Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: I SURRENDER ALL (to God) (don’t write about the song) (05/07/15)
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TITLE: What Do I Need With All of This?
By Marilyn K. Smith
05/11/15 -
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“Yes, dear?” I answered, turning to see my daughter standing there with a smile on her face. “Ok, what’s the deal? I know something’s up because you haven’t smiled like that in a long time.”
“Mama, I’ve been healed!” Now she was fighting back happy tears and I was looking at her with more questions in my eyes.
“What do you mean…healed?” I asked, hesitating a little on the last word.
“My grief…it’s gone!” she explained with joy I never thought I would hear again.
My young adult daughter had lost the love of her life seven years ago and I had watched her stumble through life with days of gentle weeping and also days that teetered on overwhelming and unending sorrow. As a young woman she had been an honor graduate both in high school and in college. We had hoped she would step into all that God had called her to be and do for him. Now all that seemed doubtful. Grief had her tightly bound. Recently she had progressed onto a more level plateau of grief but the onset of emotional tidal waves would often threaten to drag her back into the riptide of loss. Her husband was ill with HIV before she met him and she was very aware of his terminal illness. However, her ever-determined spirit had caused her to declare to her daddy and I that she was “going to take care of him no matter what…so I might as well marry him.” We had been devastated, knowing that caring for someone in his condition was going to present the hardest challenge and deepest loss she would ever know. In just a few short years, he succumbed to pneumonia that often attacks these patients. Our family suffered a great loss that day. My daughter got stuck in a grief so strong, it threatened to pull her under and eventually end her life.
Now, I was standing in my family room facing a daughter who was smiling, joyful and emotionally whole! Something powerful had taken place while she was away.
“What happened?” I asked with wide eyes. I knew she had been a way for the weekend to a revival service in a bordering state. I knew she had gone by herself. I had been a little unnerved by that fact, concerned that her grief might come flooding back to the point of deep depression. She had not really been alone for more than a day or two since her husband’s death and she lived next door to us then.
“God has healed me!” she exclaimed. “I am no longer grieving!”
And healed she was! She went on to explain that her visit to Charlotte, North Carolina, included the Rev. Billy Graham Library. She said that from the moment she stepped on that beautiful site, she started weeping. She could hardly take the tour for the tears. The more she tried to hide them, the worse they became until she was just sobbing. The walk through that library brought a cleansing to her soul. Then she attended a revival service in Charlotte where Rev. Todd Bentley was ministering and found more healing during the rest of the weekend.
So happy to see God’s blessing, I wrapped my arms around her. What an answer to prayer! But much to my surprise, the miracle did not end there!Within the next few weeks, I would see her make decisions that I would have never dreamed possible. She contacted and applied to the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri. Before she even heard from the organization, she put her house on the market. My emotions went from highest joy to disbelief and back to joy! Amazingly her house sold in seven days! Then she began giving away everything, even her wedding dress. Away went hundreds of dollars of china, household items and furniture. When I questioned her she merely said, “Mama, what do I need with all of this? It’s nothing! I am going to serve the Lord. He is all I need!
My daughter is now an Intercessory Missionary at Hope City in Kansas City, Missouri. God continues to use her in serving foster families, the homeless and people caught in the cycle of addiction.
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Several of the paragraphs in the body of this entry are quite lengthy. Modern readers have short attention spans, and do better with shorter paragraphs, so I'd recommend breaking a few of them into shorter chunks. The beginning, with dialogue and short, fast-paced paragraphs, held my interest more.
It's not recommended to use exclamation points except in dialogue. Where your daughter is speaking, exclamation points are fine, but within the narrative, you should probably eliminate them.
One of your writing strengths is sentence structure--you have varied and interesting sentences that give this piece a nice flow. Well done!
One suggestion to strengthen your writing would be to get rid of dialogue tags like "she said" or "she exclaimed" all together. Instead, introduce who is speaking with an action, or description. So when you said this: "“What do you mean…healed?” I asked, hesitating a little on the last word." you could try something like this: "What do you mean," I hesitated. "...healed?" That makes thing flow a bit better.
Great job with this. And I've heard of the International House of Prayer. Every three years, I've attended the Urbana Missions Conference sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and held every three years. The students and leaders at the House or Prayer pray for all the Urbana attendees. And I think its so cool that the two biggest cities in Missouri are taken over by young Christians every so often. :)