Healing

How Faith Found me

by Lina Hariz
02/06/17
For Sale
Author requests article critique

  Message Writer
  Hire Writer

Tweet

 How Grace Found Me
By Lina Hariz

Written in September 2013

 All of us are shaped by various experiences and events that occur in our lives. The sum of these experiences make us who we are. Occasionally, however, a powerful event occurs that divides our life into a Before or After.  An event so significant that it drastically changes us forever and alters the course of our existence. Here is mine.
        I was raised by parents who doubted the existence of God. They are wonderful and highly moral people who’ve helped others and gave a lot to charity. But, growing up in a country plagued by a civil war, they were suspicious of Religion and of God in whose name many atrocities were committed. As a result of my upbringing, I was not a believer, until everything changed in 1996. In October of that year, I was in a car accident with my 6-month-old daughter, Maya. September and October of 1996 were the most difficult months for us as a family. My mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer, so my husband Nick and I packed up our 2 kids who were 5 years old and 6 months old, and flew to Lebanon to visit her. While there, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The next day, we got a call from my sister in Burbank that her husband, who was 35 years old at the time, had colon cancer. He was diagnosed on the same day that their one-year-old son Danny took his first steps. Needless to say, we were all devastated. After Mom’s surgery, Dad flew to Burbank to be with my sister, and Nick and I took care of Mom for 10 days until she was able to travel. We arrived back home to Burbank on October 18, 1996. The next day, October 19, I went to visit my brother-in-law, Michael, who had been home from the hospital for about a week. He had lost 50 pounds since I saw him 5 weeks earlier! He looked like a patient dying of AIDS. I got emotional when I saw him. I was also very tired and jet lagged. My husband asked me if I was feeling up to driving, and I reassured him that I was wide-awake and could make it home easily. After all, our house is 5 minutes away from my sister’s. So, I strapped my daughter in the car seat and drove home. Since I was not taking the freeway, I thought it was safe to put her in the front seat so that I could talk to her and she could see me, as she wasn’t feeling well that day.Then, everything went black. I don’t know what happened that day. Did I fall asleep, did I faint? Did a car hit us and drove away? All I know is that I came to and found that I had hit a parked car. The smell of sulfur like that of a lit match was in my nose because the air bags had deployed. I looked to my right at the baby and found her rear-facing car seat askew and the air bag had hit her head from behind. She didn’t seem to be conscious. My first thought was: I KILLED THE BABY. I unbuckled her and jumped out of the car screaming for help. The people who lived in the neighborhood ran out of their homes. One man grabbed Maya from me and laid her down in the trunk of my Jeep Cherokee, while another Good Samaritan called the paramedics. Soon after Maya was laid down in the trunk, she began crying and all who were there breathed a sigh of relief. The paramedics loaded us in an ambulance and drove us to St. Joseph Emergency Room. We were both released a few hours later. When my dad, who is a Cardiologist, came to see us at home that evening, he was concerned at how pale and still Maya was. Soon after, she threw up. So, we jumped in the car and drove to Children’s Hospital for a CT Scan. She was kept in the hospital overnight, and I thought the ordeal was over. Boy, was I mistaken!
         The day after Maya was released, I got up early and went to her bedroom to check on her and get my son ready for school. I found her having a grand mal seizure in her crib. So I called a friend, since Nick was at work, and took her back to Children’s Hospital where she was rushed to a room in the Radiology department to get an MRI. My husband, parents, and sister joined me and we paced the hospital hallways waiting to hear how Maya was doing. My dad, being a physician and a slightly controlling man (and I say it very fondly) followed the hospital staff and insisted on looking at the MRI himself. A subdural hemorrhage was found in Maya’s brain from the blunt force of the air bag. She was admitted and spent 3 days in Intensive Care where she had a total of 6 major seizures and was in a state of semi-consciousness. Let me tell you, seeing a baby with tubes coming out of her little nose, arms, and legs is a sight that I don’t wish on anyone. Finally, Maya was put on Phenobarbital. No surgery was needed, but she remained at Children’s Hospital for 10 days.
