Contributed by Columnist Sarah Hudson Pierce
At seventy-two I am so uplifted when I hear Vestal Goodman sing “I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now” inspiring me to tell when my life took a tremendous turn.
It’s February 1962. As a fourteen-year-old girl, I sat on the floor in front of the cast iron wood stove, inside our unpainted, mostly unheated cabin in the woods near Noel, Missouri. As I put kindling in the stove, I stirred the coals and watched the flame ignite. Looking deep within the fire, I vowed then and there that “I will rise up from whence I came.”
Not knowing exactly what that would entail, change came at lightning speed!
Less than six weeks later I became a Christian and was asked a couple of weeks later by the minister Fred Webb, of Grove, Oklahoma, who baptized me, if I would like to go to a Christian orphanage near Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He assured me that I would have immaculate surroundings and plenty of food and clothing and that I would be sent to school.
Having gone to bed hungry for years, after and even before our father died in 1958, I grabbed the brass ring and my sister and I went into the orphanage.
And it changed both of our lives forever!
It wasn’t easy but I knew that God had a plan in it for me!
I know “life is difficult” as the famed author M. Scott Peck wrote in The Road Less Traveled but I cherish my memories but God has always taken care of me and has always provided sometimes even more than I need.
Life isn’t easy in our world, though it never has been I suppose.
Fifty six years later I still struggle
At thirteen I almost drowned and actually went down five times before the Easter siblings, from South West City, Missouri, came to rescue me when they saw I wasn’t clowning around!
I know what it feels like to almost drown but I know God will pull me through the tight places because He always does.
I would encourage you to pour your own thoughts out upon the page and do it and do it until it becomes a habit because writing can be one of the greatest forms of creative therapy there is.
Not only is writing very therapeutic it is the only way I know to leave your own story as well as a legacy for your family to have for generations to come.
If we don’t tell our stories in our words they will never be told.
The motivational speaker, Tony Robbins, said “a life worth living is worth recording.”
I treasure the family stories I’ve found within my old trunk because these stories have helped me to make some sense of my life.
Not only will you be your own therapist but you may be providing the rope that others need to survive as they reach out through the pen upon the page.
And remember that it all works out and that we do get what we say and we should begin immediately thanking Him in advance for what He is about to give us because it works that way.
It is all good and “We get what we say!”
Contact Sarah at [email protected]