It wouldn’t be until February of 2008 when my dear friend, Barbie, began helping me to recall some ministry memories and some of the people I used to know that she encouraged me to attempt contacting a couple of people to tell them what had transpired. She recalls how a warm, dawning realization crossed my face when I would suddenly and fondly remember some dear mom I had forgotten even existed. At that time I was able to recall only those people Barbie helped me to remember by prompting me with questions of past activities. I had lost so many of my memories, including much of a year of my life (June 2006-2007) and even at one point having been reminded that I had written books. For the most part I?remembered my life in general, but had lost many of its specifics. It seemed as though it had been someone else’s life that happened a long, long time ago. If it weren’t for my family still being with me, I think I may have gone crazy with disorientation, a condition I worked hard to overcome. I?still sometimes recall events and happenings wrongly, and especially the order in which they occurred, but I no longer get lost in real-time.
I?was beginning to gain a bit of momentum with healing at that time, but I was still challenged to do anything extra. The internet had changed so much in three years and I couldn’t remember how to do even an email. My husband and children helped me to get re-acquainted with how things work, and they still make themselves available to help me learn all this internet activity I’m involving myself in these days. It’s funny when we’re used to keeping up with new developments as they occur, to realize I’d been pretty disconnected from what was going on outside my own little world. It had been a few years since I had connected in to anything new except how the body functions and getting to know the new people in my life. My learning curve suddenly went sky-high just to catch up with all the new technology like digital cameras and memory sticks, and new applications like Facebook and iPhoto. (I still need an iPhone and can hardly believe I actually want one!) I continued to relearn many things even now; inconsequential things that we all take for granted, like how to write a check. In the meantime, sitting at the computer for a whole hour was a real victory!
It was February 2008 when I began what would be a slow year-and-a-half long process of “coming back” to my work and ministry. A lot had changed since I left it, and God had shown me so much through the true friendship, miracles, and blessings of the local community ministry He’d given me. And so, being refocused in vision and refreshed with inspiration for future ministry possibilities, and with the much-needed help of my friend, Barbie, I began to take small steps toward forming a plan to rebuild.
Part 4—Barbie Poling’s Perspective of Marilyn’s Story
I remember when Marilyn started mentioning specific people she had connected with in the past. I was really interested to know that she had had some friends before. I had come to see from experiencing her life that it seemed she didn’t have many friends outside our small community, and some of them still didn’t know how to relate in a two-way relationship. She told me about several people, and I hoped that one day I would meet them.
I had become accustomed to helping Marilyn remember this and that. She would speak in amazement to me, “How do you remember all that without any notes!” And she would say, “Aren’t you going to write that down?” when we talked about something we were going to do later. Her car dashboard was very decorative with sticky notes. ?
When Marilyn first started communicating that our group of ladies didn’t seem to know how to relate rightly with her, I expressed that I wanted to learn. I asked her to teach me how to be a friend to her. One of the first things she told me was that all we ever talked about was me. I thought about that, and I remembered many conversations where she had talked about her life so that confused me. Then one day I had a huge revelation as I was going over some of all those notes I had taken during the ladies meetings at her house. Her messages had been about building right relationships. I had written that the first step in building a relationship is becoming interested in the other person’s interests. I realized that all the times Marilyn had been talking about her life to me, she was only sharing things from her life that would help me to understand something that I needed to understand; she was giving me examples. I had never approached her wanting to know and understand HER interests, and what she had been thinking about and wanting to talk about.
My revelation went even deeper than my relationship with Marilyn. I suddenly realized that I had been relating with God the same way. I had always wanted His involvement in MY life, but I was certainly not in the habit of approaching God in order to understand what He was wanting to do in my life and the lives of the people around me, and becoming fully interested in His interests. I had what Watchman Nee calls “a seeing.” I saw the reality of my previous whole life’s approach to God, and that I had never come to know HIM. I hadn’t even begun my relationship with the real HIM because I was interested in and focused on something totally different than He was. I was interested in building my own flesh image while He had been interested in truth-telling and reconciliation. I became broken and undone and the tears kept flowing….and flowing….and flowing.