The Path of Forgiveness, A Choice for Love

"We must never forget that spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love. The heart decides and what it decides is all that really matters. In every love lies the seed of our growth. Those who are truly enlightened, those whose souls are illuminated by love have been able to overcome all of the inhibitions and preconceptions of their era. They have been able to sing, to laugh, and to pray out loud. They have danced and shared what the saints call the 'madness of saintliness'. They have been joyful because those who love conquer the world and have no fear of loss. True love is an act of total surrender."~ Paul Coelho

Spring has arrived in all of its glory. The sights, sounds and smells are a feast for the senses. The sound of birds chirping is music to the ears and invites us to greet each new day with joy. Formerly stark and vacant tree branches are now covered in buds ready to burst forth with new life as the vivid green grass startles us awake from a long winter of hibernation. How wonderful it is to be alive!!

On Tuesday morning, I spoke at The Church in the Falls with the women's weekly bible study group. I was invited to share my story and any thoughts about what I had learned. I was greeted with open arms and hearts by a wonderful group of women. I shared some of my thoughts on forgiveness and later answered their thoughtful and compassionate questions. I never cease to be amazed at the love that people share so freely with a stranger. I am humbled and forever grateful because God continues to extend Love to me through the hearts of so many. Thank you, my new friends. Thank you...

Here are the thoughts that I shared on The Path of Forgiveness: A Choice for Love~

My story is a love story. It is a story of a common woman hurled into an uncommon situation. It was the search for Life and Love that is the essence of my story. My search led me to learn of love beyond what I thought existed in this world. It was found in the hearts of my family and friends, some of whom I had yet to meet. I have felt upheld by the incredible and far reaching love of many caring and compassionate people in this world. My story could have become just another story of victimization by cruelty and hate but there was a truth that lay much deeper. I count myself to be blessed beyond measure because I have found more Life and Love than I ever dreamed existed. I have come today to share what I have learned about the path of forgiveness, a choice for Love.

On July 10, 2004, I was viciously attacked by my estranged husband when I went to our home to prepare it for placing on the market for sale. In an insane attempt to control my future and alleviate the pain that he felt at my leaving, Bill Slabaugh ordered nitric acid on the internet and patiently waited for the perfect opportunity to spray me with its liquid fire and burn me beyond recognition so that "no one would ever want me."

Like all of us, I have been on a long journey to understand who God is and what life is all about. As a child, I remember reading my dad’s bible to find the truth that it contained. I would only read the words in red because they were Jesus’ words so I knew that I could trust that they were true. I was blessed to have a varied experience when it came to spiritual teaching as I went to a catholic church with my Aunt Betty, a country Baptist church with neighbors, a Methodist church with my family, and finally attending various Fundamentalist churches as an adult. I have read and studied and sought to know God and to find purpose for my life. Through my varied experiences, I have learned to open my mind and heart to the reality that God is everywhere and truth comes to all of us who seek it.

I was married at a mere 19 years of age and had 3 children within 4 years. I was invested in raising my children in a home built on Christian principles and devoted my life to motherhood and family. There was only one problem and it overshadowed the lofty goals that I set for myself. Love was not present in my marriage. I prayed and studied the Bible religiously. I sought counseling and worked to love my husband as I felt that I should and prayed that one day he would love me back. Although we were both devoted to our children and wanted to have this loving Christian family, we mixed like oil and water and nothing was able to bring to us the unity and love that I desired. It was a long painful 17 years before I let the marriage die but in the process I learned the most valuable lesson of my life. I learned that God loved me. I hope that doesn’t sound trite because it is not! While watching a movie called, "Always", with a couple of friends, I finally heard what God had been trying to tell me for a very long time. In this movie, a character played by Richard Dreyfuss is a pilot who dies unexpectedly in a plane crash. He has trouble leaving this realm because he needs to express to his girlfriend something that he had always been unable to say. In this scene, his girlfriend, who is also a pilot, is trying to land a plane in a thunderstorm and it looks as if she will also meet the same fate. Dreyfuss’ character leans forward from behind her and whispers, "I have loved you. always." At the moment that he uttered these words in the movie, I gasped because I got it! To the core of my being, I felt God’s complete and unconditional love for me and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was how He had always loved me. I was such a worker... always trying to be good enough to be worthy of love. To learn that God’s love for me was contingent on nothing was astounding and life changing. From that moment forward, it was settled for me- nothing could ever separate me from the love of God. That was 16 years ago and I have rested in this truth from that day on and have never questioned it again.

