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I lived a normal life, which isn’t normal
In the middle of everything I just lived a regular life. I married at the age of 24, and divorced nearly 14 years later, which is unfortunately normal. Neither of us have remarried, and we are still friends today.
My childhood dreams.
As a child there were two things I wanted to be when I grew up. A wife and mother with lots of babies, at least 4 or 5. But there were no children. Only a barren woman who longs for children will know the wrestling and turmoil of not fulfilling that dream. It is one of the things with which I have had to deal, like many other women.
From Arkansas to Mississippi.
Places I have lived, in the USA.
Arizona:
Bisbee
Sierra Vista
TucsonArkansas:
Ash Flat
Cherokee VillageCalifornia:
San DiegoFlorida:
Winter ParkIllinois:
Belleville
SpringfieldMaryland:
Baltimore
FinksburgMississippi:
Biloxi
Gautier
Hattiesburg
Ocean SpringsNorth Carolina:
Gastonia
Goldsboro
Winston-SalemTexas:
San AntonioVirginia:
Newport NewsWyoming:
CheyennePlaces I have lived overseas.
Germersheim, Germany
Benghazi, Libya
Republic of Panama
After divorcing I went to work and bought a home in Ash Flat, Arkansas. I served as Vice-President of an international Christian woman’s organization. For my church I prepared the weekly bulletin and wrote articles for it.
I planted trees in my yard and dug up rocks and boulders to make flower beds, and had calluses on my hands to show for it. I sold my home and moved to Mississippi. Got another job and stayed there for more than eight years and left only because my job went overseas. I rented a house, bought a mobile home, sold the mobile home, bought a house, sold the house, moved to another town and back again. Normal.
My coming to understand the Hand of God.
In the middle of some of the happenings in the above paragraph while I lived in Arkansas I was put on Supplemental Security Income (SSI) because I was told I would not be able to work much longer because of my breathing. I had 13% functional capacity.
A scoliosis surgeon in Texas, whom a friend knew, wanted to dismantle my body in order to release my chest cavity so I could breathe, and for free. He could not because the consensus of many surgeons was that surgery would kill me because of my breathing, now at 11% functional capacity. It was from these doctors and nurses that I discovered that the normal things I lived in the above paragraph, for me, were NOT normal.
My friend who worked with this doctor told me the doctor would look at my breathing function tests, remembering the calluses on my hands and shake his head in wonder. The technician had to trick the machine and lay me half off the table to get the picture of my rib cage because of it’s deformity. The doctor looked at the CT scan of my rib cage and could not understand why I had no pain.
While many folks, in the kind of churches I attended, would look at me and see unbelief because I was not healed, these doctors and nurses looked at me and saw the hand of God.
I learned from this doctor’s nurse that people with 77o curves in their spines simply do not function in society not only because of the physical pain, but because of the emotional trauma that accompanies it. But yet I lived a normal life and did function in society. It blew them away.
This knowledge was liberating because I then understood what it is my Father God had done for me when I ran to Him at the age of 16 when I realized I was trapped in my body with no way to escape.