A Snow Storm, a Dozen Roses and a New Beginning
by Joy Patterson

The happiest memories I have of my early childhood were in the years I was together with my sisters and brothers. We were separated after my mother died when I was 7 years old. It was one of the saddest days in my life. My mother was in her third marriage when she died of leukemia. My natural father was an alcoholic, spending his life in and out of jail, until finally one day it all ended in the gutter outside a pub where he was robbed and bashed to death.

Other early memories were also painful. About the age of three and onwards, I was a victim of incest wrought by different family and extended family members, at various times and over a period that extended a year beyond my mother's death. Later in life I found out that my sisters had also had similar experiences.

As I grew into my early teens I was a quiet, very shy, insecure, introverted and lonely person. I experienced guilt and depression and at 15 took an overdose of sleeping pills to try and somehow escape these feelings.

I was married at 18 and by 22 had two little girls. By the age of 24 I was experiencing many dark days of deep depression where I felt I could no longer cope with life. I could sit on the floor, cry for my mother, get angry at God and fall into despair for hours, sometimes days.

It was on such a day during this period that I remember feeling something snap inside me. I had already left my husband and children and was back visiting, and on this particular day, I stood in front of my husband and threatened to cut my wrists with a razor if he didn't give me the car keys. Reluctantly he gave them to me and in a distraught state of mind I left home. I felt confused and out of control.

I got in the car and drove and didn't stop until many miles had passed, and many years also. In my search for happiness (love, joy and peace) I had journeyed most of the way around Australia and lived in many different places, always moving, always searching and always in all the wrong places.

I had allowed many forms of physical abuse to enter my life. I had no love or respect for myself and basically lived life on a razor's edge, not really caring if I lived or died. Drugs became a large part of my life and I used many kinds, often dangerously mixing them. Finally even the needle became an option, and I used it for narcotics, including heroin, on a couple of occasions but I thank God it was not enough to lead to full addiction. At one point I was drugged out continually for a period of two years. Drugs had become an everyday necessity and life without them meant facing a deep pit of emptiness, despair, hurt and the real world, which I didn't want to face nor live in.

During our separation, my husband Dennis had given up his job as a musician in the entertainment industry, rededicated his life to God, and with our two growing daughters was now devoted, along with Christian friends, to praying for me.

For the next five years Dennis would write regularly. Occasionally we would see each other - sometimes through what I now believe to be miraculous circumstances. I could see the changes within him. He would tell me about an inner peace and joy he had as he now lived his life in obedience to God and he revealed a zest for life that I had not seen in him before. He wasn't going to give up on me, nor our marriage. What he had seemed very real and genuine. But at this time I couldn't see it the way he did.

I was living on a farm in Queensland keeping goats. I had grown crops of marijuana, had delved into the Hari Krishna sect and new age practices and touched on things in the occult. I had been involved in seances, astral travel and had visited clairvoyants and fortune tellers. I was searching and my heart was always long for truth, contentment and that something called happiness.

One day, alone on the farm, I felt that I had come to the end - a very dead end. Life no longer had any purpose; it didn't matter to me if I never saw another day and I was beginning to have very strong thoughts of suicide.

Then from that deep dark pit that I was in, I cried out to God. I called to Him loudly, "God, do you hear me? Do You really exist and if You do, what am I to You? Do I matter to You? Look at what You have done to me!"

I was angry and all the bitterness inside me was directed at God. My heart continued to cry our, "What is love anyway? And God, if You really exist, I want to know it."

As I cried out I accused Him of all sorts of things. But somehow I began to tell Him how lost and desperate I was and that if He really did exist I would give myself to Him completely. I would give Him my will totally. I just wanted to change.

"Please change me," I cried. I no longer wanted to be the person that I knew I was. I asked Him to forgive me for all the wrong I had done and to come into my life and change me. I finally found myself believing in Him. Like a small voice within I heard Him speak to my heart. "Joy, I am the way, the truth and the life," and again, "I am love - God is love."

These words seemed to pierce my heart and as simple as they seemed, I knew God was giving me answers. It was what I had been longing to hear. After searching for a Bible I had been given some years earlier, I looked to find who had said, "I am the way the truth and the life." I discovered it was Jesus.

"Way" . . . Jesus was the way to go. Jesus - was - the - way! "Truth" . . . He is true - I could believe it. And "Life" . . . not death as I had been previously contemplating . . . and God is . . . "Love". If I know God, I can know real love. How I'd longed to know what real love is! On my knees I answered Him, saying, "I am beginning to understand what You are telling me and I am ready to try things your way. What do you want me to do?"

God spoke to my heart immediately, "Go back to your husband." I now know at this time I became a saved believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. I left the farm not looking back, and drove to my sister Lyn's farm in Queensland who also, along with her husband, had recently found Jesus. I told her that I had given my life to God and needed to share this with Dennis. He was studying at Cedarville University, USA (where staff and students were also praying for me).

From Lyn's farm, I finally located Dennis by telephone, visiting a family in a small town in Virginia where he and our daughters were about to sit down to their first Thanksgiving meal - a Thanksgiving meal that was about to become a celebration to mark the end of seven long years.

I had called to say, "I have found the Lord," though I now see that He had really found me. I told Dennis that if he was still willing, I was ready, in God's strength, to try to rebuild our relationship.

On the evening of the 20th of December, 1983, I landed at Kansas City airport where my husband, Dennis, was waiting in a heavy snowstorm, with a dozen red roses, for a new beginning.

"I had waited patiently for God to help me; then He listened and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out from the bog and the mire and set my feet on a hard, firm path and steadied me as I walked along. He has given me a new song, of praises to our God."

Psalm 40:1-3 (TLB)

Joy Patterson is today very happily married to her husband , Dennis, Pastor of Ingleside Baptist Church, Sydney Australia. Since this writing, God has blessed Joy and Dennis with three sons as well as their two daughters.