Taken verbatim from James Robison’s book “Living Amazed: How Divine Encounters Can Change Your Life.” Pages 20-23.
All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked. Luke 4:22 NIV
It’s a miracle I was ever born. In fact, if the laws we have today were in effect back then, I’m 99.99 percent certain I would have been aborted.
My mother worked as a practical nurse, giving hospice care to home bound individuals. She had been married at a young age, but by the time she was forty, she was long divorced and working in the home of an elderly man in Houston. The man had an alcoholic son, about ten years younger than my mother, who one day forced himself on her and raped her.
My mother lacked the wherewithal to press charges, and when she became pregnant, as a result of the assault, she went to get an abortion, for all the reasons you would hear today- product of rape, no father or family in the picture, mother living in poverty and unable to care for the child. But when she went in to see the doctor, he refused to perform the abortion.
I don’t know why. Did he see possibilities and potential in that unborn child? Or did he simply believe all life was precious? Whatever the reason, and whatever you might think about it, he refused to perform the abortion.
When I was old enough to understand, my mother told me the circumstances of my birth and that the Lord had told her, “Have the baby; it will bring joy to the world.” (Interesting prediction, LO!)
As a result, my mother as convinced that I would be a good girl, and she was going to name me Joy. In the delivery room, when the doctor told her she had a son, she said, “No, I have a little girl and her name is Joy.”
You can call him anything you want,” the doctor replied but you’ve got a boy.”
I was born in the charity ward at the hospital, and my mother immediately placed a newspaper ad seeking foster care for me. This was 1943. Doyle and Katie Hale, a Baptist pastor and his wife from nearby Pasadena responded to the ad and took me in. They raised me for the first five years and were hoping to adopt me. In fact at one time, they had paperwork drawn up, but my mother would never sign it.
When I was five, my mother showed up one day and announced that she was moving from Houston up to Austin and that I was going with her. I clearly remember running away from her and crawling under the pastor’s bed. And I can remember my fingernails dragging across the hardwood floor as my mother dragged me out from under the bed by my foot. I remember that desperate clawing like it were yesterday. It was quite traumatic.
Mrs. Hale was crying so hard that she was convulsing. She had to go lie down. And Brother Hale was saying to my mother, “Please don’t do this, Myra. Don’t do this.”
But my mother insisted. “No, we’re going.”
Brother Hale tried to give her a handful of money to help her out, but she wouldn’t take it.
“We ‘ll be all right,” she said.
But the fact was, she had only enough money for us to get on a bus in Pasadena, on the southeast side of Houston, and ride to somewhere just on the other side of the city. That’s where we got off and hitchhiked the 165 miles or so to Austin. I clearly remember sitting on a little cardboard suitcase with all my belongings in it, and my mother had a bag. I still have that little beat-up suitcase in my office today.
When we got to Austin, we moved in with one of my aunts, and my mother began to look for work. When she found a job, she needed something for me to do during the day, so when school started, my aunt, who was a teacher, paid for me to go to a private school. I was only five, but I went into first grade and got a pretty good kick start on my education. All the way through, then, I was a year younger than everyone else in my class.
Though school always came easy for me – boringly easy – I was so shy and so afraid of everyone during my childhood that I would not even stand in front of a class to give a report. For the first ten years of school, I was so withdrawn that I wouldn’t mingle with the other kids. I carried a brown bag lunch every day, and I ate alone. When they picked teams in gym, I was the kid who was never chosen – because nobody knew me. My mother and I moved so often that I was always the new kid.
We lived in Austin for the next ten years, and over that time we moved so often – fifteen or sixteen times – that the words home and family were meaningless to me. Most of the places we lived did not face a street or have a street address, and we would get our mail at someone else’s house. I’ve said that our only address during those years was an alley, a creek, or a dump. If it had an address at all, it would be some number and a half. They were typically little one room houses with the living area and kitchen all together with a bathroom attached to it. We lived the longest in the back of a junk yard, with auto parts, wrecks, and other debris lying around. That was the yard I played in.
In junior high, I walked three miles each way to school every day because mother didn’t have a car and no school bus ran anywhere near our house. During the entire ten years I lived in Austin, we never once had a car. And nobody around us had a car.
To be continued tomorrow… Although none of us likely experienced the material scarcity above as children, we indeed may have suffered far more devastating trauma and abuse, either as a child or in a marriage, for which we’re still seeking healing, deliverance, and reconciliation. Keep reading. The next segment is titled “To the least of these.” I am one of them! Are you?
Continued Blessings as YOU GO FORTH, NOW encouraged and relishing in the fact you possess great hope>>>>> merlin