Twest

3 p.m. July 29, 2017, Houston, Texas.

I re-planned that day a thousand times in my mind. I could have left at a different time. I could have gone to the apartment office when I saw their car pull in backwards, could have asked someone to walk me to my Jeep (although it’s common enough to park facing out, but now my hair prickles when I see someone park that way). Could have stayed in the office until they left.

Perhaps if I had simply gotten in my Jeep, closed the door and locked it, ignoring the young man yelling, “Hey!” Perhaps I could have driven away.

But I didn’t.

With the Jeep door still open, I turned around. Now I was looking down the wrong end of his gun. I can’t explain the kind of controlled terror I felt. Yet, I still had to think.

**************

8 a.m. July 8, 2012, Houston,Texas.

I decided to stop by Lakewood Church on my way back home to Alabama from the Southwest Believers’ convention. 

On my way in, I noticed her, eighty years old, beautiful, well-dressed, walking briskly toward the gargantuan building. Her walk said, “purpose.”

I said, “You look like you know where you’re going.”

She said, “I do—why don’t you come with me and sit with me too?” 

So I quickened my pace, and she started chatting with me. Turned out she was from Mississippi (I’m from Alabama) and we hit it off. 

During the service, they had a time of prayer where anyone could go up and get prayed for (by the Pastors of the church if you sat up front, by volunteers if you were sitting somewhere else in the auditorium). I had a funny feeling I was supposed to move to Houston, so I went forward.

I looked into the eyes of an attractive fifty-ish lady and said, “Look, if I am supposed to be here, I would need an apartment.”

No one could have predicted what she prayed, “Lord, let it be less than she thinks.”

I went back to my seat in disbelief. “How could it be less than I think? I’m not thinking nothin’. What would a Houston apartment cost? $2000? $3000? Who knows? One thing for sure, it can’t be less than I think, because I have no thoughts about it whatsoever.”

The next day I bought a Houston Chronicle just to see what the prices looked like. There was an apartment for $650, and I thought, “Well, that’s what I pay for my apartment in Mobile (Alabama),” so I called the number.

I could have passed out from shock when the man said, “We don’t have that one any more, but we have one for $469.” What was going on? It was as if I could hear God saying, Oh, it can’t be what my prayer partner says because you’re not thinking anything, huh? Now you just watch me make you think something and then make it less than what you think.

Everything fell into place. I was in the world’s greatest church in an awesome new city making new friends. It was a good move for me—I was the happiest and most carefree I had ever been in my life.

The only emotional connection I had to Alabama (that wasn’t painful and broken) was my little brother, Louis. But he was living with someone who hated me, who had called him the last time he came to visit me and told him to leave me and go back home with her, which he did. I needed a break from Alabama, and Lakewood was such a happy answer!

***************

6:05 a.m. April 21, 2017, Houston, Texas.

I was on my way to teach English as a Second Language at the Texas charter school where I had secured a position. I was running early enough to go by the Starbucks I liked and get a coffee once I turned off I-45. 

Like something out of the 1996 movie Twister, I saw a refrigerator hurtling towards my windshield. It was unreal, unimaginable. I was confused—I didn’t understand. It smashed into my Jeep, totaling it and almost killing me as well.

Somehow I stayed conscious. When the EMTs arrived, they put me on a stretcher and loaded me into an ambulance. I’m sure they thought I was crazy when, within the ambulance, I started yelling, “You said in your word, ‘All things work together for the good of those who love Him!’ How is this working to my good? Show me—just show me!’” 

I had a comminuted sternal fracture (my breastbone was fractured): I could in no way walk up stairs. Since I lived in an upstairs apartment, Miss Faye (the elderly lady from Mississippi who had befriended me when I first came to Lakewood) let me live with her for a few months while I recovered.

I couldn’t teach school; I couldn’t walk up the stairs to my apartment. It didn’t add up, considering the idyllic life I had been enjoying at my new church.

