Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing (22 page)

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Authors: Stormie Omartian

BOOK: Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing
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I said, “Pastor Jack, I don’t understand. I know God can heal me. I know I was supposed to have this baby. But the pain and nausea never let up, and I feel too weak to pray anymore.”
There was love, compassion, and concern in his voice as he labored in prayer for me yet another time.
Sunday morning I was discharged from the hospital. The pain and nausea were worse than ever, and I was discouraged, to say the least. It was decided that if there was no change by the following Tuesday, taking the baby was the next step. There was nothing more that could be done, and time was running out.
At home in my own bed, little Christopher came into my room. He didn’t run in happy to see me like he had always done before. He came in cautiously and kept his distance. I had not been a mother to him for four months, and now we were strangers. I couldn’t hold him, read to him, or play games with him. Emotionally he was leaving me behind. He politely said hello, then ran out of the room to continue his life. It broke my heart.
Bob and Sally, two very close friends, came to our house with their children to temporarily relieve Michael from the burden of this whole ordeal. They made the meals for the day and kept Michael and Christopher company. There was nothing they could do for me, so they left me alone. I was grateful.
At six that evening I almost jolted in bed. I sat up and said to myself, “What just happened?” It took a moment to realize that I suddenly felt no pain or nausea.
I sat in bed for a few minutes to see when it would return. When nothing changed, I got up slowly and walked into the bathroom adjacent to our bedroom. I looked in the mirror at my thin face and hollow eyes, then carefully walked back and sat on the bed for a moment. Still feeling no nausea or pain, I got up and walked into the den, where my husband was alone, watching TV. He nearly fell off the couch as he sat up quickly and said, “What’s the matter? What are you doing up?”
“I don’t know,” I said in disbelief. “I suddenly feel different. The pain is gone, and the nausea too. It may come back any minute,” I added, exhibiting great faith. After months of agony, I was afraid to hope that this feeling could last.
Michael looked at me in amazement and whispered quietly, “Praise God!”
I walked slowly out of the den and down the long hall into the kitchen, where Sally was cleaning up the dinner dishes. I hadn’t eaten much of anything for months, and even with intravenous feeding I felt very weak.
She turned and said in a startled voice, “What are you doing out here?”
“I don’t know what’s happened, Sally. I suddenly feel better.”
“Well, Hallelujah!” she lifted her voice. “Do you want something to eat just to prove that what you’re saying is true?”
“Yes, quick, before it comes back again,” I replied.
She gave me a bowl of sliced pears and some plain dry toast without butter. It tasted like the most wonderful gourmet meal. I ate it down, loving every morsel and thanking God for my reprieve. Even if it all came back up, to be able to chew something and swallow it was heaven.
We waited and waited, but the nausea and pain didn’t come back. I went to bed and slept through the night. The next morning I received many phone calls telling me how fervently the church had prayed for my healing the night before in the Sunday evening service. Pastor Jack had not mentioned to me that he was going to have the congregation pray.
“Yes, I
am
feeling better.” I told each person who called. I didn’t tell anyone how
much
better, since I was still afraid it would all come back and I didn’t want them to stop praying.
I waited until six o‘clock Tuesday night—a full 48 hours—to call Pastor Jack at home and tell him what had happened.
I described to him in detail the events surrounding Sunday evening.
“Praise God, you’ve been healed!” he said exuberantly.
“I have?” I replied. “Do you really think so?”
“Stormie,” he sighed patiently, “I
know
so.”
“You mean it won’t come back?”
“No, you’ve been healed. Did you know we were praying for you on Sunday?”
“No, I didn’t know anything about it until Monday.”
Obviously it was not my faith or prayers, but the faith and prayers of thousands of other people around the country, and specifically those in The Church On The Way, that healed me and saved my baby. I was filled with gratitude for the love and concern of my brothers and sisters in Jesus. God had given me a caring family like I had never dreamed possible. He had promised to see me through, and He did.
Two weeks away from my due date, I flew to New York to be with my husband at the Grammy Awards ceremony, where he won three Grammys for producing an album called “Christopher Cross.” Christopher was the first artist to win the four top awards—Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist—all in one evening. It was an exciting time, and I thanked God that He made it possible for me to be a part of a big night for my husband.
