Penny was feeling aggravated.
Life had not been easy for her.
She was now in her mid-30s, and when she looked back on her life, there did not seem to be much there. Nothing
except bad things.
"I'm married," she thought, "But my husband doesn't respect me. He talks nasty about me and to me and yells at me
and calls me names every chance he gets."
Now she pondered, her husband is starting to yell at and insult and degrade her daughters too.
Penny could feel the flush flowing through her. "I can't take this anymore," she shouted out loud. It startled her to
hear the anguish in her own voice.
She looked around the house, seeking a cure for her problem. Sleeping pills, razor blades, maybe the shotgun,
anything to end the pain that was growing larger every day inside her. Kill the person, kill the pain.
Penny wanted to die.
Her life story did not paint a pretty picture.
She had been sexually assaulted three times, the first time when she only was five years old. They all picked on her
in school. They teased and abused her so much that she dropped out in ninth grade.
Then came Ken. He was the only one that treated her good. He acted like he was a good friend.
He parlayed that friendship into sex. The next thing she knew, Penny was pregnant at
18.
Penny lost that first child, a son, but still married Ken a year later.
Perhaps it was the loss of his son that set him off, but Ken, who once was her friend and confidant, now as a
husband became abusive. Mainly verbal, yelling about everything she did, but one time a few years back the verbal
almost became physical but he stopped just short of hittingt her.
That triggered one suicide attempt.
"The only thing that kept me from taking my life was God showed me the gift he had given my in my two
daughters," Penny thought.
They never had a son, after the one they lost, but they had been gifted with two beautiful daughters. For awhile that
had settled the household situation but now, it seemed like it was ready to explode all over again.
Last night, it was all of the normal verbal abuse but with the addition of Ken calling her a bad mother and talking
nasty about her daughters too.
Penny felt totally deflated. Like all the fire inside her had been extinguished.
Her job as a cashier was not going to make her feel better.
She really missed her old job, as a school aide, the sound of children's voices always cheered her up.
Now, all she wanted to do was kill herself.
"God, why have you allowed me to be treated like this for three quarters of my life," Penny asked.
She could not find an answer to her question. God did seem to want to share, if He had one. She was alone at home,
feeling defeated. All she wanted to do was find the right thing with which to kill herself.
She walked past the computer during her search for that right thing. It glowed with a series of names, indicating
who was online at that moment. One of the names was that of a minister she had met.
How did she meet him?
Out of curiosity.
One day she saw he was online so she read his profile. She saw that he said he was a minister in his profile
and she sent a note to see if he "really" was a minister. Most things are not real on the internet, she had thought, he
returned her note and said he really was a minister.
"I am still not sure if he is or if he isn't," Penny thought, as she sat down at the keyboard. "But in the case he really
is, maybe he can tell me why God is treating me like this."
On the other end of the computer connection:
It past time for the A.M.E. Today Newsletter to be completed. Just a few more paragraphs and it would be done.
Then the flashing began in the corner of the screen. The buddy box indicated a page.
Penny was the pager. The message, "I want to kill myself right now, I can't take it any longer."
My heart dropped so far, and so fast, it raced right past my feet.
Suicides scare me. I only knew Penny as a name on the screen. Not even a name I really knew. If I recalled
properly, someone who sent a note recently asking if I was really a minister. Now she says she is going to kill herself.
A lot of old, bad memories rose to the surface.
A decade-and-a-half ago, I received a phone call from an acquaintance. I did not know him that well.
I am not sure of the politically correct way to describe him. He was just under four feet tall. His head was out of
proportion to his body. His legs were bowed. Back in the day, he would have been described as a dwarf.
His name was Bobby. We had been in Boy Scouts together as kids. The only thing that made him memorable then
was his size and the fact he was the most athletic person I had met at the time. He could do one-armed pushups better
than most people could do with two arms.
He went on to be an actor. His big movie was "Under the Rainbow," a behind the scenes look at what happened on
the set during the filming of the "Wizard of Oz." He was type cast. Yep as one of the Little People.
He had several movie roles in Hollywood. By then I had become the Entertainment Editor at the paper where I
worked. I recognized his name on a press release and subsequently wrote several articles, including one lengthy
profile, about him.
When I heard his voice on the phone that night, it took me by surprise. Bobby and I were friendly, but we were not
really friends. We did not hang out or anything. I thought maybe he was going to ask for another shot in the paper.
Instead, Bobby started thanking me for all my help throughout his career. Thanked me for reaching out to him when
others wouldn't.
Bobby said he was through with Hollywood and the fakes that were out there and he said he was
back home now and would be remaining in what was our mutual hometown to live.
"We will get to hang out more now," Bobby said.
His voice said hang out, my gut said Bobby was checking out.
He hung up as quickly as he called. I could not shake the feeling that Bobby was going to kill himself.
I called him back. No one answered the phone. I left a message on the machine. No return call.
I told my wife how that call troubled me. I told her Bobby never said anything
about ending his life but my spirit just said that was what he was planning to do.
I had not gone into the ministry yet. I was not even as close to the Lord as I should have been as lay person. If I
had been able to get back to Bobby, I am not sure what I would have said.
