by Anne Beiler
“Shh, listen,” she said with a serious voice. “Jesus is speaking to us.”
“He is?” I asked her, playing along. “Hmm, what’s he saying?”
“He said we’re going to have a little baby sister this year.”
My heart skipped a beat, and immediately I knew LaWonna was right. Not long after that Jonas and I discovered another baby was on the way.
During the January after Angie’s death, I only went farther and farther down. I prayed for God to send me someone to talk to, perhaps another lady who could understand what I went through. Even discovering I was pregnant couldn’t chase away the shadows that taunted me.
One Sunday my despair drove me to the altar at church, where I knelt and closed my eyes, asking God to help me make sense out of my emotions. I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. I looked up—my pastor stood there, concern etched on his face. He prayed with me. I wept. He knelt beside me there at the altar, his arm around me. For the first time in months, I felt comforted. Eventually we both stood up, I to return to my seat, he to climb the stairs back up to the pulpit. He hugged me one more time.
“I love you, Anne,” he said kindly. His words didn’t surprise me—our young church had grown close, and we always told each other, “I love you.”
“I know you do. I love you, too,” I said. Our congregation loved our pastor. It seems nearly impossible for me to describe the complete respect and admiration all of us at our church felt for him. His preaching seemed inspired, his pastoral care for our flock Christlike. Besides those things, everyone simply loved being with him—he made us feel at home.
“No, Anne,” he said, looking into my eyes. “I love you in a special way. Please call me. We need to talk.” That said, he walked back up to face the congregation.
Walking back to my seat, my mind spun. A special way? What did he mean by that? Did he love me that way because Angie died and as a part of the congregation he knew I needed a special love? I stood beside Jonas, finally feeling comforted but also confused. Something didn’t seem right.
I was excited that LaWonna had moved home from California with her family, and I got caught up in helping her unpack, but soon I realized it was getting late. Time to head home. Exercising came at the top of my New Year’s resolutions, so after bundling up and walking outside, I prepared for the run home. The night sky shone clear, the air felt crisp, and my breath puffed out in foggy bursts. I rounded the corner into our housing development and mentally prepared for the long hill ahead.
Over halfway up I noticed headlights coming down toward me. No through roads crossed our development, so very few cars drove down that hill. I heard the gravel crunching and couldn’t tell if the driver saw me running, so I stepped over into the snowy shoulder as the vehicle passed.
As I stepped back up onto the road, I misjudged the ledge on the side and stepped right on the lip. I heard the sound of a small twig cracking, then a searing pain shot up my leg. Soon I realized I hadn’t stepped on a twig—something had snapped in my foot. I fell to the ground at the side of the road, clutching my foot in agony, angry at myself for not bringing my cell phone, wondering how in the world I could make it home.
I told Jonas our pastor offered to meet with me to talk about Angie. He seemed fine with the idea—we respected our pastor and felt that if he thought I needed counseling, well, then it probably made sense. But I didn’t tell Jonas what Pastor said to me at the altar that day. It was the first of many secrets.
“No, Anne, I love you in a special way.”
I drove up through the woods to our church. The trees stood bleak on that winter day, looking cold and very much like stakes driven into the earth. The parking lot sat empty save two or three cars; after all, it was only a weekday. Entering my pastor’s office seemed strange—I’d never gone for counseling before that and felt needy and weak that someone else had to take time out of his busy schedule to walk me through my problems simply because I couldn’t deal with them on my own. I knocked on the thick wooden door.
“Come in, Anne,” he said.
I immediately felt safe just going inside his office. Pastor walked to me from behind his desk and hugged me for a long time while I cried. He motioned towards a seat, and I felt so comforted in that chair across from him. His eyes looked concerned for me. He asked me so many questions. We talked for an hour or two. I couldn’t believe how good it felt to talk about Angie, about the day she died, about how I felt. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of meeting with Pastor before and thought to myself, This must be God’s way of answering my prayer about having someone to talk to.
When the time came for me to leave, he walked me to the door. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next: Pastor gave me another long hug, but this time when I looked up to thank him, he kissed me square on the mouth, a kiss he held in place for what seemed an awkward eternity. Finally he pulled away and said, “It’s obvious to me, Anne, that you have needs in your life that cannot be met by Jonas. But I can meet them.”
I nodded dumbly, not knowing what else to do. Somehow I ended up outside feeling very guilty and confused. Everything seemed cast in doubt—Why would my pastor do that? I only wanted to talk about Angie. And why would he say those things to me? As I fled to my car, only one thing seemed certain in my mind: I could never tell Jonas about what had just happened; he would never believe me.
I sat in the cold, trying to figure out what to do about my foot. I hoped to get a ride from someone driving up the hill; after all, my house sat only a few hundred yards away. But no cars came by. Eventually I stood up. One step at a time, I told myself. One step at a time.
I could place hardly any weight on the damaged foot, but I began making progress. After fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes finally I arrived at the front door. The door stayed put, locked. I rang the bell and heard someone coming to answer.
“Anne, what’s wrong?” Jonas said, looking perplexed as he opened the door.
I practically whimpered. “I hurt my foot. Please carry me.”
