qarrtsiluni

As I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, not knowing there was a God didn’t bother me. And it wasn’t until I moved to Aspen with my two-year-old daughter that I realized no one on this earth really knew me – the inside me, the lonely one, the betrayed, abused, hurting one.

A little past midnight on a clear winter night, I walked out of town far enough that I couldn’t see any lights or hear the noise. I wanted to be alone to cry my bottled up tears. Was there a God?

It was hard to find darkness because the millions of stars overhead lit the night so brightly that I could walk in their shine. I saw a rose growing at the side of the road – through the snow, in the middle of winter. The aspen trees had shed all but a few of their quaking, golden leaves which seemed to glow from within with flickering candlelight.

I wondered aloud: “God, how can this rose be alive in this cold, so late in the year? The aspen trees don’t worry about ‘who am I? where am I going? why am I here?’ They just plant their roots and grow. Same with the rose. Then why don’t I know why I am here, why I am alive? How come I can’t just grow and be Vicki?”

I cried. Then there were no tears left. I sat on a rock, shaking with the cold. Yet inside something changed and now I felt warm, at peace. I knew Jesus had heard me. He was taking me to my home in Him and He hasn’t abandoned me since.

Yes, I had turned away from Him after my divorce. For years I had tried not to think about Him. Still He didn’t leave me. He waited.

Now, almost forty years later, He is still with me and I want always to live in His presence.

People will sometimes say to me, “Oh, you’re religious.”

I say, “No – not religious, but I do have a living, loving relationship with God. I am a stone in the creek, rolling around against other stones, the water washing me, smoothing out my rough edges, making me fit where God knows I need to be.”

I thank God for that first encounter with Him in 1967. My life has never been the same.

by Vicki Foley Theriault