I tend to have a song going through my head a lot of the time.  As I’m still trying to write a decent blog, I’m a bit concerned because for the past hour it has been that song from Wizard of Oz that goes ‘if I only had a brain’.  Why isn’t it something like the theme song from Rocky?

What I’ve seen over the past four years are women’s lives dramatically transformed.  I’ve seen churches and community coming together to help break the chains off of the moms and sisters and daughters and friends at a placed called Morgan’s Mercy Mansion, whose theme song could easily be I’m Counting on God, because that is how they function.

The goal of Morgan’s Mercy Mansion is to restore the lives of women battling addictions by immersing them in a 6-month God centered program through bible study, classes, activities, and around the clock support.  (Now the song ‘This Is How We Overcome’ has started.)  What I have seen with my own eyes are transformations so great that it was like a giant eraser had wiped away the years,  anger replaced by peace, if God had a wrinkle cream, that would describe it, except His would actually work!

So where do I come into the picture? Eight years ago my life looked pretty good. My kids were old enough that they were both in school and I reentered the workforce and was doing well. I was enjoying it and moving up fast and receiving raises. Sure, my marriage was a little rough, but life is never totally perfect, right? Then my already rocky marriage hit a crisis and before I knew it I found myself in a shelter for the abused, my marriage ending, my oldest having been diagnosed with a type of Autism called Aspergers.  Then my youngest started having severe problems at school and the job where I had been doing so well was not happy with an employee who had to keep leaving to take care of her kids. I was running on empty- working 40 hours a week, trying to deal with an ever increasingly angry boss and then when the diagnosis of Autism came through for my youngest son as well … it was the end. My last dream of an ideal life for my children was gone and I found myself experiencing extreme depression, something I never understood until I walked through it.  I ran into a wall of darkness, that’s the best way to describe it; as if I was in a room where all the light had been sucked out.  There was a song that would come over the car radio I Hope You Dance, I would sing it through the tears, “When you come close to selling out, reconsider.”

I wasn’t much of a mom during that time, so much of the effort was on just surviving a day, sometimes just surviving an hour.  Shortly after all this, my sister was killed and that was the last straw for me, I just couldn’t hold it together anymore.  Alone, I found myself unable to manage small children, the calls from the schools, the angry boss, the bills, the rental, the borrowed car, the lawn … life.  My family said they couldn’t help me so far away so I moved back home to the area I’d grown up in.  From city to deep countryside.

Moving back home, well, that wasn’t the answer.  My parents couldn’t understand my kids being Autistic, they felt it was my poor parenting skills and that it was too late for them because of the parenting mistakes I made when they were younger.  I had nowhere to go but I couldn’t have my kids in that atmosphere so I packed up our stuff in the car and looked for a shelter.  Now, in the middle of the countryside there aren’t ‘shelters’, I interviewed at one in a nearby town, for us to stay there a few days and we were turned down, special kids with special problems wasn’t what they were there for.  Finally I found a friend who had a vacant rental and let us stay there, she was a kind heart and a listening ear in a world of rejection.

My parents did turn out to be for us and ended up helping a lot, they just didn’t understand why my kids acted the way they did. (http://www.aspergersyndrome.org). One day we were at my parents and my dad told one of the boys to go home and he said he didn’t have a home.  That crushed my dad so he gave us a piece of his land and helped us get into an old trailer that we could make payments on.  But the work I was doing couldn’t cover bills, and the child support would stop and start and we just weren’t making it.

You know it’s weird, because I grew up in a family where having enough wasn’t a problem, we’d have fancy dinners and go help the poor and I received a college education … I’d never have thought I could be in a old beaten up trailer home with my two kids trying to figure out how to make a meal last. We’d had several days of growling stomachs and dreams of having food to eat, when a friend took us to her church so I could ask for some flour and basics.

This was the church that runs Morgan’s Mercy Mansion. When I walked through those doors I trusted no one.  BUT …. The proof I saw was in lives. The church welcomed me in, claimed my little family, embraced us, held me up through the tears.  So I studied and watched and was puzzled by the love we were welcomed with… what was this?  Why? We had nothing to offer.  I saw other people who were just as messed up as me, and saw something change in them.  This was so different I wasn’t sure what to do, run or stay. I saw their actual physical appearance change as lives were given completely over to God. I saw drug habits gone and a release and a joy and peace that left me amazed.  It was like the love I’d only dreamed of was right there within reach.  A deep craving rose up in me, I wanted it too but was scared.  Pieces of my life started to click together, stuff from the past connected and my body was healing, and weights were falling off my heart.  At first I was more secure with the old feelings intact but a taste of God and I kept craving more, had to know more about this God. This was a lot more personal then I’d ever known.  I started growing a parental backbone and was amazed where it was coming from. The transformations I saw in their lives happened in mine.  Now I’m drawn like a magnet to other hurting women.  Oh, how I want them to know that it’s ok, God has you!  That you can uncurl from that mental fetal position of feeling constantly kicked and spit on.  The song You Are For Me by Kari Jobe is now running through my mind.  When things happen that would take all of it away I remember He is for me … and you.  He will “never forsake us in our weaknesses.”

Back when I had returned back home, my life looked like a demolition derby car, unrecognizable, running on four flats with the tailpipe dragging.  But those darkest times where everything seemed to be crashing in were pivotal moments in my life that have inspired me to reach out and help other women through Morgan’s Mercy Mansion.

My desire is to give the women at Morgan’s Mercy Mansion an opportunity to learn job skills through an on site classroom where they can learn computer skills and be able to obtain better paying jobs after they graduate from the program.  The main item holding me back is getting hold of some computers for the classroom.  The goal is to carry this program onto the community at a second location. If you would like to know more about Morgan’s Mercy Mansion visit their website at:

www.mmmrehab.com

Sarah is a single mom of two sons. She is the youngest of nine siblings and is passionate about seeing the tools to succeed placed in women’s hands and breaking limitations to reach the heights God has spoken over and placed within each of us.

Sarah Sparks