Just a couple of months before I started writing this book, I attended a Christian conference in Oklahoma City. I really enjoyed getting together with other Christians and talking about our lives. Not surprisingly, I shared my story a handful of times over three days. On the last night of the conference, a woman who’d heard my testimony asked if I wouldn’t mind dropping by her hotel room and telling my story to a few friends. I said, sure, I’d be happy to stop by. Three or four people I could handle.
When I walked into her room I could barely squeeze through the door. Every inch of the place was packed. It was a pretty small room, with two twin beds and a bunk bed in the corner and a chair or two, and someone was sitting on every available surface, including the carpeted floor. There were women of all ages, some in their sixties, some in their teens, all of them looking up at me with expectant faces. There were five teenagers hanging off the top bunk bed. I didn’t count, but there had to be at least twenty-five women crammed in that little space.
I remember thinking, Oh, dear.
True to form, my heart started racing, and my face got blotchy. But I took a deep breath and made it through my story. I cried a lot, especially during the abortion part. ‘I’m not crying out of regret,’ I told everyone. ‘I’m crying out of sadness for the lost girl I was.’
Right in the middle of it, my friend Amber walked in eating a bowl of ice cream. ‘Wow, it stinks in here,’ she said. ‘What are y’all talking about?’ When she saw me, she figured it out and smiled.
‘Oh, gaw, I already heard that a bunch of times,’ Amber said, winking at me. ‘See ya.’
I think she wanted to get me used to telling my story without her around.
When I finally finished, it was nearly 1:00 a.m. I headed for the door, and a woman jumped in my path. I was getting used to women jumping in my path.
‘Excuse me, Crystal, do you have a second to talk?’ she asked. Her lips were quivering, and her eyes were filling with tears. I knew what was coming.
‘I’ve never talked about this with anyone,’ she said. ‘Anyone. So it’s really hard for me to even say this out loud.’
Lay it on me, sister, I thought. Let it out.
‘When I was younger,’ she finally said, ‘I was sexually abused.’
We spoke for several minutes, and then we prayed together. ‘The enemy wants you to keep it a secret,’ I told her. ‘The enemy loves secrets and shame.’ I’ve since found out she now gives talks about her experience to other women who have been abused. The circle of salvation is widening. Chains are being broken everywhere.
I was already on way to my own room when another young woman, Kelly, stopped me. ‘I know this sounds crazy,’ she said, ‘but when you were talking I couldn’t see your face anymore.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All I could see was this bright light around your face. It was like this golden glow.’
I’d heard this before – from the frizzy-haired woman in Thomas who said she’d seen a beautiful light by my side – but I hadn’t given it much thought. And now I looked for an explanation, like the glare of a lamp bouncing off a mirror or something. I prayed with Kelly for a few minutes and finally made it to bed.
But the next day, another young woman approached me and said, ‘Crystal, I couldn’t see your face when you were talking. There was just this light all over it.’
In all, three women who were in the room that night told me they couldn’t see my face. All they could see was a bright golden light.
I knew what they’d seen was a glimpse of God’s presence, and that made me cry. To be honest, I cried because I was jealous. I was jealous because they got to see God. I know, I know, I got to be in His presence, so what right did I have to be jealous? But the fact is, once I met God, I knew I’d be chasing Him for the rest of my life.
A lot of people who hear my story ask me the same question:
‘Why did God choose you?’
I’ve given that plenty of thought since 2009, and the best answer I’ve come up with is: Why not me?
What I mean by that is, there’s nothing special about me at all. God didn’t say, ‘Oh, there goes Crystal. Isn’t she something?’ I’m certainly not better than anyone else, and I’m also not worse. I’m a mom and a wife and a schoolteacher in a small Oklahoma town. I am ordinary in every way. Who knows? Maybe God thought, Boy, she sure does like to talk, so if I can get her to talk about me she’ll never shut up. And if He thought that, well, He was right.
But the truth is, I really don’t know why God gave me this gift. I don’t know why I saw what I saw while others who have died and come back saw nothing. And honestly, I don’t need to know. I may not always understand God’s plan, but I do know that it’s perfect.
And anyway, it’s not important why God chose me, because what happened isn’t really about me. And the lights all those women saw around me? Those aren’t about me, either. Those lights are about God. My story, and my testimony, is all about God. Everything I’ve gone through in my life is all about God. This book is a book about God and His presence in our lives.
