Out of Darkness into the Light

Chapter 2

Out of Darkness, into the Light

I started going to a church there in Etna Green, and when I was twelve years old, I went up front and got baptized in water—but there wasn’t any change in my life. I didn’t know that when you became a Christian, your life was supposed to become different. When I turned seventeen years old, I got pregnant out of wedlock. My parents were devastated, needless to say, and I was too. I thought my boyfriend wasn’t going to marry me, so one night after we had been out, I came home and got my mother’s sleeping pills. I made up my mind that I was going to take every pill that was in the bottle. I went to bed that night thinking I was going to get out of all my problems. The next morning my mom and dad found the empty pill bottle, and they found me and couldn’t get me to wake up. They called the doctor, and he told them to pour coffee down my throat. They then took me over to my boyfriend’s house; I didn’t know anything about it because I was unconscious. His parents told them that he would marry me. The doctor said that if I would have taken two more pills, it would have killed me. Remember, I took all that were in the bottle. God had mercy on me and my baby. We were married on my husband’s seventeenth birthday.

The following June, my baby was born—a healthy baby boy. Thank God he was all right. Since my husband, Luther, was so young, it was hard for him to get a job, so we ended up on a farm in Rochester. He worked for a man who had a lot of farms. They furnished an old house for us to live in. We didn’t make much money, but we made it somehow. During that time we had another child—another boy—and then we had a girl. Neither one of us were Christians. My husband’s mother and father were Christians, and they started talking to me about the Bible. Because I had been baptized, I thought I was a Christian. At first I didn’t like it because I thought they were saying I wasn’t a Christian. But after a while, I started to read the Bible and saw that what they were telling me was true—I wasn’t a Christian. I realized that if I died I would go to hell, and that made me feel miserable. Later on, my husband started having dreams where a hearse would back up to our door and start unloading caskets, small ones and larger ones. He was so tortured by these dreams that he didn’t want to go to bed. One night he dreamed he had until June 11 to accept Jesus as his Savior.

In the dream he kept hearing a voice saying, “You better not put it off. You better not put it off.”

During this time, he was out in the field one day and a cow went berserk. It started chasing him, so he ran and jumped into the pickup truck. The cow ran into the pickup and smashed the door in. He thought this was it and that his time had come. He was so stubborn, but he went and got life insurance for the kids and me. But God has a way of working. One day toward the end of May, he told me that he would like to go to the church where he was raised and see some of the people he knew. So we went, and the Spirit of God moved him—he ran to the altar and received Jesus into his heart. I received Christ right after that. God changed our lives—we were born again. He told me afterward that he had no intention of getting saved—he just wanted to see some of the people he knew. But God had different plans. Praise the Lord.

We were then both baptized in water and received the infilling of the Holy Spirit. We couldn’t wait to get to church, and when he would come home from work and after he ate his evening meal, he would get his Bible out and read and study the word. He was so hungry for God, and little did we know what God had in store for us.