Soon after I returned home, the pretty little dark-haired girl with the chestnut-brown eyes and long, dark eyelashes that I saw in my dream was born. We named her Amanda Katherine. Right away I could see that this time everything was different. I had no more urges to batter or beat. No times of losing control. No rage, no anger, no inkling of the former problem.
I had known since the first incident with Christopher that I did not have in myself what I needed to be a good parent. I would always have to depend totally on God to help me raise my children. Because I couldn’t do it without Him, I was forced down on my knees all the more to seek God’s guidance and pray to be more like Him in nature.
As soon as I was recovered enough, I concentrated on making up for lost time with little Christopher. Every afternoon when Amanda was sleeping I took him someplace special—just the two of us. Although extremely proud of his little sister, it made him feel important and grown-up to kiss her goodbye and inform her that she was too little to go where we were going. In our three hours together, Christopher and I got acquainted again. We walked and we talked. We went to the park, to a children’s movie, miniature golfing, to the toy store. This was
our
time, and within two weeks all that was damaged during those months of my infirmity was repaired. “Thank You, God, for giving me Christopher and Amanda,” I said at least ten times every day, and I meant it with every fiber of my being.
With the cost of obedience taken care of, the rewards of that obedience were great. From the moment of Amanda’s birth, the healing began. Just like an open wound heals slowly day by day, I felt a wound in my emotions, in my heart somewhere, begin to heal. Every day with Amanda brought more wholeness and more fulfillment.
At 42 years of age I went to my very first mother-daughter tea, presented at Amanda’s preschool for Mother’s Day. It was thrilling beyond description. I found myself feeling sorry for the two little children whose mothers didn’t come. Always before that had been me; I never had a mother who came. Now I was getting to go as the mommy.
Amanda’s pretty brown eyes sparkled and danced as she got up with her friends to sing the songs and recite the poem they had rehearsed for their mothers. Every few seconds she would steal a glance in my direction to see if I was watching her. I was.
God had kept His promise to restore my lost mother-daughter relationship, and He chose the perfect way to do it. The cost of obedience is great, but the rewards, I discovered, are far greater.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FINAL FORGIVENESS
“Do you ever get rid of the pain?” a young woman asked me after one of my speaking engagements.
It was a question I heard frequently from people who had been abused as children. I knew immediately the pain she was referring to.
“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “You get healing. You receive freedom beyond what you thought possible, but I don’t know if you ever get rid of the pain.”
The pain of an abused child stems from a foundation of rejection. A constant “pain in the gut” becomes a way of life, and many people, like me, accept it as part of daily living. It’s with you everywhere you go. Before I met Jesus, I silenced my pain with drugs, alcohol, work, or “love” relationships—methods which, in the long run, only served to make the pain worse.
Even in the happiest moments, the pain was always there waiting for the mere suggestion of rejection to bring it rushing in, reaffirming all the negative feelings I had ever had about myself. In times of weakness, suicide seemed to be the only solution. When I was 14, I wanted to die just to stop the pain. I used to beg God for a frontal lobotomy so I wouldn’t have to feel anymore. After establishing my relationship with God through Jesus, I was able to take my pain to God in prayer on a continuing basis. It certainly had gotten better and more controllable, but it was still there.
Yes, I understood the young woman’s question completely.
After Amanda was born, I was flooded with requests to speak about the restorative power of God. Amanda’s birth had nothing to do with their asking me, but I believe this sudden opening up of ministry was because of my obedience. Again, it was one of the rewards. It was also an example of God using the rubble of my past to help others. Whenever I spoke, there were countless people suffering from the same wounds and emotional scars I once had. They felt like they were dying inside and needed to know there could be life before death for them.
Another part of my ministry that sprang forth was in the area of physical fitness. I had seriously studied exercise and nutrition for 15 years and had been teaching exercise and nutrition classes for some time. The classes became so popular that people were calling from all over the country asking me to sell my exercise tapes and class notes. This led to two “Exercise for Life” albums and a book called “Greater Health God’s Way” for Sparrow Press.
