Early August 1998

“The next year, 1977, I got pregnant again. Jesse and I had moved to Farmington, New Mexico. I remember we drove there the night Elvis died, pulling a small trailer with everything we owned. Jesse was working a lot of hours as a boilermaker for a power plant there. We rented a double-wide mobile home, and it was one of the nicer places we lived. I fixed it up, and I was the typical little housewife—except that I smoked pot all the time. We weren’t doing major drugs then. My grandma Graham died, and when I flew to Phoenix for the funeral, I made a doctor’s appointment. I needed to have a cyst removed, and since I had just found out I was pregnant—and Jesse didn’t want the baby, of course—I decided to have an abortion at the same time. That was the only abortion that was done in a hospital.”

Chris and Jolene asked a question now and then to prod my memory, but mostly they just let me talk.

“Jesse and I separated for a while, and he had a girlfriend. When we got back together, we moved to Pinetop, up in the mountains; it was very beautiful there. Because of Jesse’s work we moved a lot, little towns all over Arizona and New Mexico. I once counted fifty different apartments or houses or hotels where we had lived in the ten years we were married.

“We went to Prescott for the fourth of July. It was wild there in the ‘70’s. The Hell’s Angels would ride into town, and the police would close the streets for the holiday. Prescott is a quaint little town with antique shops, and there’s a street called Whiskey Row with a bunch of saloons. Jesse and I were doing Quaaludes and partying in and out of the bars. I was so spaced out, I was offering Quaaludes to cops; there was no way they could control the drugs and alcohol, so they simply tried to keep the peace. We were in front of the courthouse, in the center of town, when Jesse went nuts and started hitting me, and the cops had to pull him off of me.
“Jesse screamed, ‘Just get the ______ out of my life. Go find somebody else.’

“I literally took him up on it. I turned around, walked across the street, went into a bar, and met a man. Paul took me to his cabin, and I spent the night there with him. We had an off-and-on relationship for the next couple of years. Whenever Jesse beat me up, I called Paul; he came and got me and nursed me back to health. He was a very gentle guy. I don’t think he ever wanted me to leave Jesse to marry him, but he was always there for m. Jesse never knew about him.”

…..more to come.

Joy Came in the Morning – Part 1
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 2
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 3

Early August 1998

We had a beautiful suite with a separate bedroom and a kitchenette off the full-size living room. From the moment we walked in, I felt the presence of God, and I began to realize that something truly supernatural was in store for me that night. Because I knew it would be an emotional time, I went to the bathroom, took my contacts out, and washed my face. While I was putting my pajamas on, Chris and Jolene prepared the living room. They placed boxes of tissues in various spots around the room, and they decorated one of the tables with a white linen tablecloth with lace trim.

“We want to anoint you with oil and pray before we begin,” one of them said. They prayed and asked God to reveal whatever memories I needed for my healing. That’s an important part of post-abortion ministry, because you immediately start blocking out the memories of that event. It’s a defense mechanism. You couldn’t live with what you did if you had to face it, so you suppress the memories and bury the details so deep in the recesses of your mind that you’re able to live in complete denial of what you’ve done.

After we prayed, Chris and Jolene asked me to start telling what I remembered about my abortions. “The first one was in May 1975,” I said. “That’s the only one I can even tell you the exact month and year.” I told the story of being pregnant before I married Jesse and choosing him over the baby.

“The second abortion was in 1976,” I said. “I don’t remember the actual abortion; I just remember coming home to our apartment and lying on the loveseat-rocker all day. Jesse asked me, ‘Are you okay?’ and I remember looking up at him and thinking, Now you ask. I just killed my own baby—our baby— something I really wanted and you’re asking if I’m okay. But I didn’t say it.

“There were always two reasons for the abortions. One was that Jesse didn’t want to have kids yet. ‘Someday,’ he’d always say. The other reason was drugs. I’d seen films in health class about babies who were born addicted to drugs, and it horrified me. We were so into drugs—cocaine and LSD, and even PCP, an animal tranquilizer that produced a cheap but intense high. The one time I thought I was going to die from drugs was the time I did PCP, around the time of that second abortion.

