I was in the flower aisle at Walmart when another amazing encounter happened. I was holding Micah, and Virgil was over by the azaleas with Willow. Just then I saw an acquaintance, Shearl, pushing her son Mickey in his wheelchair. Mickey, who was in his twenties, had been severely injured in a car accident. Shearl and I made some small talk before she said, “You know, sometime I’d really like to hear your story.”
Usually I would have said, “sure, anytime,” but for some reason I blurted out, “How about now?”
There are times when, if the situation calls for it, I’ll abridge my story a bit. I might just say that when I was younger, I felt really worthless, instead of going into all the details of my abortion. But in this case, I had the urge to tell them everything. And so I did, right there in the flower aisle. I handed Micah over to Virgil, and I gave Shearl and her son the unabridged version.
Toward the end of it, when I was talking about how great God is, Mickey started to cry. Then he was crying uncontrollably. Something I said must have really affected him.
“You gonna be okay, Mickey?” Shearl asked him. “Do you want Crystal to stop?”
I heard Mickey push out the words, “No. Keep talking.”
So I did. And when I was done, Shearl hugged me and thanked me and said, “We are believers. We believe in a God of healing and miracles.” Shearl explained that when Mickey was taken to the hospital after his accident, she came very close to losing him. His heart stopped twice, and he was revived both times.
Then Mickey looked up at me with tears running down his face and struggled to speak again.
“But I didn’t see God,” he said in his broken voice. “I didn’t see God.”
My heart swelled with love for him. It swelled with God’s love for him. I knelt down and got eye level with him and put my hands on his.
“Mickey, I don’t have all the answers,” I said. “I don’t know why you had to go through what you did. I don’t know why your accident happened or why you have to struggle, but I do know one thing. God’s plan is perfect. It was through the trash in my life that God glorified Himself the most.”
And then I added, “God is real. He is real.”
I said that again. And again. Over and over.
Mickey never took his eyes off me. Then I asked if I could pray over him. There in the flower aisle I laid my hands on Mickey, and Shearl put her hands on him, too. And as shoppers passed and gave us funny looks, we glorified God’s presence in our lives, praying for healing for Mickey and thanking God for meeting us in the aisles of our local Walmart.
Shearl would later tell me my talk meant a great deal to Mickey. He is a remarkable young man who believes with all his heart that God is going to let him walk again, and no one who knows him doubts that he will. But in his darker moments his faith is tested, as it is with all of us.
“Sometimes,” Shearl said, “people need to be reminded that God is real.”
I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT Mickey a lot since our talk in the flower aisle, and I think he made me realize a very profound truth about my experience. In fact, that truth is at the very heart of God’s message to us. Yes, God gave me the miraculous gift of His presence and His wisdom, and because of my time in heaven I now overflow with excitement and passion for Him. The love I felt pass between us changed me forever. I am beyond lucky to have had this experience, and I can’t even imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t.
But here’s the thing—you don’t have to die and go to heaven to experience God.
Look at Mickey. He was in the same spot I was in—in a hospital, teetering between life and death—and yet he didn’t get to see God. But still, he loves God with every fiber of his being, and he believes God will help him walk again. His passion is every bit as great as mine, and maybe even greater, and he didn’t even get to stand in God’s presence! Mickey’s incredible faith touches my heart and stirs my soul, and he is not the only one. I have seen that burning passion in other Christians who didn’t need to go to heaven to know that God is real—to love Him mightily and be His warrior on Earth.
Which brings me to my great friend Amber.
Amber’s passion for God blows me away. She’s young and beautiful and full of life, and all the kids in her fourth-grade class just love her to death. She also mentors a bunch of teenage girls, and people call her the Teen Whisperer. When you’re around her you see what a living, breathing thing her faith is. What Amber understands, and what she has helped me understand, is that everyone has a story—everyone has a testimony. Every one of us is born in sin and endures pain and suffering, and every one of us can be freed from that burden when we realize we are more—so much more—than just that pain and suffering. When we see the greatness of God in even our very darkest moments, then we can be free. “Even the crappiest crap we go through glorifies God,” Amber likes to say, in her Amber way. “God makes beauty from ashes, and the devil hates when He does that.”
