician’s office kept calling.

 

The night before my abortion appointment, the phone rang. It was the nurse, again.

“I can’t put my mom through one more thing,” I told her. “I can just take care of this, and she won’t even have to know about it.”

I hung up and sat on my bed and stared at the wall for a while. The gravity of my situation weighed heavily.

I don’t think I can do this. If Jimmy has to go to jail, he has to go to jail. My pregnancy suddenly felt romantic. We produced this life. How can I do this to a product of our love?

 

***

 

During my junior year of high school, I was the only pregnant girl in my school. I felt bad for my mom, who now had a pregnant teenage daughter on top of her own infant and children.

I graduated with my high school senior class, and Jimmy and I got an apartment. He worked at a car wash, and I took care of Ryan, who has retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye disease that leads to incurable blindness. It was all very exciting, like playing house. My domestic fantasy lasted about a month.

We quickly ran out of money. Jimmy was gone all the time playing bass guitar at bars where I was too young to get in the door. He became super protective of me, threatened by anything that might take my attention — including Ryan. He didn’t even like me to read books to our son. Jimmy was mean to Ryan, too. “Get out of my way, you little ba*****,” he’d say if Ryan blocked his path.

My relationship and my son forced me to put aside my dreams of college and becoming a nurse. But I needed a job, so I got a certification as a medical assistant and went to work for a Planned Parenthood birth control center.

When Ryan was 5, I walked down the aisle and married Jimmy at the church by my mom’s house.

Do you really think being married is going to change anything? I asked myself as I looked at Jimmy waiting at the altar. But I wasn’t going to move back in with my mom; she had remarried, and I refused to live with another stepfather.

One night, when Jimmy was out, I sat in our living room in our seedy little rental house. It was filled with roaches and grime, and the mottled shag carpets were stained a hundred shades of brown. Ryan, so cute with his Coke-bottle-bottom glasses and brown hair, sat crossed-legged on that disgusting carpet, inches from the TV console.

I fought the urge to pick him up and run.

How could you let your baby sit on that floor?

It hit me then that even adults don’t have control over their lives. I had nowhere to go. I was estranged from my family, and I had no friends. Adults, I realized, don’t always get to live the life they want.

For me, that meant there was nothing I could do but try to survive the choices I had made and do the best I could with my son.

And that’s what I did.

 

***

 

In 1988, Jimmy and I moved to Montana, where his parents had relocated to open a restaurant. We would help them out, and I was overjoyed at the opportunity for a fresh start in such a beautiful place. Finally, we could end the cycle of moving constantly to get away from bill collectors, of Jimmy struggling to keep a job.

I loved Montana. There, I decided we should have another baby, this time one who was planned from the beginning.

Rheanna was born in 1990 when Ryan was in first grade. I cried every day of my pregnancy with Ryan; with Rheanna, I was determined her birth would be a joyous event.

But soon the same old routines took over. I got a job and kept it, while Jimmy switched jobs and we moved between rental houses and apartments. We made it five years before Jimmy couldn’t get a job in that small Montana town, and we moved back to Phoenix.

Once there, life began to look up again.

Jimmy’s uncle had let us take over the payments on his beautiful suburban house. It had four bedrooms, carpeted floors and a big backyard.

Finally, we would live in a house, our house. We would stay here and grow roots — as long as Jimmy could keep a job and we could keep up with the mortgage payments. Money was always tight with us.

 

***

 

The phone rang one Saturday morning before we were even dressed. It was the police, who were at my mother’s house.

“You need to find your parents,” the officer insisted. “Your little brothers are here, but we can’t find them. Your sister Roxie has been in an accident.”

Jimmy found Mom and Dad, who had strangely reconciled after years of divorce, at the grocery store. They drove home, tossed the grocery bags in the front yard and sped to the hospital.

A police officer met us there and told us Roxie’s boyfriend was being questioned at the station, but it didn’t look like he was involved.

My mind spun. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Roxie was in a car accident.”

“Didn’t you know?” The cop looked at me quizzically. “It was a shooting accident.”