I was thoroughly enjoying my ministry, my family, my church, my God, and my life in general, but there was still a subtle unrest in me. I’ve frequently been described as high-strung and fast-moving, the type of personality that will always be active. That part of me is God-ordained, but this was something more; it was an unrest deep in my soul. And I might well have lived out the rest of my life thinking, “Well, that’s just me,” had it not been for Sara Anne noticing this in me.
“There is an unrest in your spirit, Stormie,” she said. “I see it surface occasionally. Let’s both ask God to reveal what’s causing it. I know He wants you to be free from yet another thing.”
I was amazed. I thought I
was
free! At least that’s what I had been telling everyone in my concerts. Here I was, 42 years old. I’d had deliverance and teaching for 13 years, and now I was teaching others about the freedom they could enjoy. Was I yet to need more?
“God, reveal to me what I need to be free from. What causes this unrest?” I prayed.
I got no answer.
Nearly a week later, Sara Anne called early one morning to tell me of a dream she had in which she believed God revealed to her my problem. “You have unconfessed hatred and unforgiveness toward your father,” she explained.
“What?” I exclaimed with indignation. “No way, Sara Anne. This time you’re wrong.”
“Honestly, Stormie, I would not have thought of that myself. I believe the dream I had was definitely from God.”
I was silent.
“Think about it,” she continued. “See what God says to you.”
“You don’t understand, Sara Anne. My dad is sweet and nice. He has never done anything bad to me. He’s never even laid a hand on me except for a couple of spankings which I deserved. He’s a kind person. How could I hate him? Why do I need to forgive him?”
“See what God has to say about it,” she gently repeated.
I hung up the phone, sat for a moment, and prayed, “God, what is she talking about? This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”
Then suddenly, like a flash of steel penetrating my heart, I nearly doubled over with pain. I saw myself in the closet again crying silently, “Why doesn’t Dad ever open the door and let me out?” The thought of it was so painful that I couldn’t allow myself to see it anymore.
At church that night I told Sara Anne, “You were right. I can’t talk about it right now, but I feel I’m supposed to fast for three days starting the Wednesday before Good Friday. Could you pray with me for deliverance from this after the Good Friday services?”
She and her husband agreed that this was the correct thing to do and that they and Michael should fast along with me.
“Ask God to reveal more and more to you over the next few weeks,” she counseled.
In the car driving home I prayed, “God, show me everything I need to be free of concerning my dad.”
I wasn’t on the freeway more than three minutes when the pain penetrated to the center of my being. This time I began to sob hysterically. The sobbing hurt my whole insides. I was blinded by tears and could hardly see to drive, so I slowed down. As cars whizzed around me, I knew I needed to pull myself together immediately or there was danger of an accident. The force of whatever thing was in me was so powerful that I was afraid a full look into the face of it would be unbearable.
“God help me!” I swallowed and struggled to blink back further tears.
Over the next few weeks I began to see clearly that I did indeed harbor unforgiveness toward my dad for never once coming to my rescue when I was a child. He never let me out of the closet. He never pulled my mother off my back. He never once protected me from her insanity. I had been let down by the one person who was my protector, my covering. The unforgiveness I harbored was unconfessed because I had never allowed myself to consciously think angry thoughts toward him.
I had learned a couple of years prior to this that, much to my surprise, Dad didn’t know about the times Mother had locked me in the closet. This knowledge relieved my mind, but it apparently didn’t heal the wound. And it didn’t release me from the bondage of a lifetime of unforgiveness. I learned the truth of the situation, but now I needed to apply
God’s
truth to it in order to be truly set free.
The more this problem was exposed, the more it became apparent that we weren’t talking about simply unforgiveness and anger. We were talking about rage—rage toward my dad. Because of this rage and unforgiveness, I had grown up to distrust all male authority—not all men, but only those in authority over my life, such as my pastor and my husband. I had never openly rebelled against them, and it never consciously occurred to me that I didn’t have the utmost respect for them. So the symptoms of the problem were way down deep inside. The bottom line was that I felt if I was hanging on a cliff by my fingertips, any male authority in my life would walk on by and let me drop.
This bondage was manifested in my life by my extreme independence. I always felt that I had to keep everything together all by myself because I couldn’t depend on anyone else to come through for me. It took a lot of constant energy to keep myself together like that. I could never rest.
