M.E. – Freeport Pretzels

Coming out of college in 1979 as a woman with an engineering degree made me in high demand to fill a quota, my challenge was to pick a job where I would be ALLOWED to work and not to just sit in the corner and look pretty. I finally selected to take a position at Micro Switch in Freeport, IL. I was a woman in a man’s job and thank God I had spent that time behind the bar or I would have never made it. I could write a book about sexual discrimination, but I would have to write it as a novel because most people today wouldn’t believe that things like that actually happened.

It was after about five years in Freeport that I reached the end of myself and literally wanted to kill myself and end my suffering. I remember standing in the living room of my rented duplex and thinking, I am “successful”, I have a new car, a new motorcycle, an Irish Setter and more money than I know how to spend and yet totally hopeless so what have I got to live for. I spent probably another six weeks or so working out the plan to kill myself making it look like an accident.

On a Friday night I dressed up for a ‘night out’ making sure that everything looked normal and not planned. I was going to spend some time at the Singles Meeting to have a few drinks and be seen before heading out to find a truck to drive head first into. I reached the Holiday Inn, walked in and headed for the conference rooms but the place was dead, no activity was going on, there was no music from the band that usually played at these events. There was no Singles Meeting that night. Now what was I going to do, it was only 8pm? I went to my car and sat, sat trying to figure out what to do then I remembered that one of my friends from volleyball/softball had invited me to come and hear the band that was playing at the Christian coffee house.

The coffee house was in the older part of town in a storefront building on a dark street, the lights inside are down low because the band is playing. I enter in the front door and scan the room looking for Jamie. I see Jamie sitting by herself at a table near the front window and make my way over to her. She looks up and smiles and pulls a chair out for me to sit in. Since the band is playing I just sit down and we don’t speak.

Finally, the band takes a break and Jamie ask me how I’m doing and I tell her without looking up from the bottom of my cup that I’m really not doing well. She tilts her chair back up onto the back two legs and looks at me and says, “Well, you know you really need Jesus”. I looked her in the eye and say, “Yeah, you’re right, it’s time”. She proceeded to fall backwards onto the floor in shock. Once she gathered her self up, she led me in the sinner’s prayer. On the night that I planned to kill myself I gave my life over to Jesus as my Lord and Savior. As it says in Gal 2:20, …and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

Now I wish to tell you that everything in my life was a bed of roses and I never felt depressed from that point on, but I can tell you that since that time the Lord has been faithful as long as I put my trust in Him and don’t try to do things on my own. It was in Freeport that I finally came to the end of myself and sought the true One that could get me through the day-to-day stuff called life.

Next M.E. – Germany; Arm-in-Arm