I AM Somebody's Girl!

By the time I was four years old my family had settled into our new house at 610 Georgia Avenue. My first memory of being at my new home was that of sweeping the sidewalk. Nanny had taught me to sweep when I lived at her house. Sweeping made me feel like a big girl even though I was only moving the dust from one side of the sidewalk to another. Still, I was showing that dust who was boss.

I was lost in my four-year-old thoughts when suddenly I stopped sweeping. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk and let the gentle wind embrace me. I breathed in the sweet odors of nature, the earth warmed by the Sun, the grass with the wildflowers scattered in it. I felt a stirring of an awakening in my spirit. I became aware of something I could neither see nor touch nor taste nor hear.

It was then I said my first prayer. I spoke to the One who I believed was speaking to me. "God, I forgot about you for a while, but I don't ever want to not think about you again." Even though I was only a child I knew that I had been heard. Now, so many decades past, I know that I was heard because He granted my request.

It seemed as if the enemy had come into the garden of my heart when I was very young and planted a weed--the weed of doubt; the weed of lies. The doubt that anyone cared about me; the lie that I was nobody's girl. But now there was another seed that had been planted. This seed was to grow into a beautiful flower, the flower of truth, in time filling my garden with the fragrance of the love of God.

The weed and the flower grew together in the soil of my heart. Sometime the weed seemed to choke out the flower, filling my mind with ideas of how I could make myself known. My desperation to find my own significance overwhelmed at times the gentle fragrance of God's love. Then once again the gentle breeze would stir in me the memory that I was loved--not because of what I could do or because of what I didn't do; no, I was loved because the Creator who took the primeval dust of the world and formed it into a man had chosen to love me.

Still, the weed and the flower grew together in the garden of my heart. They grew together until I woke the second time in the Recovery Room after my brain surgery. That was when I saw the second vision in the Recovery Room. I saw Jesus and He was asking me, "Sarah, do you want to be well?"

I'll tell you more tomorrow,,,