Painting Revelation Blog

I have always believed in God, but I didn’t know where to find him. I looked for him in the stars and the sunset, in the comforting touch of moss and the sweet smell of pine needles. I opened my eyes underwater and looked for him on the ribs of sand. I sat still on polished wooden pews in St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, balanced on petit-pointed kneelers until my back ached. I listened for him in the liturgy and the organ music. But I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t find love.

I searched for love in many places. I tried to please my parents, but always failed. I tried to connect with friends, but I was often mean. My dog was my safest confidant and brought me the most comfort until at boarding school I realized I could use my body to get attention from boys.

By the time I was twenty I was deep into the drugs-sex-rock & roll culture of the late 60s. I still hadn’t found God or love. I spent my junior year of college at a university in England where I went from the top of the class to the bottom after I moved into a house with drug dealers. LSD short-circuited my mind and by the end of that school year I had lost the ability to carry on a conversation or read a whole page in a book. Life looked so dark to me that I seriously considered having a baby to bring love into my empty existence.

But God had not lost track of me. A woman I’d known from childhood, a fascinating, intelligent woman who’d become a Christian in midlife, wrote and told me about a place in Switzerland called L’Abri that was run by a theologian named Francis Schaeffer. She didn’t have details, but assured me I’d be able to find his books in England. She said I MUST go there before I came home. I took her command seriously.

The story of how I got to L’Abri is long and complex and full of the amazing “coincidences” that only the Holy Spirit can arrange. I couldn’t find information on Francis Schaeffer and was about to forget the idea when I happened to be on a bus between JFK and LaGuardia airports, sleepless after thirty-six hours awake, afraid because I’d been questioned by airport security while I had drugs in my pocket, and angry because my mother had hung up the phone on me. I was near tears when I reached out to a girl on the bus. She was just returning home from L’Abri and told me all about it. But later, at the insistence of my atheist UK boyfriend, I decided not to go to L’Abri, but travel with him in California instead. After I’d mailed a letter canceling my plane ticket to Switzerland, I found out that the brother of one of my druggie friends was best friends with Frankie Schaeffer. What should I do? I consulted the I Ching (an ancient Chinese book of wisdom) and it told me to flee the young man in the west and go to the wise man in the east. God works with whatever we give him.

As I was leaving our “house” to go to Switzerland, the local drug squad arrived to arrest us. They brought my suitcases in from the taxi and searched me and everything I owned. By God’s grace I had run out of drugs and they let me leave without connecting me to the evidence they found in my third floor bedroom. My housemates went to jail. I arrived at L’Abri scared and confused and on the busiest visitor day they’d ever had. My houseparent gave me a brusque hello and directed me to my room in the loft. I climbed the ladder and saw a woman making the bed. When she turned around I realized she was one of eleven other girls who had been in my Outward Bound patrol in Colorado the summer before. Mountains, buses, drug squads, and Buddhist texts are no obstacle to God.

That night I stood in the shadows and listened to the conversation of the other students in my chalet. My brain was still working at minimal capacity, but I couldn’t help speaking out when I realized they were talking about Evolution and why they didn’t believe in it. I’d never heard such a thing. When I expressed my surprise, they turned as a group and gaped at me. I thought I’d fallen into very weird company indeed. But that controversy sparked a question in my otherwise dormant mind and with the help of my L’Abri tutor, I began listening to tapes about Darwin. I discovered that as he progressed in his theories about the origins of the species, he drifted away from God and into despair. I could relate.

A few nights after I arrived there was a prayer meeting. My roommate said it would be boring, but I thought I’d try it anyway. In England I’d been initiated into Transcendental Meditation and was slightly familiar with meditating, so I sat quietly on the carpet, not knowing what to expect. My only Christian prayer experiences had been with recited prayers. I was amazed when people began talking to God extemporaneously about everyday things. In TM you’re told to keep repeating your secret mantra and ignore any thoughts. But here it was as if every intrusive thought became a prayer. And people spoke as if someone was really listening.

As the prayers circled the room I began to feel an odd sensation, a burning in my bones. Something was welling up in me and a thought was forming in my mind. I opened my mouth and prayed. I asked God to help me and to use me to help others who were lost. That is still my prayer today.

The chalet where I was staying was several kilometers down the mountain from the chapel, so I got a ride in a VW bus with some of the others. Halfway home I was overcome again, but this time with a terrible nausea—which is very unusual for me. They stopped the bus and let me out so I could throw up. It was many years later when I realized the significance of that inner cleansing. God was beginning to deliver me from evil.

The next two nights I had nightmares in which my UK boyfriend and US boyfriend left me. The next morning it was time to begin another round of birth control pills. I didn’t know how I would survive, but I knew right then that God wanted me to give up premarital sex. And I did. A few days later I received a letter from my US boyfriend (who is now my husband of 37 years) he wrote, “Debby, it’s time you found the answer.” How joyous that I could write back and tell him I had.

After just two weeks I left L’Abri,. On the train to Lausanne I sat next to a Spanish man and we communicated in French. He was the first person I told about my encounter with God. He told me he was an angel. (I won’t know the truth about that until I get to heaven, but he was very kind.) When I arrived in the Detroit airport, I was shocked to see Jesus on the cover of Time Magazine. Oh no, I thought, I’d joined a movement without even knowing it. But life with God is not a movement; it’s an incredible adventure. I met up with my US boyfriend, shared my experiences at L’Abri, and a few weeks later he gave his life to Christ while driving south one night with the Northern Lights on one side of the car, an eclipse of the moon on the other, and Billy Graham on the radio.

God continued to protect my fragile, infant faith. My first experience with prayer was when I was looking for an apartment for my senior year in college. They were hard to come by and I realized I could ask God for help. Moments after going into my room to pray, the phone rang and I was offered a perfect place in the “elbow” of St. Andrew’s Church. I wasn’t quite sure what the Bible said about drugs, so I decided to pray about that too. I asked God to give me a sign. A couple hours later I was canoeing down a river with my father and brothers and pulled up on a tiny beach for lunch. There in the middle of the sand was a bag of marijuana. Anyone who has taken drugs knows how unlikely that would be. I pocketed the drugs, surreptitiously of course, and pondered what God might be saying. But as I realized that drugs were illegal and that I had to hide them from my parents, I decided God wanted me to use my common sense. He graciously weaned me from a that addiction.

My story goes on to seminary training, marriage, church planting, songwriting, children and grandchildren, poetry, fiction, and now I study and then paint books of the Bible. I have even produced a DVD based on my painting of Revelation. Life with God is exciting every single day as I grow deeper in love with Jesus and learn to listen to what he is saying and watch to see what he is doing. He is forever creating, restoring, making all things new.

 

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