So when I say, ‘Why not me?’, I mean that I’m just like anyone else who has ever searched for God. I’m like anyone who has ever longed to feel God’s presence. For all the doubt and skepticism that kept me tied up in knots for years, I can honestly say I never stopped looking for God. I never stopped yearning for a relationship with Him. Even in my darkest moments, when I vowed to cut God out of my life, I never really did. I just kept talking to Him, and He kept pursuing me.
I was talking, and He heard every word. And He was talking, but I couldn’t hear a thing.
Maybe He picked me, because He got tired of me not listening.
But here’s the thing – God talks to all of us.
Yes, God was there with me at my speeches. But God is there with all of us, always, no matter what we’re doing. You don’t have to see a glowing light to know that God is with you. You don’t have to die and go to heaven to know you are in His presence. All you have to do is want to have a relationship with Him. All you have to do is look for Him. ‘Seek and you will find,’ it says in Matthew 7:7. ‘Knock, and the door will be opened to you.’
I did a lot of seeking and knocking. And finally I found Him. Or maybe more accurately, He found me.
I can’t wait to tell everyone that God is real. But what I’ve found as I’ve gone out and told my story is that, more often the not, the people I think I’m ministering to are actually ministering to me. I think I’m teaching them about God. Instead, they’re teaching me about faith.
I’ll give you an example. When the twins were in the NICU, we had a lot people praying for them every day. A woman that worked with my mom, Danica, and her husband, Danny, who was a pastor in another small town, came by the hospital one day to pray over the twins. A nurse told them they weren’t allowed to enter the NICU. They could have just left, but they didn’t.
Instead, they laid their hands on the metal door that led into the NICU, and they prayed for the twins right there.
Not much later, we learned Danny was gravely ill. Virgil and I prayed hard for him, just as he’d prayed for our twins. But then, one day when I was sitting in a doctor’s office, I felt another nudge from God. He wanted me to do more than just pray for Danny – He wanted me to give him $600. Now, the school year was just about to start for my two older kids, so we needed to buy new shoes and supplies. And our mortgage was due, and we had other bills, and we just didn’t have a dollar to spare. But here was God anyway, telling me to send Danny money. I called Virgil and told him about the nudge, and, as always, he didn’t hesitate. He said, ‘Just write the check.’ I couldn’t understand where the money was going to come from, and I sat there in the doctor’s office and prayed to God to help me understand.
Just then – just then – I got a text message from a woman from my church. She’d never sent me a text before, and the text simply read, ‘Hebrews 11:1’. That was it, nothing else – just the scripture. I found a Bible in the doctor’s waiting room and quickly opened it to the passage. What I read astonished me.
‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things unseen.’ (KJV )
Out of the blue, my friend had sent me a message about faith. I immediately knew this was God talking to me again. While I was sitting there grappling with His instructions, He sent me a simple message – have faith in Me. That night, we sent Danny the money.
Only a few weeks later, Danny took a turn for the worse. He was losing weight fast, and he didn’t have long to live. Virgil and I went to see him, and I held Danny’s hand as we sat with him and his wife and prayed. I told him how much it meant to us that he and his wife had prayed over our twins in the hospital. And Danny, in his weakened voice, told me what it had meant to him when he received the money from us.
‘We were in need, and I was praying and praying,’ he said. ‘And then you sent us exactly the amount of money we needed. God answered our prayers.’
I sat there and thought, God used me to help Danny. But, like I said, whenever I think I am ministering to someone, they are actually ministering to me.
At one point during our visit with Danny, he looked at me and asked, ‘What is heaven like?’
I told him what it felt like to be with God. I described the almost unbearable joy I felt at seeing my younger self. Then I said, ‘You know, Danny, God took me before I felt an ounce of pain. There was no suffering. There was only joy.’
When I told him this, Danny smiled and turned to his wife. He didn’t say anything to her, and he didn’t have to. Danica was crying, not out of sadness but out of relief. ‘That’s what I’ve been worried about the most,’ she said through her tears. ‘I can’t bear the thought of Danny suffering.’
Danny drew comfort from what I told him, but not for himself – he drew it for his wife. He didn’t even ask me about heaven for himself; he did that for Danica, too. He wanted her to know that, at the very end when his mind and body failed and he was at his most vulnerable, she didn’t have to suffer for him because he’d already be gone. He’d already be on his way to heaven.
What a great lesson in faith and love! How remarkable that God never stops ministering to me. The strength of Danny’s belief in God filled me with hope and inspiration. But God wasn’t done yet. As Virgil and I were leaving, I noticed a beautiful cross on the wall. I told Danny how much I liked it, and he said, ‘That’s my favorite scripture.’ I hadn’t seen any scripture, just the cross. But then his wife stepped out of the way, and I saw a verse printed just to the side of the cross:
‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things unseen.’