God has made beauty from the ashes of Amber’s life. She has seen His greatness in her darkest moments. Amber proves every day you don’t have to die and go to heaven to believe in God and be His warrior, and for that reason I asked Amber if she would share her testimony—her amazingly personal and powerful testimony—with you. She agreed.
Amber is a Texas girl, and from a very early age she knew she was filled with the Holy Spirit. But, like me, she had a rough childhood. She grew up in an atmosphere of chaos and dysfunction. Through it all, she had a desire to live her life for God, because deep down she knew she was created for more than what she was growing up with. And so she fought off all the hardships that were testing her faith. While all the other high school freshman girls were smoking and drinking and having sex and even trying drugs, Amber stayed away from all that. She went to a party here and there, but she was always the designated driver.
Then, toward the end of her freshman year, she gave in to the pressures of life. She allowed the bitterness and resentment she felt about her situation to turn into blatant rebellion. She quit cheerleading and missed so much school that she had to go to court twice. She smoked pot and became promiscuous. She popped pills and went on drinking binges. She got into physical fights with her mother and moved out when she was seventeen. She let the anger inside her—and the lies of the enemy—drag her down.
In her senior year, she got pregnant.
Amber didn’t believe in abortion. In the fourth grade, when all the students wrote letters to President Clinton, hers got published in a newspaper. Most kids told the president how much they liked him or how much they wanted to visit the White House; Amber wrote about her belief that life begins at conception. Even so, when she got pregnant, she feared that having a child that young would doom her to the kind of life her parents had—to poverty and fighting and unhappiness. She believed the lie that she could have an abortion and never look back. Against all of her instincts, she rounded up $450 in cash and went to an abortion clinic in a town three hours away, crying in the backseat the whole way up. She didn’t tell anyone about it except her mom and her boyfriend, but when her eleven-year-old sister, Lacey, overheard her talking about it, she prayed and prayed that the abortion wouldn’t work.
Amber sat in the clinic waiting room with its circular couches and magazine racks. She sat near the front door, away from everyone else. She felt the same instinct I felt: Get up and go home now. But her body seemed like it weighed a million pounds. She went through with the abortion and walked out into the harsh sunlight afterward feeling deeply ashamed. She didn’t go to school for a week. She lay in bed and cried and slept and cried.
But one month later, Amber noticed she wasn’t getting her period. She’d broken up with her boyfriend and stopped having sex, so she was pretty confused. She took a pregnancy test just to make sure she wasn’t still pregnant. The test result was positive.
She was pregnant.
I’ll let Amber take the story from here.
I knew this had to be some kind of mistake. It wasn’t li
ke I was the Virgin Mary or anything. I really didn’t understand what was happening. After I took the test I lay in my bed all night and cried in fear and confusion. As I lay there, I noticed a little lump in my belly. I touched it a couple of times, and I felt several small, quick flutters. Looking back now, I realize God allowed me to feel those flutters, because He knew I hadn’t convinced myself that what was growing inside me was a child. In that moment, in my bed, it was like God was telling me, “You cannot deny that I am the giver of life.”
But I was still really scared and confused, and I got my mom to take me to the ER in Amarillo. I got a sonogram, which showed I was fourteen weeks pregnant—and that the baby seemed fine.
I called the abortion clinic to find out what happened, and they said they’d never seen anything like this before. They said maybe it was twins, and we only got one. But I didn’t really need any answers from them. I knew what was happening. This was God giving me a second chance.
But then, at twenty weeks, I woke up in a pool of blood. My mom rushed me back to the ER. At twenty-one weeks, I went into labor. The doctors told me my early labor was the result of a bicornuate uterus I was born with and didn’t have anything to do with the abortion. They also told me my baby wasn’t viable, that it had zero chances to survive. I didn’t want to hear it. Right in the middle of labor I got out of bed and on my knees and prayed to God to let me keep this child.