Jonas picked me up and carried me gently through the house to the sofa. He placed me there, propped my foot up on pillows, and got me something to drink. He gently took off my shoe and sock—the pain split my leg in two.
“Just cut it off,” I moaned, trying to joke away the pain but nearly serious in my request.
Finally there it rested, my naked foot, bruised and swelling.
I met with Pastor quite often, usually at restaurants over a cup of coffee. While I felt uncomfortable after our first session, I desperately needed the time to talk about Angie, to work through my hurt, and Pastor seemed one of the few people in my life willing to just sit there and listen. Maybe I imagined things, I told myself. Maybe he didn’t do anything inappropriate. After all, everything else about our meetings seemed so out in the open. I found myself reasoning everything away in order to spend time with someone who comforted me.
When I told Pastor at one of our meetings early in 1976 that I was pregnant, he became furious. He thought the whole idea of getting pregnant so soon after Angie’s death was ridiculous and selfish. I never told him, but I felt happy about that little life growing inside of me. It hurt me deeply that he wasn’t happy for me, but instead of questioning his motives, I questioned my own, wondering if getting pregnant so soon after Angie’s death was the right thing to do.
Three months passed since our first meeting. One day Pastor asked me to meet him farther away than usual at the next town down the highway. We met in a diner and shared discussion over coffee. Then he said he needed to drive me somewhere. We drove a few miles away to a hotel, one of those single-story seedy-looking places you find a lot these days in between small towns. He asked me to follow him. I grunted as I climbed out of the car—my daughter LaVale (although I didn’t know she was a girl at the time) was growing inside of me, and the added weight had begun making it difficult to get around.
I followed him into one of the rooms, feeling increasingly uneasy and confused. Th
e door slammed behind me. Light filtered in around the curtain edges, but besides that the room was completely dark.
I sat in the doctor’s office, the x-rays of my foot shining on the wall. The doctor explained to me why I didn’t need a cast, why an air cast worked just as well in my case, why I needed to rest my foot as much as possible.
“But it’s been a couple of weeks, Doc,” I said, feeling discouraged. “Why does it still feel so tender? When will I be able to run again?”
He chuckled.
“Some things take a long time to heal,” he said. “Some breaks stay tender for longer than we want them to. And you,” he said with a mischievous look in his eye, “are not a young pup anymore.”
“I know, Doc, I know. But right now it feels like I’ll never be the same again.”
“I know, Mrs. Beiler,” he said politely. “You know, it would have healed a lot faster if you would have come in right after you hurt it. But you waited, what, two days? Hobbling around all that time on a broken foot? You did some extra damage by not coming in right away. But don’t worry—now that you’ve come for help, you’ll be fine. It’ll heal. It just takes time.”
When Angie died, I thought I knew despair, but lying there on the bed in that dark motel room, I realized despair takes many forms, contains many different layers. Just when I thought I’d found the center of my despair with Angie’s death, its rotten core split open, revealing hidden depths.
“No one’s ever going to believe you,” he said, sitting beside me in the car. “You know that, don’t you?”
I thought he was probably right: who would believe me? He was the well-respected pastor of a loving congregation, I the obviously unstable woman who lost a child less than a year ago.
I know there were choices I could have made differently that day. Some people may wonder why I kept meeting with him, why I got in the car with him, why I agreed to go into the hotel room. I’ve asked myself those questions hundreds of times, and it’s difficult to give an answer that makes sense. What I can say is that I completely trusted my pastor and that, at the time, he was the only person who cared enough to listen to my sadness. I was broken, grieving, and extremely vulnerable. I trusted him completely. It’s what can happen when people in that position abuse their power—they can lead people down roads they never would have gone down on their own. Many years later I discovered this is called “abuse of spiritual power.”
Sitting in that car, I thought to myself, What just happened? Why did I let that happen? I was so emotionally broken at that point, I felt I was beyond repair. From that moment on, heavy chains of guilt and self-loathing entwined themselves around me, and when I resolved to tell no one, I locked those chains firmly on myself. Telling the truth about what happened was the key to freedom, but I quickly tossed it aside, didn’t even allow myself to look at that key for over six years.
CHAPTER THREE
A Homecoming
Make all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.
—JOHN WESLEY
Photographs. Look at those pictures of times gone by and you are suddenly transported to that very spot, that very moment. When I look at pictures of myself from the early eighties (and there are few—I avoided cameras like a mouse hiding from a cat), there is the usual chuckle at the styles and haircuts of the day. But there’s also something else I see, something others might quickly skim over: my eyes.
There’s one in particular I noticed the other day, a picture taken during one of Jonas’s family gatherings, where everyone else is eating around the table while I lean up against the kitchen counter, finishing my plate. I’m not sure who took the picture, but they caught me in midbite, raising the fork to my mouth. I’m wearing a maroon outfit with a black belt. My hair is just beginning to show hints of gray. Caught unawares by the mystery photographer, I was unable to put on the usual smile and appearance of cheer, and my eyes unveil the true state of my spirit: no spark, lifeless, fatigued, wishing those days would end.