It was Hebrews 11:1 yet again. And today, that verse is stenciled on my wall at home. I put it there to remind me of how Danny ministered to me in his last days of life, and I think of him every time I pass it.
God turns the tables on me all the time. When I think I’m teaching, I’m actually learning. Whenever I talk to my great friend Amber, I always get back much more than I give. When I spoke with Patricia about her daughter Heather, her faith in the face of such a terrible loss really touched my heart. Then there was Shearl and her brave son Mickey. Shearl would later explain to me that when she saw me in Wal-Mart she felt a strange urge to go over and talk to me. She shrugged it off and walked past me but then circled back. She passed and circled two more times before finally giving in to the urge.
So while I thought God put me in the flower aisle to talk to them, He actually put them there to talk to me.
Why? Because of Mickey.
Mickey is, in ways I can only admire, God’s warrior. He was ejected from a truck and suffered a broken back and severe brain trauma. If the first responder had shown up even a minute later, Mickey would have died on the road. He was in a coma for three weeks, and doctors told Shearl he probably wouldn’t make it. But on the day doctors told Mickey’s family to gather up and say goodbye to him, they instead gathered up and prayed to God to save Mickey’s life. They spoke life over him with scriptures. And within hours, Mickey’s condition changed. He pulled through.
Then doctors said he’d probably never talk or laugh – now, he does those things, too. And while his life is extremely hard and his battle is sure to be long, Mickey has never once cursed God or doubted God or asked God why this happened to him. All of his pain and suffering has only made him more confident in how much God loves him. Even in the darkest darkness, he feels God’s presence.
Beauty from ashes.
Later, when I asked Mickey if it would be okay if I put his story in this book, he didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I want God to use me. I want people to know that the God I worship is a loving God.’
There’s another question people always ask me: ‘What does God’s voice sound like?’
I don’t know if they expect me to say God has a big booming voice that comes down from the heavens, but it’s not like that at all. When I hear God’s voice – when one of those thoughts pops in my head or I get one of those sudden nudges – what I’m hearing is my own voice. And because it’s my own voice, it can get confusing. Early on I used to confuse God’s commands with silly, random thoughts, like when I fought so hard not to leave a $100 tip, or when I almost didn’t tell Patricia about ‘blue rabbit.’ But now I can recognize God’s commands, because they’re usually something I don’t want to do. They’re something that will probably embarrass me, and, like I said, I hate to be embarrassed. But that’s how I know it’s God and not me – He puts me in positions I would never put myself.
That’s not to say I don’t have internal debates over a thought, because sometimes I still do. And that’s because the enemy also uses my voice to talk to me. So I have to stop and ask myself – if I follow this instinct, is it going to help me or help someone else? Is it of the flesh, or is it of the spirit? And if you think about it for a while, you can usually figure out that, No, that is not God. That is of the flesh. You begin to recognize your own voice, the enemy’s voice, and God’s voice.
But God doesn’t only use words to speak to us. Sometimes it can be a feeling or the sense that you’re being drawn to someone or some place. And sometimes, God comes to us in our dreams.
Remember I told you about the dream I had where my brother Jayson was singing and worshipping on the stage of a church? When I had the dream, Jayson was in his twenties and struggling mightily. All he felt was a deep resentment for how his childhood had gone and how his life had turned out. He became a hardcore, reckless drinker. He remembers waking up behind the wheel of his truck one night as the truck was barreling sixty miles per hour through a cornfield. Another time, he remembers driving his motorcycle the two hours from Oklahoma City to my home town in the middle of the night. He was dead drunk, had no helmet on, and drove 130 miles per hour the whole way. He didn’t care enough about himself to make any changes. He entertained the idea of a lonely, drunken death, and he was okay with it.
Eventually his behavior led to four arrests for driving under the influence. Through it all, Jayson never wavered in his feelings about God. While I was always of two minds – is He real or isn’t He? – Jayson would always flat out say, ‘God doesn’t exist.’ When I’d visit him at his home and try to bring up God, he’d say, ‘Don’t come into my house and talk that hocus pocus God stuff.’ And so we never talked about God. But I never forgot my dream, and I clung to the hope that God would find Jayson. Oddly enough, I truly believed He would save Jayson, even while I wasn’t sure He would ever save me.
Well, today things are different. Today, Jayson stands on the stage of a chapel and sings and worships God – just like in my dream.
