Standing in the Gap

Author’s Introduction

“Standing In The Gap” is the story of the traumatic years between 1969 and 1972 when cancer invaded our family, our best friend was brutally murdered, a frenzied teenager tried to kill our daughter, Val, and we discovered a psychopath stalking our younger daughter, Robin.

How could a loving God allow all these bad things to happen?

It wasn’t the first time I’d asked this question for my faith in God was tarnished by growing up during the Great Depression and World War II in a single parent family dependent on grandparents and aunts and uncles for support. But worst of all, my understanding of God, the Father, was damaged by a biological father, who abandoned my mother before I was born. I was told he left because he didn’t want a child. And he was a pastor. Not much of a recommendation for a Father/God, unless there was more to the story.

As I observed my husband’s deep commitment to our children during these crisis years, I couldn’t imagine what was so wrong with me that my father could have left me. For the first time in my life, I felt the urge to find my father and confront him with my pain. In a figurative sense, I began to storm the gates of heaven demanding answers. And the answers came in a multitude of ways – through the pages of scripture that came alive as never before and a veritable parade of people who came into my life claiming God had sent them. The ones who demonstrated unselfish love often talked about God’s love flowing through them. I began to hear frequent references to John 15, verses 4 and 5, Bible verses in which Jesus talks to His followers about being grafted into the vine that is His life. Those who enter into this new kind of relationship with God experience His love and power flowing through them to others.

“Abide in Me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me.

“I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing.” (NAS)

How is this possible? What is this fruit? Why should I want this kind of relationship?

With a sincere desire to find God’s answer to these questions, I committed myself to spend time with God through regular Bible reading and prayer. Almost immediately, God brought to my mind, my forgotten first prayer to receive Jesus as Savior. The events flowed through my mind as though I were reliving them. I was five years old and I was looking down into the dirty, swollen waters of the Ohio River flowing past our friend’s home in McKees Rocks, a Pittsburgh community along the river’s edge. I could scarcely lift my booted feet from the grasping mud. A piece of a houseboat rushed past with a small dog pathetically clinging to the roof. Not far from where I stood, I saw a rocking chair mired in the muddy bank at a grotesque angle. For a moment, I saw that rocker as my grandmother’s rocker and felt the flood threatening all I loved and trusted.

Then, I was transported to the following Sunday morning when a woman evangelist came to our church. She told the story of a little girl visiting friends who lived along the bank of a river. As evening approached and she prepared to walk home, the friends offered her a lantern to guide her along the narrow path by the river’s edge. It was raining. They explained how slippery the mud would be. They didn’t want her to slip and fall into the water. The little girl refused to take the light. She said she knew the path well. Hadn’t she walked that way many times without the light? When the child didn’t arrive at her home that evening, her parents went to look for her. (You need to know that in 1936 very few people had telephones.) The only trace they found was a deep gouge in the muddy bank where she had apparently slipped into the river.

In this recalled vision of myself as a child, I felt the reality of the story the evangelist told. I had stood on the bank of that river. The speaker compared the light the girl refused to the Lord Jesus Christ. The river was our life without Him. I sat huddled into the corner of the front pew on the center aisle, close enough to the speaker that I could have reached out and touched her. My mother was with me, but I didn’t tell her about the decision I made that morning:

“I will not be lost in that raging river. I will take Jesus as my light.”

Some people receive Jesus as Savior and Lord when they say the “Sinner’s Prayer.” For me, it was a two-step process. He was my Savior for many years before I yielded to His desire for me to give Him His rightful place as Lord. Although His plan is unique and different for every individual, God is totally consistent and I believe He sets out similar guideposts along the way for those who want to find His direction for their lives.

If you are reading this book, you may be asking how you can “abide in the vine” and if your background, like mine, includes the absence of a father in your early life, you will read how the Lord Himself stood in the gap when my father and other people failed me. He applied Psalm 68:5 to my life – “A father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows is God in His holy habitation” (NAS)

I pray that this memoir will be a guidepost along your way to a closer walk with God. who is waiting to give you the fruits of His Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and faithfulness.

Gladys Blews Wilson

Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania

June 2011