Now, every time I sneezed, it felt like a dagger was being jammed into my chest. Coughing was bad too, but not as bad as sneezing.

I finally recovered and got to go home and resume teaching, but I had a lot of questions.

***************

3 p.m. July 29, 2017, Houston, Texas, a few hours before church.

Now here I was, looking down the barrel of a gun. “Gimme your purse!” he ordered. He was young, maybe eighteen years old, nineteen tops. Hispanic. Green-eyed.

Somehow his gun didn’t look real to me, more like a high-scale toy. I had many thoughts in a breath’s time. My purse was on the passenger side of my Jeep where I had thrown it. The door was still open. I thought of where it was.

Then I heard another voice, inaudible to my external ear, but just as real as anything anyone ever said to me, if not more so. “If you turn around, he is going to shoot you in the back of the head and steal your Jeep.” To this day, I can’t prove it was God, but I believed the voice at the time, so I did the unthinkable.

While continuing to face him, I reached to my left and slammed the door shut, locking it with my hand control (key fob), which was still in my right hand, then slipping it in my pocket. I turned to face him and stood my ground. I was never so brave.

I held my hands up on either side of my ears in the universal position of surrender and lowered my head. “I don’t have anything . . . I don’t have anything . . .,” I heard myself plead as I shook my head side to side. 

It turned out his weapon was quite real; I was notified of this when he slammed the metal gun into my head. He hit me hard, but not hard enough to draw blood.

He climbed into the car which had turned around, ready to drive away, with five other men. I noticed two were extremely muscular. I couldn’t believe how slowly they drove away. The license plate said “AutoNation.” It was a dealership tag.

I went to the office and called the police. Nothing was done. The office refused to provide the police officers with the security camera tape; said only the manager could give it to them and that the manager was off. They were Hispanic also, just like the boy with the gun; I wondered in my mind if they knew the boy or his parents somehow.

I knew I had to leave that apartment complex that day and never go back. I would lose everything, but that’s exactly what I did. I stayed with Ms. Faye as I had done a few months ago when I had the near-fatal car accident which fractured my breastbone. She had kindly opened her home to me until I recovered enough to walk up stairs and would do so again.

I had already signed my teaching contract for the next school year, but I knew that, by the end of the year, I had to go back home to Alabama. Something was trying to kill me and wouldn’t let me stay in Houston anymore.

So, home I went.

******************

9:08 a.m. January 3, 2019

My cell phone rang. It was my brother, Louis. Mona Winfield, the lady he had lived with most of his adult life, had died.

He was alone. He’d never been alone in his whole life, having always lived at home (our grandmother had brought Mona in to live with them about twenty years before she died; now Mona had died too). I drove to his house and picked him up, saying, “You’re going to live with me, Louis, at least for awhile.”

“But you know I’m an atheist.”

“Yes, Louis, I know. But you’re still my brother. As long as you don’t try to stop me from reading my Bible and going to church, we’ll be fine.” 

“Why should I care? If you don’t care, I don’t care.”

Louis slept on my futon in the living room.

***********

4 p.m. January 14, 2019

Louis said he might as well go to church with me as stay home. So he went. He sang the songs and was friendly. Privately he told me that he was just going to be with me.

***********

5:30 p.m. January 17, 2019

Louis texted me that he found a restaurant job near our apartment. It’s the first job he’s held in ten years, since he started taking care of Mona full time. I’m so happy to see him take this step.

************

6 a.m. January 26, 2019

Louis came into the kitchen while I was reading my Bible. He said he might as well read with me, that it was just a book. So I let him read with me. 

Privately, I started praying for him to come back to faith (he had believed in Jesus when he was a little child).

***********

6:04 a.m. April 17, 2019

Louis came into the kitchen and announced, “I’ve thought about it, and decided I believe in Jesus again. If you want to, we can go back to that church you loved in Texas.”

Now it made sense why I had to leave Houston, why something had violently chased me out.

God wasn’t taking anything away—he was giving my brother back. 

***********

“We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28, CSB)