How did it happen? Oddly enough, my brother says it happened in a jail cell. He was there after his fourth DUI arrest and was facing ten years in prison. He remembers waking up in the top bunk in the cell. The man in the bottom bunk was a crack addict loudly proclaiming his innocence. The other one, a skinny older man, sat on the floor and quietly read a Bible.
After a while, Jayson got tired of hearing the addict’s excuses and explanations for why he failed a drug test. He leaned down from the top bunk and let the guy have it.
‘Do you hear yourself, man?’ Jayson said. ‘Listen to yourself! You’re here, because you did drugs! You did drugs! It’s what you do!’
Just then, the old man on the floor spoke for the first time. Jayson remembers he looked like an aging hippie, with smoky looking glasses and a pirate ship and a compass tattooed on his chest. He made Jayson think of Jerry Garcia. When Jayson finished haranguing the crack addict, the old man looked at Jayson and said:
‘Why are you here?’
It wasn’t a question, and Jayson didn’t answer him. He just lay back in his bed and stared at the ceiling. He knew what point the old man was making: who was Jayson to be berating the addict, when he was a busted and broken addict himself? Those four words felt like a painful and devastating lesson for Jayson. They left no room for excuses or enabling behavior. They were a call for Jayson to finally take stock of himself and see how utterly wrecked he was.
And right there, in his top bunk, he turned the page on his old life.
The next day guards had the inmates step out of their cells so they could do a headcount. When they went back in, Jayson noticed the old man wasn’t there. ‘What happened to the old guy?’ he asked the addict. ‘What old guy?’ he said. When Jayson made bond, he asked the guard how many people had been in his cell with him.
‘How many bunks do you see, dumbass?’ the guard said.
Had the old man been a hallucination? Even during his worst drinking binges Jayson had never hallucinated anything like that. Was it a manifestation of his dire mental state? Or had it been something divine? Jayson didn’t know for sure. But what he did know was that he went into prison a broken man, and he came out more whole than he’d ever been in his life. He came out wanting to change.
And he did. He went to AA meetings and stopped drinking. He went to a series of sermons called ‘Practical Atheists’ and realized he wanted a relationship with God. And on November 2, at 12:47 pm – he remembers the day and time precisely – Jayson accepted Jesus Christ in his life.
God now comes first in Jayson’s life, and he gives God thanks and credit for the woman he calls ‘my No. 2’ – his wife Melissa. He met her after getting sober and taking a job at the Christian University where she worked. Jayson had no desire to be in a relationship, but God had other plans. Melissa is sweet and tender and strikingly beautiful, and ‘she has a smile so big it makes other people’s cheeks crease’, as Jayson likes to say. I’ve never seen him happier.
Today Jayson leads chapel time at the college where he works, bounding up on stage and leading other worshippers in song – just like in my dream. ‘Pain and fear can dominate your life for a long time,’ Jayson says now, ‘but fear and faith cannot co-exist. You have to choose which one you are going to serve, and that’s what I did. And now everything I do I try to do for the glory of God.’
God saved Jayson from the same darkness He saved me.
The other weird dream I had puzzled me for a long time. It’s the one that made me wake Virgil up and tell him I knew God’s perfect plan for us, except I could only remember scattered details, like a couple of numbers and a great wall. I had no idea what the numbers or the wall meant, until my uncle came over one night and opened up a Bible. He asked me for the first number I remembered, and I told him 16. He went to the sixteenth book of the Bible – the Book of Nehemiah. ‘What was the second number?’ he asked, and I told him it was 6. He went to the sixth chapter in Nehemiah and began reading it aloud.
It was all about how Nehemiah built a great wall.
Actually, Nehemiah restored the broken down walls of Jerusalem. It was a job that should have taken years, but Nehemiah completely restored them and fortified Jerusalem in just fifty-two days. ‘When all our enemies heard of it, and all the nations surrounding us saw it, they lost their confidence,’ it says in Nehemiah 6:16. ‘For they recognized that this work had been accomplished with the help of our God.’
At least now I knew what the wall in my dream meant, but I still didn’t understand what it had to do with me. What kind of wall did God want me to restore? What was I supposed to do now? I kept thinking and praying about the wall, but I never got anywhere.
Then, one day, I came across a passage from the Book of Isaiah in a book I was reading.
‘Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation within your borders,’ it says in Isaiah 60:18. ‘You shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.’
As I read it I realized that the wall in my dream had not been a literal wall. The wall was God’s salvation. God had restored my salvation, and now He was sending me out to tell others about it.
You see, Christ died for my sins, but for much of my life I didn’t believe that. I believed He died for other people’s sins, just not mine. I believed I was too horrible, too undeserving of his compassion. And so I couldn’t accept the salvation that Christ died to give me.