“My brother Mark and a friend brought the PCP over to our apartment; Mark had wanted to turn me and Jesse on for a change, since we were always sharing our drugs with him. Mark laced a joint with the PCP, and the four of us smoked, it. The drug makes you so high, you’re numb for hours; you can’t feel anything. It was wintertime and raining, but I remember going outside and letting the rain pour down on me. I couldn’t feel the cold or the rain. I started getting really scared. I went back inside and sat on that rocking loveseat for twelve hours without moving. I was virtually paralyzed. Jesse was sitting next to me, watching an old rerun of The Honeymooners. I started crying, becoming almost hysterical. ‘I’m going to die,’ I told him. ‘I’m not making it this time.’ He tried to talk me through the high, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fine,’ he said. But he later told me he had thought we were both going to die. At one point I cried out, ‘God if you’re real, please spare me from this, and I’ll never do it again.’ That was one promise I made good on; I never used PCP again.”

I paused to take a sip of water. Jolene and Chris encouraged me to take my time and tell it all.

…..more to come.

Joy Came in the Morning – Part 1
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 2
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 4

Early August 1998

That summer, my new friends Chris Harper and Jolene Dreisbach had been to a post-abortion healing conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’d never even heard the term post-abortion before that time, but I knew God was dealing with me about the abortion issue, and I knew that’s why he had brought Chris and Jolene into my life. I also knew it was time to leave Master’s Commission but did not yet know what I would do after that. Pastor Barnett had asked me to go to L.A. and help start the LAIC, the outreach that eventually became the Dream Center. Jack Wallace, who had been teaching the singles’ class the Sunday in 1989 when I made a commitment to Christ, was now pasturing a church in Detroit and wanted me on staff there. It would be a paid ministry position, and that would be a first for me.

As I prayed for direction, God started putting all the puzzle pieces together, and by August, Chris, Jolene, and I had decided to start a ministry to help bring healing to women who’d been through abortions. Before we formalized our plans to start Truth Ministries, the girls had told me they wanted to hold a memorial service for me. They’d been working on the ideas they’d learned at the Milwaukee conference, which had been not just for helping women heal emotionally after abortion but also after miscarriage and SIDS. “If we incorporated the Holy Spirit into the memorial,” they told me, “incredible things could happen.”

“Lori, think of it this way,” Chris said. “You never had a baby shower or did any of the things that would commemorate having a child. That’s what this memorial will do.”

“Or think of it this way,” Jolene added. “If you’d had a still born child or even a miscarriage, friends would have consoled you, and you would have mourned. But women who’ve had abortions—women like us—actually had the same kind of loss, yet we never had the experience of grieving for our children.”

I thought the idea of holding a memorial service for me sounded kind of strange at first, but they persisted.

“This is a way to deal with the abortions once and for all and to bring closure on the past,” Chris said.

Jolene agreed. “Please let us do this for you, Lori.”

We scheduled the memorial for the last weekend in August, right before my birthday. The week prior to that, God started softening my heart. I had always been the strong one, the one people came to with their problems. That week I became mush. Pastor Barnett rarely mentioned abortion from the pulpit, but that week he mentioned it twice, Sunday morning and Wednesday night. For some reason it was on his heart; he didn’t know I was that reason. He preached that abortion was wrong, but he also expressed compassion for women who had felt they had no other alternative.

On Wednesday night after church, Chris and Jolene told their families good-bye, then we drove to neighboring Scottsdale, where they had rented a one-bedroom hotel suite. We planned on staying until Friday night, so the fact that Chris and Jolene’s husbands were taking care of their kids for two days so we could be free to do this was a big deal to me. I didn’t think I deserved it. I was always telling people that God had great things in store for them, but I didn’t believe I would ever have the great things of God because the sin I had committed—abortion—was so horrible. I felt I would have to live with the pain and the emptiness, the loss and the shame, no matter how great a Christian I became. As we drove to Scottsdale, I sensed God saying to me, “Let these people minister to you.”

…..more to come.

Joy Came in the Morning – Part 1
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 3
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 4