Part One
by Shirley B.
This testimony has been a long time coming for me and a very long journey. When I prayed and asked the Lord to show me how to begin, He impressed on me to start at the beginning, just like He did and tell it all. I can't put my story under one heading. Yes, there was abuse, both physical and emotional . Yes, there were three divorces I went through in the families I lived in. I suppose being dysfunctional would cover most of it, but not all. My father was from Texas, the youngest of 13 children, mostly men, who joined the Air Force in the 1940's and went off to war, leaving him to care for my sick grandmother. My grandmother shortly died and he quickly decided to enlist also. One of his older brothers had met someone in Mississippi on leave and had married her. This brother introduced my father to my mother, who lived in Mississippi and they married. Too quickly. This set off a real Hatfields and McCoys saga in our family . My father's family considered my mother to be white trash , from a poor family who lived in poverty in the backwoods of Mississippi, who used her looks to trap our father into marriage.
I was three, almost four years old, the time we were living in Freeport, Texas. I had a sister who was two years older than I was and I can't tell this story without including her in it. We were in it all together, her and I. At that time, we lived on the upper floor of a two story apartment. I can remember that the outside staircase was very steep.
On this particular day, my mother was washing clothes and in those days, they would boil starch and dip the shirts in them before hanging them. She had filled a huge galvanized tub with the last of the boiling starch and left it at the very bottom of the staircase. I came out the balcony door to the first step and down I went. Down two flights of stairs into that tub of scalding starch.
My next conscious memory was waking up in the hospital. I could see my reflection in the stainless steel and mirror like equipment around my bed, and people gathered about me. I was strapped up and wrapped like a mummy. I could only see openings for my eyes and mouth and a small space where my nose was.
My uncle had brought a basket of fruit that he was holding. I remember it had a lot of oranges, my favorite, and my last thought was, " How am I going to eat those oranges?"
This was the last thought I ever remembered about this accident. God was so merciful to me in that I never have remembered the pain and suffering of the next year of my life. I had many broken bones and burns and scars. Oh, I was aware that I had this accident, but I never remembered the actual fall until almost 25 years later.
This was the beginning of the end for an already troubled marriage. I was to learn later , from my mother's sister, that on that day, my mother could only stand there and scream til my father came running from the other side of the house to see what had happened. He was the one who reached down into that scalding tub of starch to pull me out. I was burning and I was drowning and I was broken but my mother couldn't force herself to reach in for me.
No one could understand it. It was a lot to forgive and I'm sure the recovery period over the next year didn't help matters . I had to be treated very carefully. Wrapped and unwrapped and cleaned ,careful of the burns and the broken collarbone and others things. It's like looking back at something that happened to someone else.
I recovered. I still have some scars, but little by little, as I grew, they have become smaller and faded. However, the beginning of a great trial for my sister and I had just begun, and our mother began to show a side of herself that we would not have believed was possible for a mother. If there had been forgiveness and understanding on the part of both my father and mother, maybe a lot of pain and suffering would have been avoided.
God tells us to put up with each other, and forgive each other . Colossians 3:13.
God is always faithful to His Word, and forgiveness is something He commands us to do. I believe in my heart, that if there had been this forgiveness between my mother and father, God would have helped them make things right .
Jeremiah 29:11 tells me that God knows the plans that He has for me, plans for good and not for evil. However, there was no forgiveness between my parents for this incident and more that was to come, and there was no wisdom concerning the things of God. Twenty five years later, when I saw my mother's sister again, she was shocked to see that I had no visible scars. God healed me . Where others thought there would be ugly scars, He left none. Isn't that just like God, to make the wisdom of man seem foolish? I wish that the story ended here, but it didn't and the page of life turned.
To be continued................
Isaiah 53 : 5
He was wounded for our rebellious acts,
He was crushed for our sins,
He was punished so that we could have peace,
and we received healing from his wounds.
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