A couple of times, I felt like I was cracking and I couldn't go on, and God would put another person in my place to help me.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Yes, I did shatter my leg, and it really changed my life, in a way. It wasn't much fun, but it did open me up, and as we all know intuitively, adversity can develop resources.
As a child, I spent a lot of time alone. I used to sit in my closet with one cracker. I'd pretend that I was on the North Pole freezing to death, and I had to somehow survive on this one tiny cracker.
What I have experienced, and experienced repeatedly, is the silence of God. For many years, this was a distressing matter for me. I did not consider it an experience, but the absence of an experience.
When I was a kid and I'd be in trouble. I'd ask God to help me, and then once the fire was out, I wouldn't talk to Him anymore. When I got older, I began to find I needed some help spiritually, just to function.
I was on my face. I heard the count from one to 10. I kept telling myself that I had to get up, but I couldn't move. I couldn't make myself move. It was the strangest feeling.
The first time it felt really dangerous, like the sort of thing you had to lock the doors and close the curtains on because if anybody saw you, God would strike you down with a thunderbolt. But I took to it like a duck to water.
I had this moment in church, which I think really turned me off. I was 7 or 8 years old and I was sitting at church, and we happened to be playing with the sunlight that was coming down from the stained glass window, and the monsignor came down to the pew and grabbed us by our neck collars and said, 'I'll deal with you.'
Inside that book, it's my life-all the places where I'm hurting or I laughed or I cried or I prayed. And I've had to pray a lot!
I'm just always a bit thrown when, in the immediate aftermath of some event which makes us feel like either God's out to get us or He's not doing His job as well as He can, we all still get together and continue to ask Him for help.
I know it's an experience that I need to have if God's putting me through it.