Imagine walking along through a beautiful field, admiring the wildlife and the flowers and a blue sky that almost lifts you off the ground. The smell of honeysuckle and the sound of birds singing. Then imagine suddenly falling into a pit so deep that the sky is nothing more than a pinpoint of light and the only sound you can hear is the rigid silence of the earth. Imagine being badly injured from the fall and barely able to crawl forward, but soon you see that even crawling is useless—the pit is too deep and all sides rise in walls, sheer cliffs. There is no way out. You lie down, giving in, prepared to die. Imagine lying there for six years.
But then imagine a sudden deliverance, waking to the morning light, the feel of grass under your bare feet and the smell of spring, the hint of freedom. From 1976 to 1982 I lay at the bottom of that pit, thinking the only thing that could save me was death. I wanted to die! But then, suddenly, I found a way out, discovered a way to the outside world. I was rescued.
The year was 1986, and I sat in a warm bubble bath in Texas, reflecting on my life. Somehow, happiness had returned to me after Angie’s death, six long years of abuse of power and trust by my pastor, the splitting of our church, and the division of our extended family. I’ll tell the story of those ten years from 1976 to 1986 at a later time, but for now it’s enough to say that I sat in the bath feeling completely at peace. My marriage felt restored, and Jonas and I experienced a newfound faith in God and church. Our family lived together in harmony. In the mornings, after the girls left for school, I would often retreat to the comfort of a hot bath. Sitting there on that particular morning, all alone and completely relaxed, I found myself in a mental conversation with God.
“Lord, this is really nice. I love this house. I love the last three years we’ve spent recuperating here. I feel like a good mom again. There’s peace in our family, and Jonas and I get along so well.
“But is this all there is? It seems there must be more to life than this—to be honest, I’m getting kind of bored.”
I stared at the ceiling, the bubbles fizzing around me as they popped, the warm water massaging my muscles. I thought about the mechanic shop that Jonas ran and his newfound desire to provide counseling for couples who were going through struggles like we went through. After all, good counseling got us through, and we both felt the hope that someday we might provide the same support for others.
“There must be more to life than just coasting by on peace and happiness. There must be a greater purpose.”
Looking back, I realize now that God used those years in Texas to begin showing us that our purpose would be to give financially to people and ministries in need. On one particular Sunday, Jonas and I sat in our church listening to a speaker talk about tithing. Jonas and I always gave 10 percent of what we made to the church—we both felt that was the right thing to do. But on that particular day the speaker said something we could both relate to: if you don’t feel that you are making what you’re worth, perhaps you should try giving 10 percent, not on what you are actually making, but on what you feel you should be making, and trust that God will help you reach that new income level.
Jonas and I laughed to each other as we talked about the sermon on the way home, but there was a serious side as well: we were always so tight on money, living paycheck to paycheck. Yet Jonas worked very hard and was the best mechanic and auto body repairman in the area: I knew he was worth much more than what we were bringing in.
“So what do you think you’re worth?” I asked Jonas. At that time he made around $250 per week.
“I think I’m worth at least $500 per week,” he said with a smile.
Right there we decided to start giving $50 a week instead of $25 and to trust that God would send in the money we needed.
Two weeks later we were still giving the higher amount but knew we wouldn’t be able to for much longer. In those days it was common practice for Jonas to receive short-term bank loans to cover the money he needed at his business for parts, just until he received payment. In order to cover the
increased giving, we had to dip into these advance payments. At that time we spent about $25 per week on groceries, and the increased giving definitely affected us. Then a man came to Jonas’s body shop looking for some help. He also ran a body shop and needed another employee. He needed the work done fast and was willing to take Jonas on full-time while still allowing Jonas to do his own work on the side.
“If you decide to come work for me,” the man said, “I’ll pay you $500 a week.”
Amazing! Yet sitting there in the tub, I was still too close to that event to see the larger significance it held. As the steam rose around me, I whispered quietly to God, “I’m willing to do whatever, I mean whatever, you want me to do. I don’t know what it is, but I’m willing. You’ve given me so much, restored so much of my life that I thought would never heal. Let me give back, if possible.”
I didn’t get an answer right there in the bathtub, but during the next few weeks something began stirring inside of Jonas and me, a feeling of restlessness, as if the time had come to move on. Then came a trip up north, back to where we both grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and during the long drive I couldn’t help but feel our path must be leading us back there again. After the trip, we returned to Texas and I remember sitting down at the kitchen table with Jonas. I told him I had the strangest notion during the drive that maybe we should move home to Pennsylvania. Jonas looked at me with a smile and said he felt the same thing.
Just the thought of returning to Lancaster filled me with so many conflicting emotions. On the one hand I felt almost giddy with excitement at the thought of going home to those old familiar hills and fields, favorite haunts, old friends, and especially family. Yet Lancaster County still held so many other, more painful, associations: Angie’s death only ten years earlier, the dividing of our church which once seemed so close. What would people think of me? My hometown is a small, tightly knit community, and by then it seemed that everyone knew everything about my life. God restored so much, but could he bring back all of our old friends with whom we parted ways so painfully? Still, I remembered the commitment I made to God, that I would do whatever he asked us to do, and both Jonas and I felt God was asking us to move home.