TERRI PADDON
I always tried to be a good person

I always tried to be a good person. I followed the rule: Don’t hurt anyone else with words or actions.

When I became sexually active, I was still convinced I was a good person. I wasn’t hurting anyone else, was I? It didn’t occur to me how I would hurt my parents if they knew – or how it could hurt an unplanned baby who would not have a loving two-parent family. Nor did it occur to me that now I could never have one lifelong love with one man.

And when I used drugs, I wasn’t hurting anyone else, was I? I was still a good person. After all, I worked with migrant children, I coached kids’ softball teams, and I picked up every stray animal I had room for. I went through life pretty recklessly for quite a while.

After I settled down, I married in 1977. But our marriage deteriorated over the next several years until finally, without my consent or knowledge, my husband took our daughter away a week before she turned four. He took her back to his homeland, a country that was in the middle of a war. My family and I did everything we could to get her back. People in her city were dying in the bombings. I didn’t know from day to day if she was still alive. For two years, I lived with the intense, physical, debilitating pain that comes with the loss of a child. Finally, just before her sixth birthday, we brought Eliza back to North America. At the airport, the moment I took her in my arms, the pain disappeared. Soon, in its place, came post-traumatic stress syndrome, followed by 13 years of battling depression.

Once during this time, while I was still single, I became pregnant. Without much thought, I had an abortion. What had I done? Wasn’t I a good person? How could I do this? What had possessed me to kill my child? I had spent years saving and raising one child, only to destroy another. I hated myself. My depression grew worse.

What I didn’t realize was that during these bleak years, the groundwork was being laid for a new life. There were friends, people from a church, who had spent the past 10 years praying for my family and me. These same people were showing me, by the examples of their own lives, the peace and richness that come to people who commit their lives to Jesus Christ. I envied them. I wanted what they had. But that was impossible. By now, I was convinced I was worthless. Eventually I had to take medical leave from teaching because dealing with myself was a full-time job.

In September of 1998, my load was heavier than it had ever been, and I couldn’t carry it any longer. One Friday afternoon, I knelt in my living room and cried to God. I told Him, “God, help me. Give me Your strength because I can’t do this any longer. I’ll give You myself, my family, my future, everything I have – it’s all yours. I need to be a good mother and wife, and I can’t anymore. I know You can heal me of this depression if You want to, so I ask You to take it from me. Please, Jesus, come into my life.”

In those minutes of prayer, Jesus Christ took away all of my guilt, pain and depression. I could almost feel them physically leave me. I got up as a new person.

In the past two-and-a-half years, my depression has never returned, and by the grace of God it never will. Jesus Christ also brought a change in my behaviour toward my step-daughter Gillian, from wicked stepmother to loving parent. I didn’t have to work at it; it just happened automatically. I’ve become a better wife to Robert, my patient, loving husband. I have the ability to teach again. And I have had the opportunity to explain all this to friends who wonder about the change in me.

Following Jesus Christ doesn’t mean life becomes a cakewalk. Things still happen to us, because we live in a broken world. I still have deep sadness for the child I killed, who would have been 10 years old now. Because I lived without Christ for so long, I’m still susceptible to bad ideas, so I use God’s instruction book for life – the Bible – to guide me. I know what awful consequences follow when I go my own way instead of God’s.

When you give yourself to Christ, you may not be healed of illness. You will not be spared pain. But there will be miracles in your life, those God chooses for you. I had an oppressive, heavy darkness inside me. Now I have, Jesus, the Light of the world.

Do you doubt what I say? Do you think I may be misreading everything? Do you wonder if Jesus is real, if following him really makes any difference? Ask me. Ask any of my family. Ask the dozens of other people in my church who have been transformed. There is no other explanation for what has happened to me than God Himself.

Terri Paddon is a member of Central Heights MB Church in Abbotsford, B.C.