Soon after leaving my first husband, I met Bill Slabaugh at a nearby Methodist church. He was a handsome and distinguished man, very active in the church and a Sunday school teacher for my two daughters. We were immediately attracted to one another but Bill did not ask me out for several months after our meeting. His personality was the exact opposite of my first husband. Bill was very quiet and reserved. It was much later before I realized that he was actually very aloof and could be quite cold and distant. My first husband had a strong need to control every area of my life. Bill, on the other hand, encouraged me to make all of my own decisions and stand on my own two feet. At that point in my life, I found this to be very attractive. It was years before I realized that he was so emotionally detached that he truly had no interest in knowing anything about me or being involved in any area of my life. We did not share any of our life including expenses. Everything about our lives was separate except that we lived under the same roof. After 10 years of marriage I realized that I was living with a stranger who I was trying desperately to please and, once again, hoping would one day love me back.
I woke up on a Saturday morning on May 29, 2004, sensing a overwhelming desire to leave the marriage and move on with life. I had a strong sense of the beauty and joy in every area of my life except my marriage and living what I felt was a lie became unacceptable to me. I shared my thoughts and feelings with Bill that morning still holding out a small bit of hope that there was a way for us to bring real love to our relationship. I told him that all I really wanted from marriage was friendship and companionship and that I could no longer accept anything less. Bill’s reaction surprised and confused me. This stoic reserved man began sobbing and continued to cry for what seemed like hours. The strange thing was, I had a very distinct feeling that his cries weren’t real, as if he was pretending to cry. I was very confused and troubled by this and remember quietly standing next to him with my hand on his shoulder wondering what was really going on inside of him. I reassured him that if he could get to know me and we could become friends, there was still hope. I wasn’t leaving him for another man. I was leaving him for me and my desire to live every part of my life with truth and love.

The next 6 weeks were a whirlwind of Bill’s increasing obsession with losing me. No amount of reassurance helped. This once very quiet aloof man began talking and what he had to say served to open my eyes to what he truly felt for me and that did nothing but drive me further away. Every moment that we were together he would repeatedly tell me that he couldn’t stand the thought of my leaving because he "loved to be seen with me", "loved to have me on his arm", and finally, that he couldn’t bear the thought of not having sex with me again. These same comments were made over and over again. I would say to him, "Do you hear what you are saying to me? Do you understand how that makes me feel?" One night, as we lay in bed and he had spent the entire evening harping on these same things, I said, "What do you love about me? What would you miss about me if I was gone?" With a puzzled look, he said, "I don’t know what you are talking about." That was the moment that I knew that I would leave this man who did not know me and did not value me as a human being, only as an object that he used to make himself feel good.
Bill’s obsessive behavior continued to escalate to the point that I decided to stay with my daughter for a while and let things calm down. In the week preceding the attack, Bill and I talked on the phone and he told me that he had decided that he thought that a disillusionment was the best solution and that he would pay for half of it. We discussed putting our house up for sale and decided who we would use as a realtor. In my wildest dreams I would have never imagined that Bill was in the process of coming up with such a horrific scheme. He had never so much as raised his voice at me let alone done anything to physically harm me.