       In Maya’s private hospital room, there was a window bench with a curtain that can be closed for privacy. One night, as I was sleeping on that bench, I heard the sound of the curtain opening. I jumped up thinking one of the nurses opened it to wake me up because she needed me. But it was not a nurse I saw standing right there staring at me… It was Jesus. I thought I was hallucinating. I looked at Him and he said to me, “Don’t be afraid. I am here with you”. Now some of you Christians might think, “Well… what’s so special about seeing Jesus?” I’ve got to tell you, that for a person like me who was brought up as an Agnostic who did not trust in God or even cared about him, seeing Jesus was a big deal. I am the least likely person to be visited by God. You think the Apostle Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus was a miracle!!  
        To this day, I don’t know if Jesus really came to my room or just appeared to me in a dream. Either way, this encounter with Him changed my life forever. I went down to the chapel in the morning and picked a copy of the bible and started reading.A few weeks later, I asked a mom at my son’s school if I could join her bible study. She was a minister’s wife at Calvary Bible Church in Burbank. She came to my house and prayed with me and I joined her bible study the following month. I started going to the Methodist church every Sunday and took a bible class there as well. In 2001, my husband and I became members of Village Church, a non-denominational Christian Church also located in Burbank.
        While all this transformation was taking place in my soul, Maya was still suffering from Grand Mal seizures. We changed her medication 4 times, before she was finally stable. She has been in special education since the age of 3 after she was diagnosed as having mild mental retardation as a result of the brain injury she sustained. We spent years in Physical therapy, Occupational therapy, Speech therapy, and social skills groups. When I was told that Maya would never be a typical child nor grow mentally beyond the age of 11 or 12, I decided to go back to school and get my Masters Degree in Special Education. I completed it in 3 years and graduated in 2004, then went to work at La Canada Unified first as a Special Education Teacher, then as an IEP Coordinator and Assessment Specialist, a position I still hold to this day. I also started taking classes at Fuller Theological Seminary. Then, out of the blue around a month ago, I woke up at 2:00 am and wrote the following little essay. After putting these words on paper, a sense of peace washed over me and I felt whole for the first time in years. It goes like this:
         I’ve been in prison for 17 years. I killed my baby in October 1996. I wanted to tattoo the date on my wrist so I’ll never forget. But tattoo or not, it is always with me because the ghost of the baby I lost still lives with us in the body of my 18 year-old-daughter who has special needs as a result the car accident I caused. She has traumatic brain injury. Three words that changed my life forever. The baby I strapped in the car seat on that long ago October day, was not the same baby that came out of the wreckage one hour later. We’ve spent weeks in the hospital, years in all kinds of therapy, and in special education classes and services to this day. Needless to say, October 1996 was traumatic…. It is still tough, because it sure does not feel like it happened in the past. Itlives with me. Sometimes the walls of the prison that I checked myself into 17 years ago, crumble a little. I see a small opening and I dig through it… I am partly out. My legs are free, then my arms. My nose is out… I can smell the air. I feel the sun on my skin. I am out…. I am out!! But soon a big dark cloud appears, sometimes in the form of people from the past, or images of car wrecks, or the smell of sulfur that takes me back to the air bag deploying. The cloud blocks the sun again and the prison walls rise back up all around me. After the accident, I signed a long-term lease with Anxiety and Depression. They moved in soon after. Depression unpacked her bags and sat on the couch painting her toenails, while Anxiety settled in for a long bubble bath. I needed to serve them eviction notices to allow Hope and Joy to move in. But, it took a lot of work before I was able to do so. Therapy, support groups, church, and friends. But chief among these coping skills, and the one cure that proved permanently effective, was getting to know Jesus in a personal way. His grace and love for me allowed me to become the person I am today. A person who is grateful, thankful, who has empathy for anyone in pain, who has love for and appreciation of people with special needs. And as for the tattoo I mentioned at the beginning of this testimony, I ended up getting it last year. But instead of the date of the accident, my tattoo says ”Grace” with a small cross design, and every time I look at it I don’t think of the accident. Rather, it serves as a reminder of God’s goodness, kindness and love. “To Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.”