The tiny Episcopal mission of my choosing had a congregation of less than a hundred. It was the summer of 1969. No one wore choir robes like in the Baptist church. No one spewed out hell and damnation messages. No one seemed to care that I was an ugly misfit with a nose that swallowed my whole face.
The Vicar sat in the center isle of the tiny chapel and shared stories about the life of Jesus. Shame based at my very core, Baptist preaching had always stirred the hornets’ nest. But in the summer of 1969 I forgot all about religion and fell in love with the Real Jesus. The Vicar’s stories transformed Christ from some historical distant figure to a living, breathing man who struggled and hurt and had been rejected. I could relate to that! Sundays couldn’t come fast enough. The little red-brick light-filled chapel became an ethereal realm where I felt safe and accepted.
Now, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. Don’t go thinking I turned into the Virgin Mary like my oldest sister. It would be delusional to say I made my parent’s lives easier; I don’t think that happened for another twenty years. But that summer I did stop running away from home — I might have skipped that part earlier. I had been pulling disappearing acts for the last two years. Usually no one came looking for me. I think my mother’s hands were pretty full with her other hellion children, the garden club, and covering up for my drunken father. In my father’s case, out of sight meant out of mind, and you can be sure that forgetting I was alive was high on his agenda.
I can’t put all the blame on my parents or my nose for my enormous inferiority complex; my hip played a big role. Having been born without a right hip bone made me a little bit of a freak from the get-go. My early years were spent in Pil-o-splint braces that pulled my feet together and pushed my knees out. Sitting Indian style is still a cinch for me, even at my age. My mother, God bless her, had been raised Methodist. The Methodist’s aren’t big on the whole miracle thing unless it is to explain all the stuff that Jesus did in the Bible. But my mother was an out-of-the-box thinker; and all those years that I couldn’t walk and sat on the floor in those big ugly metal leg braces, my scrawny little knees poking out to the side like a frog, she just kept praying. Sure enough, God grew me a hip bone, and by the time I was three I was able to walk.
My mother’s intimate knowledge of how to pray with specificity started with the whole hip incident. She had remembered to pray about my hip bone but never gave any thought to the length of my legs. Fortunately God had a plan and, as it turns out, a really good one. He looked into the future and saw my big nose and the humiliation I would suffer. He could see I’d have a dad who couldn’t stand me and a generally fracked-up childhood. God knew he was going to need that short leg of mine later for something really important. In his mercy he tilted my pelvis so that I didn’t have to walk with a club shoe. To the average kid I looked relatively normal, at least until my nose took over.
The people at my tiny Episcopal mission believed in miracles. They weren’t fanatics, but they were convinced that no one had edited out a part of the sentence in John 14 when Jesus told his disciples they would do greater miracles than he had done. It was a little woo-woo for me, but who was I to judge? The miracle of the hip was a medically documented fact in our family, even if I had been too small to remember it.
In January after I started attending the mission, my parents allowed me to go to a youth retreat for teenagers from small Episcopal churches around the Southeast. I guess my behavior had been a little more contained as I hadn’t skipped school, gotten caught in any lies or been down to the juvenile hall lately. I could tell their hope barometer was rising as they thought that Jesus had finally gotten ahold of me. Truth is, I couldn’t have cared less if our youth retreat was taking us across the border to act as drug mules, I just saw a chance to escape Alcatraz for a weekend and took it. I didn’t even look back as the big yellow school buses drove us out of the gravel parking lot and headed for the North Carolina Mountains.
The bitter cold of the Carolinas turned unseasonably warm upon our arrival. It was the flower child era, the dawn of hard drugs and free love. Our band of brothers reclined in the warm sun on cool grass beside a diamond-studded lake. In tattered jeans and muslin shirts we strummed guitars and sang folk songs about Jesus. Tenderness rolled across the grassy knoll; the fear and chaos I had lived with all my life disappeared like a vapor.
The second night, just before lights out, a young woman came to my room and said, “Come with me.” My heart began to pound. I flipped through my Rolodex of Baptist church no-nos that I had learned in my former life. I couldn’t think of one breach. Maybe I had broken an unknown Episcopalian rule and was about to be booted out of the club. All I knew was I didn’t want to go.
