By Charles Gardner —
Twice divorced, twice she tried to take her own life – yet
can testify that God has always been there for her.
Born weighing just one-and-a-half pounds, she clearly did not have a good start in life. And in many ways things went from bad to worse with a rollercoaster nightmare youth reading like something out of a horror story.
“Childhood was constant mental torture with my mother’s fuse forever blowing,” Katherine told me after we met at a Baptist chapel in the heart of beautiful Pembrokeshire in West Wales.
“When I passed my piano exam without distinction, she set fire to the certificate. She was brutal.”
Lack of affection from her mum naturally led her to seek it elsewhere and she found herself pregnant at 16 when she still didn’t know where babies came from.
Tragically, she was pressured into aborting her twin boys. She nevertheless married the father while still a teenager, but it ended in divorce as he was a serial adulterer, though not before her son was born.
Feeling worthless, she twice tried to commit suicide. But it seems that divine intervention saved her on both occasions.
She married again, and had another son, but her new husband was a drug-runner, and worse.
Brought up as a Catholic (her mum was Irish), she got to love the ornate furnishings and rituals of the church but longed to find God for herself. It didn’t happen, however, until she took the brave step of accompanying a friend to a Baptist chapel where a combination of kindness and gentle teaching of how the Bible equips us for daily living made all the difference.
“I recall how I felt when I first saw the pulpit with the words of Psalm 46:10 written across it: ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ It washed over me like a warm river. I knew I was home.”
She realized that Jesus had died for all her sins and recalls: “I prayed to God and asked forgiveness for myself. I became a Christ follower. I can look back now and see God’s hand on my life, every single step of the way.”
Quoting the famous hymn Amazing Grace, she adds: “God alone has saved me from many dangers, toils and snares. My faith has kept me, though sometimes I was clinging on by my fingernails. I know he will not leave me or forsake me. And I long to see the face of my Redeemer when he returns or takes me home.”
After a second divorce while still in her early thirties, she was determined not to marry again, but with working long hours to pay off debts incurred by her profligate ex, her sons persuaded her that she needed a man in her life and eventually sent a photo of their mum with her two boys to a dating agency, explaining that they came “with the package”.
Katherine recalls: “I fasted and prayed for guidance and when I read (in Psalm 68) that ‘God sets the lonely in families’, it hit me between the eyes, and that clinched it.” Decades have passed, and she and Brian are still happily married. Both boys took his surname and consider him as their dad.
Katherine is now a member of Bethesda Baptist Chapel in Narberth, Pembrokeshire, and lives not far away in the village of Henry Gwyn in West Carmarthenshire.
If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here
Id like to submit an article to God Reports. I am a prolife speaker for Lutherans For Life. I love to share my journey of ike and faith in what I call “Shaking the Family Tree”. Conceived in rape. Adopted. Sought info on my biological family. Met 5 members of my biological family including mother. Now im 70 and sharing my gratitude, thankfulness and joy with others.
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