Stormie Omartian - Out of Darkness: My Story of Finding True Light and Liberation

HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

EUGENE, OREGON

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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All of the stories related in this book are true, but the names of certain persons mentioned have been changed in order to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. Each name that has been changed is marked by an asterisk following the name the first time it is mentioned.

All photographs in this book are the personal property of the author and may not be reproduced without written permission.

Cover photo by Michael Gomez

Cover by Left Coast Design, Portland, Oregon

OUT OF DARKNESS

Copyright 2015 by Stormie Omartian

Published by Harvest House Publishers

Eugene, Oregon 97402

www.harvesthousepublishers.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Omartian, Stormie.

Out of darkness / Stormie Omartian.

pages cm

Continues: Stormie. 1986.

ISBN 978-0-7369-5057-2 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-7369-5058-9 (eBook)

1. Omartian, Stormie. 2. Omartian, StormieChildhood and youth. 3. Abused childrenUnited StatesBiography. 4. Adult child abuse victimsUnited StatesBiography. 5. Women drug addictsUnited StatesBiography. 6. Life change eventsUnited States. 7. Spiritual healingUnited States. 8. Christian authorsUnited StatesBiography. 9. Christian biographyUnited States. 10. Women musiciansUnited StatesBiography. I. Omartian, Stormie. Stormie. II. Title.

CT275.O54A3 2015

270.092dc23

[B]

2015020231

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To my husband, Michael Omartian, for his faithfulness to God and to me.

To Suzy, Susan, and Roz, my prayer partners of more than 30 years, for all of your labor in praying for me and my family. Id pray that the blessings you have given me through your ongoing prayers would be heaped a hundredfold back upon you, but then again I dont want to limit God!

To my son, Christopher, and my daughter-in-law, Paige, and to my daughter, Amanda, and my son-in-law, Dallas, for your love and support. And to my granddaughter, Scarlett Grace, for bringing everlasting joy to me and my family. I love you all much more than mere words can ever express.

To Bob Hawkins, LaRae Weikert, Kim Moore, Terry Glaspey, and the staff at Harvest House Publishers for your constant support. Special thanks to L.Rae, T.Glass, and B.Hawk for all of those special times we spent together talking about the future and how to best serve God. Our more than 30-year relationship has been a source of great happiness and encouragement to me.

Contents

For the first 30 years of my life, I believed no one had more emotional scars than I did. I know now that I was not alone. After I began writing books and went public with my personal story, people came out of the hidden places of their soul with similar stories of their own to tell me. All were heartbreaking. Some were horrifying. In fact, many stories were so shocking that it was difficult to even think about them. I had no idea that these suffering people even existed, let alone how great in number they were. I mistakenly thought I must be the only one.

You may wonder how I didnt know about the countless people who have suffered emotional brokenness due to things that happened to them or mistakes they made. Its because, at the time, these kinds of negative experiences werent talked about. They were kept secret in the unfortunate tradition of feeling that people might not believe you, or they would blame you instead of your circumstances, or judge you for your suspected part in the situation. We were in the dark ages back then about emotional suffering. And though we are not quite yet in the age of enlightenment about this, its far better now than it was.

Emotional damage doesnt all happen in childhood. People can experience a wonderful time growing up and still be scarred later in life by abusive people who inflict their own brand of cruelty on them, or by their own bad decisions, or through tragedies of one kind or another. Whatever the reason, people need to be brought out of the darkness of their life.

This is the story of my struggle to overcome the emotional damage of abuse in my childhood and the heartbreak of being a potential child-abuser. But you dont have to experience any of these things in order to relate to the miraculous restoration I experienced. No matter what pain, disappointment, or situation has placed you in a dark place in your life, there is a way to come into the light of healing and restoration.

It has never been my intention to blame anyone for what happened in my past. Its too easy to point out someone elses faults, because we all have them. And because no parent is perfect, its cruel and unfair to hold them forever accountable for mistakes they have made. We have to let those things go and take responsibility for our lives now. We have to move on. Its my goal to point you, the reader, toward the source of all restoration and wholeness.

This is a true story, but some of the names have been changed to protect the privacy of people. When that occurs, following the first mention of that name, it will be followed by an asterisk (*).

I wrote about some of the things that happened during the first 35 years of my life in a book called Stormie that was published in 1986. I began the story at the major turning point in my life that started my climb out of darkness. Ive decided to again start at the point of deep darkness I was living in, in order to fully explain what drove me to the point of recognizing my condition and finding help. The facts are what they are, and I cannot leave them out because they are crucial to the rest of the story. The following 37 years after that point to the present day is all new, much of which I have not spoken about publicly before. But I feel the entire story should be told in order to prove that once you recognize the darkness for what is it, its possible to walk out of it and into the light for the rest of your life.

This book is about my life, but it is not so much about me as it is about living in darkness and finding true light. We have all been there in one way or another. Because of the overwhelming number of people who experienced similar or far worse emotional hurt than I did, and because so many have given up hope of ever being healed, Im telling my story so that they, too, can find a way out of the darkness of their past and onto the path of healing and wholeness that awaits them. I desperately needed restoration and I found it. And not only that, I found transformation such as I never dreamed possible. If I can find it, anyone who wants that can find it too.