Your Life in My Hands

Pamela Rose was born in Melrose, Massachusetts and is a hybrid pilgrim of British and American descent.

A former bi-lingual secretary and UK lawyer, Pamela moved with her husband and son from England to the USA, some ten years ago. A keen sports lady, she also enjoys all types of writing including greeting cards, songs, poems, and faith driven books.Chapter 1—Thursday, Day 1

When boarding a bus called Fellowship of the Sword with fifty-three years of life tightly entwined around your body, strangling the very breath out of you, agitating with years inside an empty marriage, and having childhood memories bobbing up and down in tune with the tapestry of youth’s promiscuity, the prognosis for the trip does not seem good. You believe that your past is immeasurably worse than those sitting all around you, and you shrink back into your seat, anticipating the worst.

I was on a bus bound for a ranch in a location I knew not, but somewhere in the Hill Country of Southern Texas. That’s all I really knew or cared to understand. I had reached the end of the road in terms of the designer lifestyle I had created with all its pitfalls, and I wanted my life back. I had died a slow death inside, and it was my time to see, to be born again.

While sitting shoulder to shoulder amidst total strangers, stories unfold before your very eyes, and the fallen world’s lives reveal abhorrent truths and cruel realities. You then realize that you are not alone, and the common ingredient shared is bondage, all courtesy of captive free will. Bound we were, but soon to be loosed.

Shackled to the very tips of our heads by life’s inequities, I embarked on a journey of apparent darkness, only rivaled by the compelling light it would shed upon my return to reality five days later. But for now, it was an unknown, and I sat nervously, knowing that soon it would be my turn to disclose and spill all. It would be my turn to tell my unabridged story to persons I had never set eyes on before, driver included.

You see, you have the choice. You have center stage. Come clean, and be rid of the gangrene-infested memory bank that continues to deprive you of life, bind, and gag you, all courtesy of the ever-present and resident accomplice, the devil, or you can hold back and justify your stance. It’s your choice after all, and captive free will is the common denominator. I chose to conform!

For some, it was all too much, and life’s horror stories were screened without censor to an unsuspecting audience. Reality hits hard, tears well up, and your heart bleeds as you listen incredulously to life’s victims. Taken by surprise, you begin to see a pattern of merciless subjugation experienced by so many and at the hands of those trusted most. It’s life’s irony at its best.

For many, bitterness took root, and un-forgiveness became a justified means to an end; the due punishment for those who relentlessly had tormented and tortured a life just to gratify sadistic cravings or power-hungry appetites. Those who had fallen foul and who had fouled sat pensively, nervously awaiting their airtime.

Longing for peace, release from captive pasts, and the freedom to lay claim to promised futures, we tarry a while longer, wondering and doubting the outcome. Detours will be shelved for five days at least, and the small gate with a narrow road beyond is illuminated.

The five-hour journey passed with the blink of an eye, but its cutting-edge technology of purpose deeply incised my very soul. I was speechless within but feigned the talk, heavily masked. I knew my time would come to reveal all. The arrival at the ranch provided me with some temporary respite, only to discover that my time to confess was ahead.

Off the bus and in the ranch, it was called a mercy seat, a term I had never encountered, but an essential throne where the sordid of life is revealed and unwelcome thoughts, deeds, and words are confessed, declared, and thereafter put to death.

I bore my soul at two in the morning on March 2, 2007, on my mercy seat and in the company of total strangers. My salvation was proclaimed! I had been a Catholic for a lifetime, so I naturally thought I was already a member of the club. I was a Catholic after all, so I must have been saved! My infant baptism, first holy communion, and early confirmation bore witness to the fact, but had my life to that point reflected the glories of our Creator and Savior? Or did they sadly reflect another whom we all know but perhaps choose to ignore too readily and almost incessantly? For now, salvation was the requisite first step on what was going to be a fierce battle for my release into His freedom.

Salvation was secured. A strange bed was a welcome refuge from unimaginable beginnings. And to think I had unwittingly boarded a bus just hours earlier, angry, skeptical, and blissfully unaware of what lay ahead. Oh, sweet mercies! He’s in control for sure!

At the point of being emotionally drained, my selected perch gave temporary rest to an already weary traveler, and the evening closed. Did dreams accompany my night hours? No, I was in His peace.