By Dianne Schroeder

I was born and raised until age fourteen on a small, rural farm in the thumb area of Michigan. We had no running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, and an engine-propelled wringer washing machine.

Yes, we were poor by anyone’s standards, but I didn’t realize I was living in poverty until many years later.

My father was a physically, verbally, sexually and emotionally abusive alcoholic.

He unleashed his verbal and physical fury on my older, developmentally disabled sister and on me – more times than I care to remember, and told me repeatedly that he wanted to kill me.

He and my older brother sexually abused me until age thirteen.

At that point, my mother took ill and hemorrhaged in our presence several times. Six months later, she died of what we would years later learn was uterine cancer.

My sister and I always considered her an angel because she literally saved our lives (especially mine) many times.

Shortly after her funeral, I knelt in a field of unharvested wheat, wept uncontrollably and screamed out to God the hatred I felt toward Him for taking my protector, my angel, from me, and for leaving us with this man who so obviously hated us.

For as long as I could remember, I’d hated him, too.

Since childhood, I had gone to God with my emotional pain.

When I was as young as three, four, and five, I’d swing on an old wooden swing that hung on a rope from a tree, and there I would tearfully pour out my heart to a God I couldn’t see.

I’d sensed His presence, but I didn’t understand. He came as the Holy Spirit of God, the Comforter, to hold me and comfort my broken heart.

Today, I know Him.

Four days lacking a year from my mother’s death, Pa died.

Immediately after Mom’s funeral, he crawled into bed and would rarely get out.

Eventually, congestive heart failure took his life. I was happy about that, but I was also hurting so bad that rebellion took over.

I refused to accept love from anyone. If my father wouldn’t love me and my mother was gone and couldn’t love me, then no one was going to love me.

I began staying out all night drinking, partying and looking for the love I’d never had: the love of a man.

At age sixteen, I met Jesus through yet another supernatural encounter with the Holy Spirit as I knelt distraught on the floor of a juvenile officer’s office. That presence once again enveloped me, and when I regained awareness of where I was, I was looking up into the face of the juvenile officer.

“If there is a God,” he said, “I sure do hope He hears you!”

He had threatened to place me in a juvenile home, but instead he let me go.

I am so happy he did, because mentally I was like an uncaged lioness, and I wouldn’t have survived long locked up.

For the next two years, I lived in multiple homes and slept on park benches. Many, including my aunt, tried to love me, but I would not receive their love.

In 1967, at age eighteen, I married Jim. Through God’s unfailing grace and emotional healing, I have remained married and faithful to the same man for almost forty-four years.

During the early years of our marriage, I went back to church – the Lutheran church from my background and the Catholic church from Jim’s – and began personal daily devotions using Our Daily Bread.

I didn’t know it then, but I was hungry for God and wanted Him to be more real in my life.

In June 1970, after maturing, congenital cataracts left me legally blind, I found myself in a Bible study led by two spirit-filled women. They confirmed my salvation and prayed for me to receive the gift of tongues. I was afraid of the presence of God’s Spirit; but later at home I was baptized in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues.

Within twenty-four hours of that experience I completely changed my wardrobe at the Spirit’s leading, and Jim and I poured all the alcohol in our refrigerator down the drain.

Subsequently Jim and I left our Lutheran/Catholic tradition and fully surrendered our lives to the Lord.

As time passed I received emotional healing that enabled me to forgive my dad.

I later realized that God also wanted me to forgive my abusive brother.

He had never married and was alcoholic, jobless and homeless. In 2001 he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, high blood pressure and kidney failure.

His condition continued to deteriorate until he signed for me to be his medical proxy in 2009.

By September of that year he could no longer walk more than three feet without walker assistance. He wound up in the hospital and in nursing homes multiple times during his later years, and the last six months of his life he was forced to live in a non-assisted senior apartment complex.

On May 31st, 2010, he fell backward down a series of steps and refused medical transport or treatment.

On June 2nd, his doctor from the VA went to his apartment as she had done on several other occasions. It took him fifteen minutes of excruciating pain to get to the door and let her in.

He had apparently been using a large bottle of booze on a bedside table to medicate away the pain from the broken ribs he had sustained in that fall.

His doctor called an ambulance and he was transported to the hospital.

In transport, he went into respiratory crisis. I couldn’t be reached. Emergency measures were necessary so his VA doctor authorized the ventilator as treatment for his distress.

Jim and I were in Michigan visiting with family on June 3rd when his doctor called, whom he had known for two years. I took the earliest flight out of Flint, Michigan on June 4th, arriving at the hospital in Ft. Myers, Florida that evening. Though his doctor did not practice there, she met me at the hospital.

During the next eight days I made all decisions demanded of a medical proxy with the assistance of hospital staff, end-of-life people, the doctor, and (by phone) my husband.

His doctor told me she ministered with a Christian band on the beach near the 5x8 shed he called home, and he had started approaching her and showing an interest in spiritual matters two months before he died. She had preached to him during one of her visits to his apartment: a mini-sermon about how Peter had rejected Christ.

She had told him that Jesus would come to him, and that Jesus would want his soul.

“Don’t reject Him when He comes,” she had told him. “There is no promise He will come again.”

During the eight remaining days of his life, she prayed a prayer of repentance with him three times, and I prayed with him at least three other times.

This abusive man died in a hospice mansion, something you’d expect for the very rich. He was born in poverty but died in riches, and he lives eternally in riches not exceeded anywhere on this earth.

He died forgiven by me. But more importantly, he died forgiven by his God.

Perhaps you are a young person reading this, and you feel like you haven’t done anything that would separate you from God. But sin – not in part, but the whole – separates all of us from God. Only the righteous will enter heaven and God says: “There is none righteous…no, not one” (Romans 3:23). Even the good we may try to do is contaminated by not-so-good motives to some degree.

We all need God’s righteousness.

You are reading this today because God ordained that you would.

God loved my brother, and He sent me, along with Dr. Francis and others, into his life to tell him of His great love for him.

God spared my life and sustained me all these years so that I can tell you how much He loves you. You can’t earn eternity with Him, but if you come to Him in prayer, He will give it to you. All you need to do is exchange your life and accept His. He is coming for your soul, and there is no promise He will come again.

Receive Him now. Today is the day of salvation (II Corinthians 6:1, 2).