The next day came and went and no calls from Bobby. As I went to bed the next night, I told my wife, it was
probably just me and I could not figure out why I had such a bad feeling about that phone call. But since a day had
passed uneventfully, I just chalked it off as intuition gone astray.
The next morning I was awakened with screams. It was my wife's voice. "He's dead, he's dead."
And there on the front page of the paper, the paper that I wrote for, was the story, "Local Hollywood actor found
dead".
They had found Bobby out in the woods, behind his house, hanging from a tree. He hung there unnoticed for
a full day. Because of his size, people who from a distance, saw his body suspended from the tree thought it was a
kid's prank. They thought it was a stuffed figure the local kids had hung there to scare people.
That was no stuffed figure. It was Bobby. Police, whom I had to talk to in a couple of lengthy interviews, concluded
that after he talked to me, he walked right out the back door, into the woods and took his life.
I could not figure why he had picked me for that final conversation. He hurt me. He left the burden of his death on
my shoulders. He was not there for me to ask why.
Gallons of tears were shed. Shed for someone I did not know
well. Someone who had branded my soul with the hot iron of his depression.
It was burden I could not shake for years. Even now I can still feel some of the echoes of that pain. I had felt his
pain, I instinctively knew what he was going to do, and yet, I could not stop it. It was a combination of frustration and
deep engrained sorrow that lingered with me..
This all came back to the surface when the note appeared on my screen that Penny was going to take her life.
This time I had the person still on the line. This time I had no second thoughts about what to say.
I began by reassuring her of God's love and worked my way through to the empowerment of the Holy Spirit.
I did not take the burden on myself. All of you who were reading Tuesday, I called everybody in on this one. As I
finished the newsletter and was in the midst of convincing Penny to stay alive, I sent out an SOS for prayer from all
those who were about to receive the newsletter.
I could feel a wave of power flowing through me as the newsletter left my computer and started making its way into
your homes, offices and more importantly your hearts.
Twenty minutes after the newsletter was broadcasted, I was shouting on this end of the keyboard. My fingers were
doing the shouting. They sounded like machine gun fire as they raced across the letters. A staccato rhythm,
punctuated with pounding when the Lord gave me something especially inspiring to convey to Penny. It was a flood
of notes, sending words of hope, inspiration and God's love to Penny on the other side.
First her soul was touched, "I am crying so hard right now," Penny said.
Then she was convicted, "I know this is not what God wants me to do. I just did not have any more hope, oh please
God help me, I can't take it any longer."
Then she was comforted, " I just felt the power of the Lord cover me like a warm blanket. I can feel Him back in my
life. I thought I had nothing to live for, God is telling me I have everything to live for."
It was not a simple one, two, three procedure as listed above. The process was long, trying, tentative and intense.
At its conclusion, Penny no longer was talking about killing herself and I was drained.
I asked her to tell her husband to his face that she forgave him and that God forgives him. Also to pray God first
would order her life and pray that God too would touch her husband and make him what God wanted him to be.
"I can't do that, he will just yell at me more. He might hit me. I'm still afraid but I feel more powerful right now than
I have felt since I was little," Penny said. " I can feel the presence of the Lord in my life. I feel something in side of me
that I thought I had lost forever."
The blood of the Lamb had covered her.
I left the computer that day feeling totally spent, but very much in the hands of the Lord. I felt used but not abused.
Tired but very much uplifted. The old memories of Bobby for some reason did not feel so painful. The current
memories of Penny ... the Lord touched me and let me know she would be alright.
Yesterday, I heard back from Penny. She still was glowing in the Lord.
When her husband came home that night. She confronted him with the Good News of the Lord. She did not get hit.
Ken listened attentively to her.
"I don't know how I did it but I went right up to him and said God forgives you and so do I," Penny said. " I felt so
strong in the Lord!"
She said she cringed for a minute but instead of getting a back hand, she got a back on track from Ken. "Please
forgive me for what I did. I will try to do better, I don't ever want to hurt you like that again."
"I then went to read the Psalm you told me to hold on to as an anchor, the 27th Psalm. ," Penny continued. "Ken
came over adjusted the light so I could see better, and put his hand on my shoulder in a comforting way. He also
brought me a cup of tea. He was so good to me."
"I thank you for reminding me that God still loved me. I thank you for bringing God back into my life," Penny
wrote. "I thank God for just having someone there to talk to when I was in need."
I reminded her that God never left her life and as long as she turned to him, bad times may come and go, but she
would be anchored through the storm. Also told her not to worry about thanking the messenger, thank Him from
whom all true messages flow.
I had to leave the exchange of notes with Penny. I had an appointment to keep, but I turned off the computer with a
sigh of relief.
I knew God was good. He reaffirmed his goodness to me through this scary situation. He had restored Penny's
faith and had bolstered mine with one intervention.
Bobby's death will remain with me the rest of my life. A relative stranger I could not save.
This week, God put me
back in a similar situation. I personally could not save Penny, but God showed me, that through His word and His
empowerment, He can, through those people He has called, save lost souls, even over long distances. Distances made
so much shorter by computer. He burned into Penny's heart that life is for Him to give and not for her to take. Life is
not something we should conclude with our own hands.
God gave both Penny and me a second chance. I now can put Bobby to rest and Penny is at peace in the
Lord..