Roxie endured a difficult childhood. She was pregnant at ages 12 and 14, and although it was never spoken, we all knew the father was my uncle. She gave the children up for adoption, got her GED and became a medical assistant. She was planning to marry one of her instructors.

Recently, Roxie had received a letter from the State of Arizona stating that her son, who she assumed had been adopted, had bounced between foster homes for 10 years. He had learning disabilities and was blind in one eye, and finally, a family wanted to adopt him. Roxie had kept her children a secret, and now she was face to face with her past.

That Saturday morning, Roxie sat alone in her house, picked up a gun and shot herself in the eye. She didn’t leave a note, and we never saw her alive again.

Driving to her funeral the Friday after Thanksgiving, we passed the mall on the way to the cemetery. The parking lot was packed with cars, people shopping on the busiest shopping day of the year.

Life is going on, and we’re dying here, I thought as I stared blankly out the window. This is the worst day of our lives, and people don’t even know. Really, our lives are nothing in the great scheme of the world.

 

***

 

Not surprisingly, our newfound home stability didn’t last long. Jimmy played baseball, and one night he broke his leg badly during a game and had to have surgery. He was out of work for a long time, and we lost the house and had to move in with my parents in Phoenix.

The Playboy magazines were back, and my dad was up to his old tricks. I could hear him padding around late at night, then the familiar tones of the computer modem making a connection to the Internet. I felt sad for him because I knew what he was up to.

Every year, my sister Rosie, who had never stopped going to church, guilted me into attending a mother-daughter banquet at her church. By this time, I had become a clone of my mom. I was functional, but I was numb inside, void of emotion. When my kids would play or do something cute, I felt nothing. That’s not normal, I would tell myself. Mothers are supposed to have feelings about their kids, and I don’t have any.

When Rosie and I walked into the banquet, my third in a row, people remembered me and talked to me. They were friendly and kind, and I saw something in them that I wanted my kids to have.

But my life was a far cry from theirs. The day in and day out of dealing with Jimmy’s anger, unemployment and constant lying was taking a toll. Every weekend, I drank the days away because we had nothing else to do. I had no hobbies, friends or money.

Maybe it was time we started going to church.

 

***

 

My kids hated church that first Sunday. Ryan was a sophomore in high school, and Rheanna was 7, and I made them go to youth group and children’s activities.

But they were soon drawn into the church’s community, and the more they loved it, the more I hated it. I started looking at the people in church and thinking, This has got to be fake. Nobody can be this happy and joyful.

Their house would burn down, and they’d praise the Lord. I could never be like that.

One Sunday, a lady convinced me to step forward to the altar when the pastor asked if anyone would like to pray to become a Christian. I had warmed up to the people in church, so I inched out of my pew. I’ve tried everything else, and if this isn’t real, then nothing’s real, I told myself as I walked to the front of the church. I’ll give it a shot.

I prayed the words of the sinner’s prayer, acknowledging that I needed Jesus to forgive me of my sins and live in my heart. But I felt nothing.

Some people have dramatic conversions when they become Christians, but mine was a long and steady journey. I would meet people, long for the joy that Christ had brought to their lives and become their shadow. If they went to a class, I went to the class. I wanted what they had.

But sometimes I felt like I had to get saved every week. Please God, I would beg. Make it real this time. I really want it. I want to be a new creation, but every week when I go home, nothing changes.

Finally, a lady at church sat me down and said something that made sense.

“Rita, your spirit is new, but your soul has to be restored,” she told me. “It’s a process.”

Why didn’t someone tell me this to start with?

 

***

 

Jimmy felt threatened by church at first, but after a while, he began attending and became a Christian. Finally! I truly hoped that God would restore my marriage and life would be good.

My faith was growing as I prayed, read the Bible and attended church. In Sunday school, I was the one who raised my hand with questions. I needed this to be real, and it was. God was meeting me there.

As usual, though, nothing changed at home, and this time it got worse.