After ten hours of labor, I gave birth to a daughter. The child was alive but struggling to breathe. She was less than a foot long, and she weighed fifteen ounces.
The nurses took my baby to the nursery, cut and pieced a tiny triangular piece of cloth on her as a diaper, and wrapped her in a pink-and-blue-striped blanket. Then they put her in an incubator. All the nurses were surprised my baby was even alive. One of the nurses asked me if I wanted to hold her. In my emotional agony, I pushed out a “no.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hold her; it’s just that in those moments I thought, This is it, God, this is what’s going to break me. This I can’t handle. There is no way I can hold her and love her and then let her be taken away. I’d had to deal with so much garbage in my life, and now this? I was filled with anger and resentment toward God. What kind of God would toy with me like this? Wasn’t this supposed to be my second chance?
In a blur, my family and friends came and went, giving me their love and support. My best friend Lauren, who knew me so well, didn’t say a word. She just curled up on the end of my bed and lay there with me. And all that time, my younger sister, Lacey, was nearby in the nursery, holding my tiny daughter. Lacey, who had prayed for weeks for my baby to live, was experiencing the joy and the gift of an answered prayer.
A nurse asked again if I wanted to hold my baby, and again I said no. No one thought she could survive much longer, and I didn’t want to look at her and then never see her again. My friends and family filed into the nursery, saying their good-byes to the child. I just lay in my room in total silence. I was done, finished, at my breaking point.
I didn’t even realize it, but thirty minutes had now passed since my baby was born. Somehow she was still hanging on. That’s when a grief counselor came over to talk to me.
“Amber, I want you to think really hard about this,” she said. “Years from now, are you going to regret not holding your daughter?”
In a flash, I realized she was right.
“Oh, my God, yes, I’ll hold her!” I yelled out. A nurse brought my baby to me bundled in her pink-and-blue blanket.
I couldn’t believe how tiny and fragile she was. She wasn’t much bigger than the palm of my hand, and her body and limbs were so skinny. But I was surprised she looked like a baby—a perfect baby that happened to be too little. I could hear her taking these tiny, gasping breaths for air. A nurse told me this was because her lungs weren’t developed. I just held her and stared at her and loved her. And as I lifted up parts of the blanket to gaze over this perfect little creation, one thought flooded my mind: This is the life I tried to end.
In the pain and grief of that moment I didn’t understand that God was showing me His redemptive love.
And then I heard my daughter take one last tiny gasp for air.
I handed her back to the nurse, who carried her out of the room. Just a bit later the nurse came back to my room and held my hand.
“Amber,” she said, “she is gone to be with Jesus.”
My baby hung on for forty-two minutes—just long enough for me to hold her.
I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that God gave me a second chance to see His mighty hand create beauty from ashes. I know that those few minutes with my daughter changed my life. They added another beautiful part to my purpose and destiny. My daughter showed me a real love—the true love of my Father. And now I would never give back any of the pain and suffering and grief I felt, because it all led to that blessed miracle—when I got to hold my daughter for those few minutes.
Through it all, God showed me He holds the key to life and death. He took away my crippling shame and sorrow and replaced it with the powerful truth of His redemption. There is so much I still don’t understand about God. There are times when I still wrestle with Him, but in the end I always come back to the truth of knowing that He is good. He showed me I am more than the pain and suffering in my life. I am His perfect creation, and He is always there. He is my redemptive love.
And now my baby is part of my testimony.
Her name is Kylie Ryan.
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 area, with two twin beds, a bunk bed in the corner, and a chair or two—and people were 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 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 salva
tion is widening. Chains are being broken everywhere.
I was already on way to my own room when another young woman, Kelli, 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 Kelli 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.
MANY 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.
Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again Page 20