Nothing Wasted
Much of what I write comes back to being widowed twice. I can’t help it. It shaped the second half of my life and reshaped the woman I once thought I was becoming. But I’ve had to rebuild my life, or at least parts of it, a few other times too. In truth, I can’t take the credit. God was the general contractor. I was merely the subcontractor.
I won’t go into each of those seasons here — maybe I’ll save them for a memoir. However, there’s one I'd like to tell you about now.
When I was fourteen, my mother moved my two siblings and me to another state after her divorce from my dad. She had just endured one of the most painful trials of her life, and the move was her attempt at a new beginning for all of us. New location. New friends. Eventually, a new marriage for her.
I recognized trouble brewing
I’ve always had a keen sense of discernment. Before we moved, I knew it was a bad idea. Most fourteen-year-olds would tell you that leaving everything they know is hard, and I’m sure plenty of that was ordinary teenage grief. But for me, it was more than that. I knew trouble was coming.
No amount of begging changed my mother’s mind. We were going. We were transitioning in the middle of the last quarter of the school year, which meant finishing eighth grade in a new school only to start ninth grade in another one.
We moved anyway.
I was miserable. Forty years later, I can still feel that pain when I allow myself to go back to those days. Somehow, I finished eighth grade, losing a little more of myself each day. I fell into a despair I’d never known. My mother was sure I’d come around — moving is hard for teenagers, she often reminded me, but I’d make friends and grow to love the new house and the new state if I’d just try.
Believe it or not, I did try. I was a firstborn and a rule follower, and a grade-A people-pleaser on top of it. Good student, obedient daughter, loyal friend. I’d been blessed — though it often felt like a curse — with a deep sensitivity to what everyone else was feeling. I didn’t want to keep wounding my mother with my near-defiant attitude over this move.
I had to do something. Something in me had to change.
Discovering truth through an unlikely character
One afternoon that summer, I picked up my Bible looking for a way to fight the anguish inside me.
You’d think someone raised in church her whole life would know exactly where to turn. I didn’t. I could recite the Sunday School stories and the whole catechism of our faith, but I had almost no practice reading the Bible on my own.
Flipping through the pages, I landed on the book of Job and stopped. I read the introduction, kept going, and didn’t stop until I’d finished the whole book that afternoon. Knowing what I know now, it was a strange choice for the first book of the Bible I ever read straight through. But God met me there.
I read it again the next day. And the day after that. I lost count of how many times I read it through that summer — enough that I started to feel like a modern-day Job. (I had no idea then how much truer that would become.)
Those afternoons spent learning about one grim, faithful old man left me wanting more. I branched out into the other books and into watching televangelists on TV. (I know how that sounds. Hear me out — they get a bad rap. God can use anybody.)
One morning, I was deep into a TV preacher’s message. He kept talking about a personal Savior, about making Him the Lord of your life. I’d always been taught that I was saved by grace through faith, sealed by the baptism I received as an infant. But my parents made that decision for me fourteen years earlier. I had never made it for myself.
When the preacher invited us to pray for God to take up residence in us, I got down on my hands and knees on the living room floor and wept. I begged Him not just to take control of my life but to inhabit my heart — because I was so empty I didn’t think I could keep going the way I was.
He did exactly that. The aching prayer of fourteen-year-old me on that hot summer morning changed everything. Circumstantially, nothing shifted right away. Internally, I was a new creature. The old Leah was gone. The new one had come.
The warnings resurfaced
I know now I should have been discipled in those early days, but we hadn’t joined a new church yet, and I didn’t know enough to know I needed it. For the time being, God met me where I was and taught me Himself through His word.
The discernment I mentioned didn’t fade as I grew up. It sharpened. I understand now that it’s one of the gifts of His Spirit at work in me. Other people have noticed it over the years — I’ve been told more than once that I missed my calling as an FBI profiler. I’m not so sure about that. But it played a real part in what happened next, late that summer of 1986.
My maternal grandmother had lived next door to us back in our old state. We were close to her — not just in proximity but in every way that counts.
One day, I felt led to write her a letter asking if I could come live with her. I finished it and got it in the mail fast, before the people-pleaser in me could start worrying about what my mother would think.
About a week later, my mother came into my room with a friend for backup — she wasn’t sure which version of me she’d be dealing with. They confronted me about the letter. My grandmother had called her, wanting to know what was going on that would make me do such a thing. My mother was completely blindsided.
I’ll get to the point. That first conversation did not go well. It was a hard no, and my grandmother hadn’t even agreed to it yet. But within a few days, everything changed. I was going home — not to the house we’d left, but to my hometown, to live with my grandmother. That Labor Day, another of my mother’s friends drove me the eight hours back to the place I loved.
I was free.
There’s far more to this story than fits here, but I won’t leave you hanging. Remember that discernment?
What I didn’t tell you is that my mother remarried while I was still living at home. I never liked the man. His true colors came out after their ceremony, once he’d moved in. I can’t overstate it: he was not a good man.
A few weeks after I left, my mother showed up on my grandmother’s doorstep with my brother and sister. She was leaving him. He’d physically hurt her on top of the verbal abuse I had witnessed first-hand before I moved away.
She didn’t stay long before she was guilted into going back, but she left my siblings with us, at least for a while. Six months later, my brother went home to her. A year after that, my sister followed. I never did. And after they returned, her husband tried to take her life — and my brother was there. He didn’t just witness it. He saved her. Twelve years old, and he stopped the attack.
He was there the whole time
I have no doubt I am who I am today, partly because God gave me the clear knowing that I had to leave when I did. He let me be cared for through my pivotal high school years by a selfless grandmother.
My brother and sister stayed in that place years longer than I did — the same place my discernment had told me to run from. I’ve never fully made peace with that. I got out at fourteen and was handed quiet years with my grandmother; they got the rest of it. I didn’t have the power to take them with me, and for a long time, the unfairness of it sat on me like a stone. There were seasons their road was so much harder than mine that I had no business saying a phrase like “nothing wasted” anywhere near them.
My mother did eventually get out of that marriage, but life stayed hard for her. I don’t judge her for any of it. She was a broken woman, undone by the collapse of her marriage to my dad, desperate to feel loved again.
Years later, talking about that time, I told her I’d forgiven her long ago. And I told her one more thing, hoping to lift some of the guilt she still carried:
“Mom, God didn’t waste the summer of 1986. It’s when I surrendered to Him.”
Tears filled her eyes.
And there’s this: my brother and sister both came to faith, too, years later, in the very place I couldn’t save them from. God was there the whole time.
He wasted none of it.