On the morning of July 10, 2004 I planned to go to the house, pack up our things and prepare the house to be sold. I pulled into the driveway as Bill stood outside watering the lawn. We exchanged a few words and I set to work packing boxes in the basement. Bill seemed busy working in the house and frequently came downstairs as I worked. We discussed our belongings and how they would be divided. I was in the process of packing and marking a box when Bill came up behind me, grabbed me by the hair and sprayed me square in the face and began to wrestle me to the floor. Although I had no idea what he had used to spray me, I instantly felt as if my face was on fire and knew that I was fighting for my life. With every bit of strength that I had I fought to stay upright believing that was my only hope of survival. I was soon overpowered and he had me on the floor flat on my back holding down my shoulders with his knees. I could not move anything but my legs and head. Bill then began methodically spraying me from head to toe with the "liquid fire" as I screamed and repeatedly begged him to tell me why he wanted to kill me. I fought to get away. I tried to bite him and head butt him but nothing made any difference. He quietly continued to spray me. I searched his eyes to understand what was happening and only saw the cool aloof man that I had always known. He didn’t appear angry nor out of control. To the contrary, he seemed very much in control and although the attack lasted a very long time, he only spoke twice quietly saying, "If I can’t have you no one can." and later, "I’ll make sure no one ever wants you."
As the minutes passed, I was aware that my chances of survival were passing with them but I never stopped fighting for my life, not for one second!! And then suddenly, I found myself upright and running up the basement steps screaming the whole way believing that he was most certainly trying to catch me so that he could complete his plan to kill me. When I reached the garage, I instantly grabbed the garden hose and turned on the water because I felt as if my entire body was on fire. I tried to call 911 on my cell phone but it didn’t work so I just stood in the driveway spraying myself with water and screaming for someone to help me because my husband was going to kill me.
The next thing that I knew, a neighbor that was merely an acquaintance was standing beside me and trying to help me. His wife was standing in their yard across the street trying to call the police as I screamed and screamed in agony and fear. I now know that at that moment, I was surrounded with Love and, in fact, Love had never left me, not even in the moments of my terror in the basement. Love surrounded me, protected me and at the precise and appointed moment lifted me to safety and to that Life of truth and love that I had been forever seeking.

I have come to tell you that God is love and that, in fact, there is nothing but Love. A year and a half before the attack, Bill and I had decided to build a new home. We carefully chose a house plan and a lot that suited us. I had never built a home and really enjoyed every part of the process. When the lot sat vacant waiting for the basement to be dug, I prayed for it. I prayed for our home when it was nothing but what I called our "dirt hole". As the shell of the house was erected and each room began to take shape, I would lay in bed every night and visualize our home and always pray the same thing, "Let nothing but love be there." Ironically, it was in the first week of moving into our new home that I began to see that our marriage was not built on real love. We lived there for only 5 months before I told Bill of my discontent.
As I lay in the hospital for several weeks after the attack, I often thought of my prayers for that house and it strangely comforted me. I had no doubt about the reality of those prayers nor did I for one second believe that my God who loves me with an everlasting Love ignored those prayers. In fact, I believed that God gave me the thought and the heart to pray them in the first place. I would often visualize God’s hands cupped before me, filled with the pain and the horror of what had happened. Like sand, what went in would slowly slip through His fingers and out would pour Love. I call it the God Filter. No matter what touches me, out pours Love, always Love, nothing but Love.

In the months that followed, I would frequently say, "God is about more than a perfect face." And I would challenge God to do something big with all that I had endured. I believe that we have all come here to learn and I prayed that my heart would stay open so that not an ounce of suffering would be wasted, that all of it would be used to make me more of who I came here to be.

Rainer Maria Rilke, a young German poet from the beginning of the 20th century wrote many love poems to God. I would like to share one that has meant a lot to me in the last year.~
"God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.
Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand."