But then God gave me His wonderful gift, the gift of His glorious presence, and after that I did accept His salvation. I realized I wasn’t undeserving or unforgiveable. God broke my cycle of pain and secrecy. God ripped away my curtain of shame. And now God wants me to share my story with other women, so that they, too, can accept His salvation. When I talk about all the things that happened in my life, it empowers others to talk about their own lives, often for the very first time. And when they do, God breaks their cycles of pain and secrecy. God rips away their curtains of shame. And in this way their salvation is restored.
God’s salvation was always there for them, as it was always there for me. God just needs us to accept it. He needs us to choose Him.
And that, I realized, is why God allowed me to think I’d be able to return to heaven, when all along His plan was to send me back. God gave me the opportunity to choose Him, and that’s exactly what I did – I chose to stay with God. Before that I could never fathom loving God more than anything else, but once I made the choice to stay with Him I couldn’t understand loving anything more than God. God gave me that choice so I would always remember choosing Him. The choice was everything.
But why, you might ask, was God’s message delivered in such a confusing way? Why did I have to have a dream, and then read the Bible, and then read another book that led me to the Isaiah verse? Why didn’t God just explain things to me clearly? It’s because He needs us to choose Him. He needs us to want to find Him. If God just fed us instructions, we’d be nothing but puppets. But God didn’t create a world full of puppets; He created living, breathing people with free will. We don’t choose God because we have to. We choose God because we want to.
I believe now that’s why I witnessed those demonic attacks. They’ve been the hardest things for me to talk about and the events that make me worry the most about sharing. But they happened, plain and simple, and I’ve had to deal with them. They were another step toward recognizing that God is real. After all, if I was scared to death of these demons – of the enemy – that meant I had to believe the enemy was real. And if I believed he was real, why wouldn’t I believe God is real, too? The reason I was so vulnerable to the enemy was because of my fear. The enemy feeds on fear. I was like the lone sheep that strayed from the flock, forcing the shepherd to come find me. The enemy will go after you if you are alone and afraid. And I was alone, and I was deathly afraid … until I was saved.
Until God found me, and I found God.
Choosing that relationship with God is what salvation is all about. Salvation isn’t some ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card that allows you to do anything you want and give you a clean slate. The sins you commit on earth will always have consequences. I still grieve for the child I lost when I was younger, and my heart still breaks whenever I think of all the bad decisions I made. My human form will always bear the scars of these sins, but because I chose God over everything else, God has cleansed my spirit. God has given me salvation. God has bathed me in His love.
Which is not to say that salvation is just reserving your spot in heaven. Salvation is something that exists here on earth. God has a purpose for us here, today, right now. He wants us to live our lives in the kind of fullness and goodness that glorifies Him. But we can’t do that if we are plagued by secrets and shame. The walls of our salvation start to crumble and collapse, allowing the enemy to get in. And so we must make our walls Salvation and our gates Praise. We must restore these walls, brick by brick, so that we can live in the fullness and glory of God.
The key, for me, was obedience. It took me a while to get there, but today when I hear God, I obey Him. I remember very clearly hearing God tell me that I would be writing this book. It was clear as day: ‘Someone is going to come and help you tell your story.’ And that’s just what happened. Believe me, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was lay bare my life in these pages. It was painful to be so transparent, and I struggled with it mightily.
But that is what God wanted me to do, and so that is what I do. I go out and tell my story, and I share the message God sent me back to share. And what is that message? It is many things, but here is one way I would put it:
God is real, and we are all worthy of His love and salvation because He finds us worthy.
That may sound simple, but for me it changed everything. It was the answer I spent my whole life asking questions trying to find. And now that I have it, the fondest wish I have in my heart is for everyone – everyone – to have it, too. I want everyone to be there with me, in the bathing glow of God’s love – even my worst enemy and the biggest sinners. It hurts me to think of anyone experiencing the opposite of what I experienced with God. No one should have to live in that horrible darkness.
And in the same way that God forgave my sins, I no longer harbor anger or resentment toward anyone who has hurt me in my life. I love them deeply, and I hold them all close in my heart – my beautiful mother, who made mistakes but who never abandoned me, never stopped fighting for me; my father, who searched for love and acceptance just like I did, and who did the best he could to be my dad; my stepfather, who battled demons his whole life but who found ways to show a little girl love when he could; the people who abused me; the men who mistreated me; anyone I ever held a grudge against.
But most importantly, I have forgiven myself.
We are, all of us, God’s perfect creations, and we are so worthy of His love.