This is a story of a miracle. It was 1971, I was 18 years old and I had become homeless the year before. A Christian family had taken me in and we read the bible and did drugs every day. The man of the house was a small-time drug dealer. When it came to the bible, at first I didn’t believe and I struggled to understand what I was reading. One night, feeling desperate and alone and hopeless, I asked Jesus to come into my heart, though I had no hope that anything would happen. I cried myself to sleep. In the morning when I woke
up, I felt strangely refreshed. Everything seemed to have a sharpness and a glow around it. The Old-English bible I had been reading had been printed in 1819 and it had been very difficult for me to understand. But that morning, when I read my bible, everything was crystal clear. I understood everything, simply and completely. We lived about five miles from town and I did not have a car. It was a rural area with little traffic so hitch-hiking was unreliable. Most of the time I just walked all of the way to town. Soon after the bible became clear to me, I was walking into town and I was passing this area that had four raised-ranches in a row. They were the only houses around. Several dogs lived in that little neighborhood. I had walked past the third house when I got this feeling that I should look behind me. About a hundred feet behind me there were three dogs running at me, their teeth bared. Front and center in the pack was a large German Sheppard. He was growling in a threatening way and looked especially vicious. I felt deeply calm. I looked right at him and I said “Jesus loves you.” And, I swear, he froze in mid-air and mid-stride, not standing on the road, but frozen in mid-air. The other two dogs kept running towards me, so I said to them “Jesus loves you.” And they, too, completely froze. I turned and continued walking where I was going. After 50 feet or so I looked back at the dogs and now they were standing in the road, each with a shocked and dazed look of “what hit me?” Later, I found out that the German Sheppard’s name was "Satan.” 

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My Mom was home and she was doing something in the kitchen when she heard a knock on the front door. She wanted to finish what she was doing so
it was a couple of minutes before she went to the door. By then the man had
already begun to leave. She had a dog with a deep bark and the dog was barking. My Mom looked out the window as the man was leaving and she caught a glimpse of his face. About two weeks later, on the news, she recognized the man’s face. He was someone who had killed multiple people in her area. He had been pretending to sell something door-to-door.

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I ran into my old boyfriend in Portland and he asked me “When did you get to
Portland?” Then he said “No, wait, let me tell you when you got to Portland.”
And he told me the exact day I got to Portland, months after I had arrived here. He told me that he had had nightmares about me and knew that I must be in town. I ran into him at the beginning of September and we hung out. We had always been very attracted to each other. The last time I saw him was on September 11th and we got into a huge argument. The next morning he woke up and said to me “Would you like to go to the coast or would you like to go to Mount Hood?” If we had gone to the coast, my phone would have died and I would have never gotten the phone call. So instead, we go to Mount Hood and as we’re driving there I get this phone call and a friend says to me on the phone “You’re not going to date him again!” And I said “No, I’m not going to date him again.” He overheard me and got very upset and he’s crying and we get into an argument. I sit in the car for hours trying to talk him down. Eventually I had to get out of the car because I realize that I can’t calm him down. I apologized for upsetting him and I promised him I would
never call him again.  A couple of weeks later I went somewhere and ended up sleeping under a tree. I woke up in the morning out of a nightmare and I thought to myself “Somebody is dead and it’s my fault.” I told some friends about this dream and everyone said “Oh, no, no, no. That’s just a dream.” I went back to Portland and a friend told me that my old boyfriend had killed himself two days after September 11th. I was pregnant with his only child. It was especially strange because I was told I would never have children because of cancer I had as a child.

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Six months ago, I had a friend who was in prostitution. She got beat up by her pimp really bad in a hotel room one night. He beat her to the point where she has kidney problems and PTSD. I was out here and I tried to take her off the street and help her out. Well, you know how when you have PTSD your mind sees different things. I was giving her four or five 400mg ibuprofen to sleep every night, so she wouldn’t fight in her sleep, which she did on a nightly basis. There was one time we had a fight. I knew it was coming and we broke up. There was this guy and I told him “Don’t take advantage of her. It isn’t right.” You know, she has mental problems. So he laughs in my face and he takes advantage of her. Six days later she tried to jump off a bridge. So I made a bargain with God. I said “God, listen. I don’t know where she is and I don’t know if she is o.k. but if you save her life and don’t let her jump off a bridge, I will marry her. Regardless of how I feel and regardless that I can’t trust her, I will marry her if you save her because she means that much to me.” So, she’s alive. And my question is, what does that mean for me? I haven’t told her about the promise I made. She is trying to practice forgiveness and I’m not ready to forgive this guy yet. Every time I see that guy, I think about throwing him in that water right there (pointing to a deep river.) It would have been different had he not known what he did. But when he laughed in my face and said he was going to do it anyway, that’s when it became personal. Everyone says that God will handle it in his own way. I believe in God but what am I supposed to do with the hate that I have for the guy? If I kill him, I’m breaking one of the Ten Commandments, I’m breaking one of my deals with God. But if I let him live, it’s a constant reminder that I had to bargain with God because of something that he wanted to do. So it’s a Catch-22. How do you believe but not be able to practice it? He left her on a bridge to die after he got what he wanted. How do you forgive that? How do you have compassion for that? I can’t not believe in God but I also can’t give forgiveness for that. And I can’t say that I support her and continue to watch him rub it in my face. What happens when your religion and reality hit up against each other like that?

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Washington State, 1974, and I am getting a ride in the back of a pick-up truck with another hitch-hiker. The driver is going a couple hundred miles so there is plenty of time to enjoy the wind and the sun. But something is bothering me. Three one-dollar bills are all I have and I want three things. I haven’t eaten yet and it is early afternoon. I’m hungry. I could get lunch for around $3. However, I have been on the road for weeks and my clothing smells badly. I want nothing more than to have clean clothes to wear. I could get my laundry done for about $3. And, while I am a voracious reader, I had no reading material with me. I would love to buy Henry David Thoreau’s book On Walden Pond and Civil Disobedience. I might be able to find a used copy for $1 somewhere but then I probably wouldn’t have enough money to do laundry. Even if I could squeeze those two things out of $3, then I certainly wouldn’t have any money left over with which to buy food. It’s been a hard few days and the quandary is making me feel grumpy. After sitting with these thoughts for a while, it dawns on me that the $3 isn’t the problem. The problem is my stressing about it. So I asked the other hitch-hiker if he would like a dollar. He eagerly said “Yes!” So I gave him one. I held the other two bills up in the air and let them go. They flew from the back of the pick-up truck into the open roadway. “Whoa! Why didn’t you give those to ME?” asked the hitch-hiker. “I gave you one,” I said. “The other two are to help other hitch-hikers who might find them.” Relieved of my money, I felt relieved of my quandary. I relaxed and my appreciation for the day deepened. I was leaving myself in the hands of fate, alone. A while later, the driver pulled into a little strip-mall. He got out and told us “I’ve got to get my laundry done before I get to where I am going. I only have a small load. Do either of you have anything you want to add to the load?" I added my clothes and felt so grateful that I was getting my laundry done. After getting the clothes into the washer, the man said “I’m going to get some lunch while the clothes wash. Can I buy each of you some lunch?” We had a modest and pleasant meal. I felt so thankful. After lunch, the man switched our laundry to the dryer and said that he was going to go into the used book store and he’d be happy to buy us each a book! I found a copy of the exact Thoreau book I wanted. Prior to stopping at this strip mall, we had been in the back of the truck for the whole ride and I never communicated any of my wants to this man. The day had switched from one of desperation and grumpiness to one of amazement and thankfulness. Thank you, Mr. Man, whoever and wherever you are.

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