The following is an excerpt from The Pastor Driven Wife: Stories of God's Faithfulness from the Mundane to the Miraculous, by Paula Russell with Kim Aldrich.
To order the entire book, go to http://www.kimaldrich.com/.
MY DRUG BUST
“Trust in the LORD, and do good...” —Psalm 37:3
The first congregation my husband and I pastored while we were still in college was a small country church in the Appalachian Valley of southern Ohio. Each week we drove there on Friday afternoon when our classes were over and then travelled back on Sunday night after the evening service.
At that time, our budget for groceries was seven dollars a week on my husband’s fifty-dollar-a-month salary. Since we were still paying for college, we both found jobs in the summer to help supplement our income and save up for the next year’s tuition. He painted houses and mowed lawns, and I was hired as a sales clerk at a local drug store for $1.10 an hour.
I had been at my job only a few days, when I began to notice a teenage girl whose purchases were always the same: cough syrup and airplane glue. Being a fairly naïve country girl I didn’t figure it out at first, but eventually I realized that no one could possibly put together that many airplanes and I had never once heard her cough. I tried to strike up a conversation, but as soon as I approached her she would take off out the door like a scared jackrabbit.
So I began to pray that if God wanted me to reach out to her, He would make a way. To my surprise, the very next day she was waiting for me outside the store when I went out for my lunch break.
We walked to a nearby park, and thus began many days of walking and talking about a variety of subjects, including the fact that the cough syrup and glue were to help her stay high when she couldn’t afford alcohol or more expensive drugs.
She shared cautiously at first, but gradually her tough exterior began to erode away, and the walls that had been holding back the tears finally crumbled. She told me how her father had left her mother to raise her and her sister alone when she was only four years old, how her mother’s alcoholism had gotten worse and worse, and how her grandmother, the only person who had ever loved her or given her a kind word, had just died. After that she started selling drugs to support the “pain medicine” habit she had come to depend upon.
Her anger and bitterness ran deep. Then, in addition to everything else, the unthinkable had happened. She’d been raped by an older man who lived in their apartment complex and had become pregnant by him. As soon as her mother found out she was pregnant, she sent her off to an unwed mother’s home to have her babies—twins, a boy and a girl—and then forced her to put them up for adoption. She said she could still hear them cry at night and was haunted by their faces in her dreams.
Over a period of a few weeks, this deeply wounded girl slowly began to trust me, and I could tell she really looked forward to our times together. I eventually began telling her about Jesus, His love for her, and His life and death. She had heard some Bible stories from her grandmother when she was younger, but for the first time she began to open up and ask questions about how God could forgive her, and maybe even help her to find her twins. It was an awesome day for both of us when she finally prayed and asked Jesus to come into her heart and wash away her sin, the pain it had caused, and the pain she had endured at the hands of others. It was a gift beyond compare, and she received it with utter joy.
When we finished praying, she also had a gift for me. It was a bag of marijuana. She said, “I want you to take this. I’m not going to sell it and I’m not going to smoke it anymore.” We both rejoiced in her newfound freedom, and she resolved then and there to live a transformed life—by the power of Christ.
After we finished talking, I put her “gift” in the trunk of my car until it was time to leave work. Then I drove home, all the while trying to figure out what to do with my stash. I was afraid it was too much to flush down the toilet without clogging up the drain, and I definitely couldn’t put it out in the trash for fear someone might find it and use it. Then suddenly, I had a bright idea.
We had a small garage that was unattached to the house, so I thought that would be a perfect place to burn the stuff and be rid of it once and for all. I put a metal bucket in the middle of the garage floor, emptied the contents of the “gift bag” into it, and lit a match. My first impulse was to step outside, but then thinking it would be irresponsible to leave a fire unattended, I dutifully stood next to the bucket while billows of reefer smoke filled the garage. Mere moments before I had completed my mission, my husband—just home from work and expecting to find an empty garage—opened the door with a horrified expression on his face.
My answer to “What in the world are you doing?” was giddy laughter and a rather garbled praise report of a soul saved and a pastor’s wife feeling no pain.
Lesson Learned: Never underestimate the impact of one individual yielded to God, or one heart truly listening to another.
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