Oddly enough, along with all this I started to feel like I was going crazy. I had heard there is a fine line between sanity and insanity, and I suddenly felt like I was walking on it. After a few years of not feeling that way, I couldn’t understand what was happening, but the feeling was unmistakable. There is a definite sensation of losing your mind, and I had it. I’d often been concerned about ending up like my mother, but never felt I was that close to it until now.
Good Friday arrived, and we all met as planned in the counseling office. I confessed my unforgiveness for Dad, and as I did, the ray of steel penetrated my stomach again, only this time it unleashed a torrent of emotion unlike any I’d experienced in adult life. I recognized it as the pain I had felt as a small child locked in a closet with no one to help me. It was the same pain that would periodically well up in me with such force that I had to withdraw from my friends at school or double over against a bathroom stall at CBS.
The pain came to the surface in full force. I sobbed grieving sobs from deep in my being. They were sobs I had held back rigidly in my throat for years because Mother threatened to beat me if I cried. The pain felt as if I was giving birth to something bigger than my body could deliver—something tangible, something measurable.
Sara Anne and her husband anointed me with oil, laid their hands on my head, and commanded in the name of Jesus that any oppressive spirit that had a hold on my life be broken. One final surge of pain wracked my body, and then it was over. A new inner peace settled over me.
With the expulsion of that deeply buried unforgiveness and rage, the devil’s final stronghold in my life was destroyed. I could see clearly now that the deeply repressed unforgiveness had led to a type of mental imbalance. Could that be what had happened to Mother—all her unforgiveness internalized to the point that her view of life became warped by it? I was sure it wasn’t the only thing that leads to mental imbalance, but I knew for certain that a sound mind cannot exist with deep unforgiveness and rage. There is a direct tie between forgiveness and wholeness.
I also saw that deliverance was a process that happened in different ways at different times. Sometimes it happened by spending time in God’s presence and walking in obedience to Him, such as the way I was delivered from my fear of knives. Sometimes it happened by crying out to God in prayer and exalting Him in praise, the way I did when I discovered my potential for child abuse. Sometimes it happened in the counseling office with the guidance of trained and qualified counselors, as it did when I was set free of paralyzing depressions. But no matter how it happened, it was always Jesus—the Deliverer—who set me free. He had come to strip away that which separated me from Him.
The next morning I noticed distinctly that I did not feel like I was going crazy. I felt completely normal, and the sensation of pending insanity never came back. It reminded me of when I was delivered from suicidal thoughts and I woke up the following morning without a trace of them. In the years since, they never returned. These were miracles I couldn’t deny, nor could I have conjured them up in my mind. I only knew that once again I had a new level of freedom inside me. Another set of chains had been broken, another closet door unlocked.
Trust for my husband and my pastor came slowly and steadily after that. Michael was still human and made mistakes, but I no longer saw it as a lack of caring or concern for me. My relationship with him improved immediately because I began to worry less and let him handle things. Always before I felt I had to be in on every financial decision, and I’m certain my attitude made Michael feel as if I didn’t trust him. Now I didn’t care if I was even consulted, for I trusted that God would guide my husband in all things. What relief to not have to struggle to be in control of everything.
For the first time in my life I realized how little I knew about my father. No one ever volunteered information about him, and I never thought to ask. I had always subconsciously viewed him as a one-dimensional stick figure, but now that I was set free from all my unforgiveness, I discovered features of his personality and the quality of his character unfolded. The next time he visited, I learned that he was the oldest of eight children— three boys and five girls—and because of this he carried a great deal of responsibility in the home. He was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania by devout Christian parents. His father was the superintendent at the church and his mother was the organist. I was surprised by this because I had never heard Dad say the words “church” or “God” in my whole life.
“Why didn’t you ever go to church once you left home, Dad?” I questioned after he surprised me with this new information.
“In order to get to church we had to walk a mile-and-a-half through the fields,” he answered. “We went two times on Sunday and every Thursday night no matter if there was hail, rain, or snow. When we got there we sat nearly four hours at a time on uncomfortable wood benches while the preacher ranted and raved about hellfire and brimstone. It was boring as could be, and children weren’t allowed to move or make a sound. I’ve always believed in God, but I decided that once I left home I was
never
going to go through that kind of torture again.”

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