In 2003, we hosted people from church for Thanksgiving lunch. Jimmy and I got into an argument that morning, and he took off for six hours. We ate without him, and he was fuming that we hadn’t waited for him. He pouted in the bedroom while I washed the dishes, then I grabbed my keys to run to the store.

Jimmy flew out of the apartment building after me, wildly motioning for me to roll down the car window. I did, and then I reeled back as his hand shot in and slapped me.

“Where do you think you’re going, you b****?” he screamed, inches from the car. “Get out of that car and back in the house now!”

“Jimmy, I have to get something at the store.” My voice was unnaturally calm. “I’ll be back in 10 minutes.”

That was not what he wanted to hear. Once again his face loomed in the open window, and I snapped my head back in shock as he spit on me. I pressed the button to raise the window and peeled out of the parking lot. At the store, tears dropped off my cheeks as I walked up and down the aisles.

That night, I decided that I was done with Jimmy, but worse things would happen before I told him to leave.

Jimmy was addicted to painkillers, and he had long been stealing and lying to pay for his habit. I found pawnshop receipts in our house, and he would tell me he had sold items he’d picked up at yard sales. When my dad couldn’t find his power saw and the sound equipment went missing from our church, I put two and two together.

The last straw was when Ryan came home from a summer internship and couldn’t find his drum set, which we’d been storing for him. I knew immediately what had happened.

After 23 years with Jimmy, I made him leave. He didn’t argue. He didn’t even look me in the eye as he packed his things.

Our divorce was final in December, and I vowed to never marry again.

Jimmy was soon convicted of credit card and identity theft and went to jail. He’s been incarcerated on and off since.

 

***

 

“John and Paul can’t join my small group,” I insisted to a church leader. “This is not a good idea. I’m a single woman, and I don’t want single guys in our group. I don’t like it.”

I had become a small group leader in my church, and I was one seminar away from being credentialed as an Assemblies of God minister — a position not open to remarried people. In our church, people were assigned to small groups, and I was determined that John and Paul should go elsewhere.

As life would have it, though, the two men joined my group. I asked other church leaders to make sure I was never left alone with them, but as our group spent more time together, I couldn’t help becoming close friends with both of them. We felt like a little family.

John became an especially good friend. In group meetings, we seemed to have our own conversations. Since he was dating someone else and I was never going to get married, though, our friendship was safe.

 

***

 

In 2006, my tough biker dad was diagnosed with cancer, and he got very sick very fast.

Dad wasn’t into God. He would get argumentative whenever we brought him up, but as he lay on his hospital bed recovering from brain surgery, I felt like my pastor should come see him.

I listened in amazement as my dad told the pastor that when he was in high school, he wanted to be a minister. But for some reason his church’s leadership told him he couldn’t, and Dad never went back to church.

“Do you know where you are going to be in eternity?” the pastor asked gently. “Do you want to ask Jesus into your heart?”

“Yes!” my dad replied in his strained voice.

Holy cow.

The pastor put his hand on my dad’s bony shoulder, and they prayed. Dad began shaking and sobbing, and even though he was hooked up to wires and tubes, he slid out of bed and onto his knees. He clutched the pastor’s Bible to his chest, buried his bearded face in the side of the bed and shook and cried for 15 minutes.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he wept over and over.

It was the most amazing transformation I’ve ever seen. God’s presence filled that room and changed everything. My cheeks were wet with tears, and I wished that Rosie, my faithful sister, could have been there.

A plan formed in my mind. What a testimony this would be! Dad would come home, get better and come to church with us. The next day, I bought him a Bible with his name engraved on the cover. Rosie bought him a big necklace with a cross that would fit his biker style. But Dad never wore that necklace, and he never opened the Bible. He was barely conscious again.

A month later, with worship music playing softly in the background in his bedroom at home, my dad went to be with God. It was February 10^th, my daughter’s birthday.

We held a little party for her at my parents’ house, ate birthday cake and visited with Dad, who was there under Hospice care. He had opened his eyes that morning and told my mom that he loved her; he had been unresponsive since.

His breaths came farther and farther apart.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I whispered to him, holding his hand. “We’ll take care of Mom. You can see Jesus. Just walk away with him. Go be with Jesus.”