I was led to a small room where eleven “elders” sat in a circle. There were two empty chairs and I was asked to take one. I flashed back to movies I’d seen where people sat in dim rooms in circles trying to summon up the spirit of some dead loved one.
“Should I remove the other chair?” someone asked.
“No. God will send us someone to sit there,” a woman in the circle said.
The whole thing was beginning to freak me out. I thought it best not to disturb the forces, so I didn’t ask why I was there. I had never been very good at keeping my mouth shut, but this one time I thought it might come in handy.
“Violet,” one of the elders said, “We were praying and God told us to go and get you.” God spoke to them? Trust was not one of my high skill sets. Despite the fact that I didn’t want to be defriended by this seemingly kind group of Jesus freaks, my plan to remain silent failed. “Why?” I asked. “We don’t know,” he replied, “but God will show us.”
I began to quiver. My mind flipped through the Rolodex of all my secret, and not so secret, sins. I was sure God was pretty pissed at me.
The group broke out in a Sixties Jesus peace, joy and love song. Closing their eyes they swayed from side to side, seemingly absorbed in the moment. I didn’t know the words; and though I hadn’t officially heard it was a church rule, I was pretty sure mouthing the words to a song about Jesus’ virtues wasn’t going to win me any favors with God. A kid not much older than me strolled into the room. “I was just praying and heard God tell me to come join you,” he said.
He took the thirteenth chair. Now our circle was complete. One of the “elders” began to tell a story about how he had been born with a birth defect, one arm shorter than the other. He had my attention right out of the gate. He talked about feeling like a freak most of his life and how the humiliation of having one arm shorter than the other had led him to a life of isolation. I was hanging on every word. He told us that one night a few years ago, he attended a healing service. He went down front and asked someone to pray that God would heal his arm. But nothing happened. That night, as he was driving home, his too-short arm became very hot. He described an intense electrical pulse that began in his shoulder and shimmied down his bicep straight toward his wrist. Scared to keep driving, he pulled off to the side of the road. There, alone in the dark, he watched as his too-short arm grew to be the length of his normal arm. When he came to the climax of his story, he stretched both his arms out for everyone to see. Matching arms!!
I realized the guy was perfectly well intended, trying to talk up Jesus, but honestly I just couldn’t go for it. I didn’t think he was lying, just maybe delusional in a well-intended way. Sure I’d heard all those miracle stories in the Bible about Jesus healing blind people, lepers and dead kids. It’s not like I didn’t think God was up to it, I just figured most likely he wasn’t running around doing that kind of thing in the twentieth century.
As an excuse for always missing curfew, my middle sister was always claiming she was talking to fairies in the woods around our house and aliens had abducted her. Growing up in a family where insanity was the norm, my instincts taught me to question everything and everybody.
Despite how fantastic his story was, I wished it were true; then maybe Jesus would give me two matching legs like his arms. The more I thought about God fixing my leg, the more I was certain that God didn’t even like kids like me, all spit and bravado, well versed in the art of deception. Even if God was running around growing legs and arms, he sure wasn’t going to do me any favors.
All of a sudden the guy with the matching arms said, “Someone in this room has one limb shorter than the other and God wants to heal them right here, tonight.”
No one knew about my leg. Already an outcast of society, why would I risk being reduced to subhuman by spreading the news of my deformity? I could feel my heart skip rope in my chest. Maybe this Episcopal business was a little too weird for me after all.
“Is there anyone who would like prayer for this problem?” he asked. No one answered. All eyes scanned the circle, closely examining one another. I tried to blend in, looking as non-malformed as possible. I pulled my legs up Indian style in my chair so no one would spot me. We sat in silence. I could hear the drumming of my heart echoing in my ears. I wanted to run. I scanned the room for an escape hatch. The only exit lay clear on the other side of the group.
The guy with the matching arms said, “We’ll just wait on God then. Let’s pray for others until the person God wants to heal is ready.” I’d held my bladder for hours waiting for my father to fall asleep so I could slip under the swinging doors in our bathroom and use the facilities. I was practiced at the waiting game.
