He Turned to Me in the Mud

The first time Stormie Omartian tried to take her own life, she was in junior high. Home was poor and isolated, and her mother's untreated mental illness had filled her childhood with physical and emotional abuse. She said the repeated rejection left her lonely and depressed. She was still a girl when she decided she did not want to be alive anymore. Adulthood did not fix it. She pursued music and worked in Hollywood, and by the world's measure she was getting somewhere. But success did not resolve the pain. She used drugs and alcohol. She explored Eastern religions. She entered relationships that left her feeling empty. Each was an attempt to climb out, and each one left her in the same place. At twenty-eight, the ground gave way. Her television career was faltering. Her first marriage had failed. She was contemplating suicide again. What changed was not a breakthrough but a person. A friend named Terry shared Jesus with her. Stormie later said that the love and care she saw in Terry helped her accept Christ — not an argument, but a life. She began attending The Church on the Way, where she started learning, slowly, about God's love and about worship. Prayer and praise became practices that shaped the rest of her life, and she would go on to write about them for other people. Notice what the story does not say. It does not say the wounds closed overnight, or that a single conversation untied twenty-eight years of damage. What it says is that someone turned toward her, and in that turning she caught a glimpse of Someone who had been turning toward her all along. That is the shape of Psalm 40 as well — not a sudden extraction, but a God who hears a cry from a place with no foothold, and then bends down. SOURCE: Stormie Omartian: The Power of Praise (The 700 Club, CBN) / https://cbn.com/article/not-selected/stormie-omartian-power-praise