I quoted these words in my journal a year ago and they still impact my heart today. God continues to use the terror of the attack and my longing to know beauty and love to expand me into the woman that I was meant to be.
In the year preceding the attack, I was focused on a goal of becoming more real. I did simple things like no longer coloring my hair, I would carefully weigh my words to make sure that they were entirely true and began to take a serious look at the things in my life that did not reflect what was true and real about Becky. It was this very process that led me to face the reality that my marriage looked good from the outside but had no real substance. I have gained so much from the experience of my losses that I cannot look at what has happened without feeling a deep sense of gratitude. I asked that I would become real and the mask of perfection that I hid behind was stripped away leaving nothing but the Real Becky. I asked to know genuine Love in my life and I have been surrounded by it. Since the attack, I have asked to see the beautiful in life and the eyes of my heart have been opened to see beauty in this world and in people that exceeded anything that I could have imagined. I have set my heart on knowing forgiveness and each day I learn more and more of its truth and its power to transform us and set us free to be who we really are. I have given my hand to God and He has shown me Life.
I have learned much about the path of forgiveness. I now know that it is first and foremost a choice. I knew in my first days in the hospital that I would forgive this dreadful, painful event and the man that chose to hurt me. There was never a question of whether of not I would forgive, only how and when. After being discharged from the hospital 7 weeks after the injury, I wrote in my journal that I would "live moment by moment and pray for insight- the ability to see the beautiful in life." I now realize that these words reflected my intention to keep my heart open to Life and Love.
I was in agony both physically and emotionally. My body was broken and so was my heart but my spirit remained untethered. That was a miracle and most certainly the answer to the prayers of so many. I was on prayer chains and prayer groups and Sunday school prayer lists of people that I have never met. Word spread and people prayed and God heard and healing began. Surely the greatest miracle has been the healing of my heart.

I have often meditated on words from Gail Straub’s book, Circle of Compassion~
"I have the strength to feel the pain of my broken heart, the place where I am shattered and hurt. I stay open to my brokenness, and through this courageous opening I receive the teaching and the healing of my broken heart."

In other words, I let myself feel what I felt and set my heart on staying open and believed that one day I would be healed and my heart would be free to soar once again. I chose Life and Love. When others would ask what they could do for me, I would tell them to pray that I would be more and not less because of this event- more alive and more loving...

I continue to move along the path of forgiveness toward the goal of peace and acceptance and increasingly learn just how great God’s grace is. In Eckhart Tolle’s book, Stillness Speaks, he talks of the "deeper good" in life’s struggles saying,
Even within the seemingly most unacceptable and painful situation is concealed a deeper good, and within every disaster is contained the seed of grace. Throughout history, there have been women and men who, in the face of great loss, illness, imprisonment, or impending death, accepted the seemingly unacceptable and thus found the 'peace that passeth all understanding.' Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world."

I would like to close with beautiful words from Emmanuel’s Book II, A Choice for Love~
"You came to bring light where there seems to be darkness, to bring love where fear seems to be. Remember the purpose of your soul...
When without even knowing the meaning of it, you say, ‘I choose love here. I choose love’, you will see the light change and the darkness dispel...
The life line, the golden rope, is to know that there is such a thing as love, and in that moment you are empowered to choose it. Just that. Even if your heart is breaking and you feel on the edge of collapse, say, ‘I choose love’...
Every moment of your life you are offered the opportunity to choose- love or fear, to tread the earth or to soar the heavens."

I will choose Love.

The Circle of Life

"Peace is the gentle oneness of flowing with the current of what Is. As we surrender to It, peace floods our Being and flows out from our Soul in the form of love. That love flows in a circle and always returns."

Months ago, I wrote these words to a friend to express a few of my thoughts about the flow of Life. I have decided to share them today because I needed reminding of their truth...

I have not written in a while... It has been a dry spell for expression. A lot has happened but much has been difficult to express. My big brother and first friend passed away 3 weeks ago today. I have only just begun to really cry and express my grief in the last couple of days. His eternal innocent trust of life and people has touched our world and left it's mark. I will miss him.

Four short days ago, Elliana Grace Martin entered our family. My baby daughter, Lauren, and her husband, Steve, graciously allowed me to be present for her grand entrance into this world. I am in awe of the strength and grace that both of my daughters have shown as they entered this most beautiful experience called motherhood. I stand back and lovingly observe the amazing transformation as each becomes "mother" and creates "family" anew. What a profound privilege to see the wonder of Life unfold before my eyes. When Ellie burst forth from her sacred cocoon, we all sobbed with joy. The utter perfection of this new little being that has come to grace planet Earth still moves me to tears. Looking into her eyes, I see hope and the precious Love of our Creator. Blessings beyond measure have been poured out on our family. There are no words to adequately express my gratitude so I will only say, thank You...