For a long time, he didn’t take another breath. Then he was with God.

My siblings who weren’t Christians cried and carried on, but I felt an overwhelming peace. I had the privilege of watching my dad walk into eternity, saved at the last hour by God’s grace and mercy, and it was beautiful.

 

***

 

When my dad died, I felt no unforgiveness toward him despite the inappropriate things he had done to me as a child. Next to Jack, my dad looked like a saint.

Jack was a different story. Long after he died, the mention of his name caused a well of hatred to swell up inside of me, almost choking me with its power. If Jack was in heaven, even after I became a Christian, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there with him. I could feel the weight of my unforgiveness toward Jack dragging on me and keeping me from truly becoming a new and free person. If I forgave Jack, however, I felt like it would minimize what he had done to my family and me.

Jack wasn’t the only problem. There was the kind elderly doctor I worked for who tried to assault me in the empty office. There was Jimmy, who had emotionally abused me for decades.

“Jack might be in heaven,” my pastor told me when I met with him to talk about my lingering unforgiveness. “That’s God’s grace. But you, Rita, are a daughter of God.”

As my pastor looked up, I saw tears on his face.

“On behalf of all men, I ask you to forgive us,” he said.

I didn’t forgive Jack that day, but for the first time I wanted to forgive him. Every day after, I reminded myself that God was the judge and that I had forgiven these men. Like the restoration of my soul, forgiveness was a process.

I learned that forgiveness was all about my own heart — it had nothing to do with the other person. We can’t afford to not forgive people, because it taints your life and fills you with anger and bitterness.

 

***

 

I gained a lot of weight during my divorce, expanding to 215 pounds and a size 16. One day, John and I got into a conversation about fitness and exercise. “I’ve put on weight to keep men away from me,” I blurted out, surprising myself with my words. That was partially true. I also could go out with friends for the first time in my life, and all of that eating at restaurants was showing.

God, I prayed. What’s going on? I don’t want to be unhealthy and hide behind something.

God began working on my heart, which until that day had been happy to be single while all of my single girlfriends longed to be married.

It’s okay to want to be married, God spoke to me. I put desires in the hearts of women to be married and taken care of.

Our small group decided that we would get healthy together, and we outlined a 12-week exercise regime and diet plan that we would hold each other accountable to. I planned to win.

John was already in great shape, but he wanted to help us. We’d meet at the high school and run up the bleachers and do other exercises. Our small group members, however, dropped out one by one until it was just John and me. We’d work out at his gym or sit by his pool and talk.

I eventually lost 80 pounds — and gained a husband.

 

***

 

John and I married in 2008. Having a godly husband is better than I ever imagined. Before I loved John, most importantly, I liked him.

We moved to Portland in 2010 for John’s job, leaving our grown children and a job I’d held for 17 years. While looking for a church, we found information about Resound Church online.

Here was a church starting up, and I had always been envious of people who had been part of a church since it began in their pastor’s living room. I thought it was the coolest thing, and here was my chance to get on board with a new church.

“We’re not making any commitments today,” John told me as we walked into a coffee shop to meet with Luke Reid, pastor of Resound Church.

As we sat around that little table in the corner of the coffee shop, we listened to Luke speak our language about church. John and I knew this church was right before we’d even spoken a word between us.

“We’re in,” John told Luke as we wrapped up our conversation. A huge smile spread across my face. So much for not making any decisions today.

 

***

 

On a recent Sunday, our Resound congregation lined up around an indoor pool at a hotel. Pastor Luke, wearing a black t-shirt, climbed into the water and baptized three people, including two from our small group.

A worship team member brought a guitar, and we sang and prayed around the hotel pool. I looked around at the children, the young parents, all people who we now call our own family, and I cried. We’re the oldest people in our church, and John and I have unofficially adopted everyone. They hang out at our house, and when I hear their voices and laughter, I thank God for the extravagant gifts of people and emotions he has put in my life.

I have truly awakened to a life that is messy, adventurous, fun and full of people.