They began to pray. And pray. And pray. It was a round-robin; as one of them left off, the other picked up. Their prayers flowed seamlessly, finishing and beginning one another’s thoughts as though they were of one mind. I don’t know how long they prayed, but the room filled with an invisible presence, and I was swept along in the current. Fear gave way to an almost uncontrollable desire to confess my little-people leg. Any hope of escaping without doing so was rapidly fading.
Unwinding my legs I stretched them forward and said, “The right one’s shorter.” Like a room full of mother hens, they rose without a word and moved around me. Hands gently touched on my shoulders, my head, my arms. Some people stood, others knelt around my chair. The guy with the matching arms knelt in front of me and extended his even arms, palms open. “Place your heels in my hands,” he said softly. I did as instructed.
More than four decades later, my rational brain cannot explain what happened next. They all began to pray at the same time but in a language I had never heard. Heat rose in my right hip and moved down into my thigh. I closed my eyes, overcome with the sensation. The heat intensified, and I could feel a gentle but distinctive electrical current stimulating my thigh, extending down my shin and into my foot.
“Violet! Open your eyes!” called the man with the matching arms.
In that moment the inexplicable grace of God shook my world. My right leg was growing, with twelve witnesses gathered around me. The leg stretched outward, longer than the left, as if to make a point, so that there would be no doubt as to what we’d seen. Then it moved back, perfectly even with the left. Stunned, my eyes rose to meet the man kneeling in front of me, my heels still in the palm of his hands. He smiled and people all around me began to raise their voices again, “Thank you, Lord, for your love.” “Thank you for your power, Jesus,” said another.
And then I saw him, beyond the small crowd, standing off to my left, his sandaled feet protruding from beneath a faintly striped linen robe. Dark shoulder-length hair and a beard framed his eyes, which were pools of love. He smiled at me with such tenderness that even today the memory of it makes me weep. In that instant everything I knew about religion disappeared, and something greater took hold of me that I knew would never let go.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake bathed in a kind of euphoria. I hadn’t asked for God to heal my leg. Until the moment my leg grew, I didn’t really know God was in the leg-healing business. I’m not sure what healing my leg did for all those people who saw it grow, but for me it told me God not only knew I was alive on planet earth, but that he loved me. He hadn’t needed to show off for the people in that little room that prayed for me. They already believed in the miracle of arms and legs growing. He did it just for me, because he wanted me to know that I mattered to him.
This was the reason I couldn’t sleep. I had never really mattered to anyone before.
The yellow school bus that had carried me into the grace-filled arms of Jesus drove me back into the dysfunctional arms of my parents. On the way home I had a chance to reflect on whether or not to tell them that Jesus had fixed their mistake.
The reason I was born with all kinds of tics on my right side was because my mother held my middle sister under an x-ray machine while I was still in the womb. “I used to wake up in a pool of blood while I was carrying you,” my mother loved to say, “Nature knew you were deformed and was trying to abort you. Nature abhors imperfection.” You might think this is a little harsh, but I think somehow blaming it on nature made her feel better.
Highly creative, my parents were always trying to complete what nature started. When I was small, if I fell asleep on a family trip, I would always wake up alone in the car in some parking lot, cleverly setting the stage for my abduction, sort of like leaving your keys in a car on purpose. Unfortunately for both of us, the whole abduction plan never worked out. Life is full of bitter disappointments. But tenacity was at the heart of everything my father did; and just because I wasn’t snatched from the backseat in some parking lot, he wasn’t about to give up.
As my yellow school bus bumped its way over hill and dale, I made a decision: If Jesus could forgive all my shenanigans and fix my leg, I could do the same for them.
“What happened to you?” my mother asked the moment I got off the bus.
“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing perfectly well what she meant.
“Something’s happened,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s a light glowing off your skin.”
I looked down at my arms. I didn’t see a light, but I could feel one burning inside me.
“We’re not going anywhere till you tell me exactly what happened,” she said vehemently.
I told her. She cried. My mother took me to the family doctor who verified my matching legs. After that she told my father. He just laughed in his smug, demoralizing way that tried to suck every bit of joy from my body. But I wouldn’t let him. It served me right, him not believing me. I hadn’t believed the guy with the two matching arms. I was hoping God would change my father’s mind the way he changed mine. Fat chance. I was younger and more pliable. My father was cemented in his personal prison like a vault in Fort Knox.