True Story #13

Posted 09.16.2008

I was born in Halifax, NS and came to the Boston area at about 10. My father left after bringing us here and left my mother to raise nine children alone. Generally we were happy children. Problems arose later and drinking became my major problem. We all went to church into our early teens.

I met the girl I fell in love with at 25 right after the Army. She was a friend of my sister. We lived together for three years when she became pregnant. After she told me she was pregnant, I asked her to marry me but she wanted to think about abortion. A few weeks later she came home and told me she had an abortion. We split up and tried to get back together about a year later but it didn't work. My sister ran into her a few years later and said she was in tough shape from drugs and abuse. My reaction was to give up on life and stay drunk. Although I believed in God, I felt by being a participant in creating a life that was destroyed by abortion, I had commited an unforgivable sin and was doomed. Within a couple of years I was so depressed that I spent eleven months in a V.A. psych ward as a vegetable. Two or three times over the next ten years I was returned to the V.A. for at least three months at a time. The list of symptoms and behaviors I have covered many times over. The things I have done over those years should have killed me more than once, and even though condemned in my mind, I could feel God's hand in those situations. From 28 into my mid 40's it was one long nightmare. I never dated anyone who could become pregnant after the abortion. In my mid 40's, I had a forty-five minute drive to work and God gave me Elisabeth Elliot to listen to on the radio. She's a great christian lady. I started reading the Bible again from front cover to back. New Life Clinics were advertised on her show and I started to see one of their counselors. He suggested I find a church. He and his wife even went to a few with me. With a lot of prayer, counseling and a hammer and chisel to chip away, the lie was expose and freedom to hope and believe again was mine. My church has been my family's church since its begining one hundred years ago and for the past nine my church home. And I now sing blessed asssurance Jesus is mine. Amen.

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