Jan’s testimony

I had a rough beginning—a lonely painful childhood in an alcoholic home, a date-rape resulting in pregnancy, a hasty marriage to my childhood sweetheart who insisted on rescuing me, a stillborn birth I vowed to forget. My middle years were full of anxiety over an unfaithful husband, losing myself and giving up my dreams in the quest to make him happy (convinced that Vietnam was the source of his restlessness). I hid my pain behind a smile of false hope never realizing how many masks I wore and the way they were destroying me. 

After fifteen years and two daughters, my husband left me for a “friend,” a woman who’d helped me start a 4-H group in our rural community. As a reporter/columnist for our small town newspaper, it was a scandal in town, especially since my 12-year old insisted on leaving with him. I lowered the blinds in my hilltop house and wanted to die. All those years wasted, I thought, and all my dreams ruined.

A week later, a car drove up my dirt driveway in a cloud of dust. The geese pecked at a stranger’s boots as she came to my door, with a casserole in one hand and a Bible in another. “I’m a fan of your column,” Joyce told me, and “Lately I’ve felt the need to pray for you. Now I know why.” After lunch, she turned to the Book of Joel and shared how God loved me and longed for me to “return to him,” and he would restore what the locusts had eaten.

As a country gal, she spoke in word pictures I could understand; bugs. That’s just how I felt, as if a swarm of locusts had gnawed and stripped away everything that I had and everything that I once was; there was nothing left. (The vine is dried up, the grain is destroyed, surely the joy of mankind is withered away. Joel 1) God had a promise for me in all this?

Even now, declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning…Return to the Lord your God for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love…Joel 2

I believed in God, but had never been a faithful church-goer, nor had the churches we’d been to ever shared the saving grace of Jesus Christ. My concept of God was closer to the Wizard of Oz, working behind a giant curtain to make the world run, bellowing out his commands, “Do this and you will have my approval.” I never understood he desired a personal relationship with me.

My prophet in blue jeans had come to share a promise in an obscure book in the Old Testament that would change my life. I am sending you new wine and oil, enough to satisfy you fully. Joel 2:19.

After pondering it and counting the cost, I asked Christ into my heart a week later. My husband saw the difference in me and the prayers drew him home, with a vow to do it “God’s way,” but a month later he found it too hard. He ignored his children from then on, sending them both into their prodigal years. Drugs, sexual promiscuity and running from their anger and pain for years.

My road to wholeness was far from easy and much longer than I expected (and I took a few slight detours) but I clung to the promise from Joel; that God would restore (make up for the years as it says in the NIV) and his restoration would be complete. It took some time and struggles for me to see that it didn’t mean prosperity or a new mate to make up for what I’d lost, but a union with him that would bring healing and forgiveness.

He would gently peel off the layers of deception and protection to bring me back to my original condition—the definition of restoration—and I would become the woman he created me to be. And I would find joy and wisdom and strength, beyond what I could imagine. Everything that happened to me (that I considered waste) he would use for my good and his glory. God is the ultimate recycler.

My mess would become my ministry. The source of my greatest shame and pain would become the seed to be scattered in the lives of other women. God has taken my unique passions and gifts and fashioned them for his use. I dreamed of being on stage as an actress; now I’m on stage wearing funny hats and using props to illustrate God’s truths to groups at retreats and conferences.

Since pigtails I dreamed of writing books, and in 2002 that dream came true, with a book published by Broadman & Holman filled with stories of other locust survivors to give hurting women hope in a God who restores, not in the way we might plan, but in a way that meets our deepest needs. My next two books come out in 2005. The Unvarnished Woman (Kregel) and Unshakable; the Steadfast Heart of Obedience (Broadman & Holman)

Twelve years after the locusts, I married Carl—whose wife left him under similar circumstances—and together we serve Christ at a thriving church in Auburn, California. My daughters are married with families and have their own locust and restoration testimonies.  

A rough beginning—yes—but like Job, God is blessing the second half of my life more than the first (42:12). And it’s a spiritual harvest that can never be destroyed.