Barbara Johnson - When Your Child Breaks Your Heart: Help for Hurting Moms

When
Your Child
Breaks
Your
Heart

When
Your Child
Breaks
Your
Heart

HelpforHurting Moms

Barbara Johnson

1979 by Barbara Johnson

Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com

Spire edition published 2008
ISBN 978-0-8007-8775-2

Printed in the United States of America

Previously published by Bethany House Publishers under the title Where Does a Mother Go to Resign?

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations identified TLB are from The Living Bible, copyright 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations identified NASB are from the New American Standard Bible, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations identified RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

BARBARA JOHNSON was a bestselling author with more than five million books in print, including Stick a Geranium in Your Hat, Between Estrogen and Death, and Humor Me. The founder of Spatula Ministries, she was a popular conference speaker nationwide and was part of the Women of Faith tour for six years.

Contents

Laughing Through the TearsTogether

When I visited my doctor recently for help in treating an eye infection, he told me to buy some artificial tears to keep my eye lubricated. Hearing his instructions, I chuckled, thinking, After all the real tears Ive shed over the years, now I have to buy some?

Enjoying the irony, I laughed all the way home. Best of all, as soon as I could get to a telephone, I called my son David to share the joke with him. Mom, only you would find something funny in an eye infection, he said, laughing along with me.

This is the same son I called Larry (to protect his identity) when I wrote this book twenty-five years ago. At that time there were no books, no ministries to help Christians who discovered that homosexuality had hit their nice, safe, protected family. So when we found out David was gay, my husband, Bill, and I had no understanding of how to deal with that devastating, painful news. We argued with David and said some things we shouldnt have said. As a result, we lived through eleven years of bitter estrangementas agonizing for David as it was for us, especially because it closely followed the death of two of our other sons.

Oh yes, Ive cried a lot of real tears over the last twenty-five years! More recently, Ive wept over the disruption in my life caused by a malignant brain tumor, and Ive mourned the death of Bill. But despite such sorrows, some of the tears Ive shed throughout this time have been tears of joy. Our relationship with David was restored long ago, and today I count him as one of my closest friends and confidants. He was the pivotal reason why Spatula Ministries was launched twenty-five years ago, and since then I have shared our story with thousands of parents who needed to be scraped off the ceiling with a spatula of love. (Thats where many parents land when they discover that homosexuality has hit their family!)

Through our work with Spatula, and through this book and more than a dozen others I have written, we have seen restoration occur in thousands of families. Many parents have written to say that our story gave them the first glimmer of hope as they got acquainted, through these pages, with someone who had actually survived what they were going through. And not only survived but learned to laugh again.

During the eleven years when our son was gone from us, the Lord kept wrapping us in His comfort blanket of love and injecting joy into our lives. When Your Child Breaks Your Heart was written out of terrible anguish and sorrow, but God turned our heartache to joy. And that joy has spilled over to other parents in pain through the 250,000 copies of this book that have been sold. Countless hurting parents have been helped by the story thats shared within the pages. I hope this new edition can do the same for you, whether youre at the stage where your tears are flowing naturallyor youre having to buy them!

Joyfully!
Barbara Johnson
The Geranium Lady
April 15, 2004

Yankee Doodle, Tinker Bell
and One Flat-Out Mom

It was a hot Saturday in June, 1975, the day before Fathers Day. I was scurrying to get myself on the way to the Los Angeles airport to pick up my sister, Janet, and her husband, Mel, who were en route to Minneapolis from Hawaii, and were stopping to spend 24 hours with us. We planned to celebrate the evening at Disneyland, spend the night in a motel in Anaheim, and then have a Fathers Day dinner together on Sunday before they left.

As I was dashing out the door, the phone rang. It was a friend of Larrys asking to borrow a certain book and wanting to pick it up right away. Impatiently, I rifled through Larrys bookcase and then pulled open the large side drawer in his desk where the huge red book was lying.

Happy to have located it so quickly, I lifted it out, but as I did my eyes caught some magazines and papers lying under the book. In the stack, about six inches high, were pictures of nude men and a packet of letters, evidently from dealers who sold literature on homosexuality. The envelopes had been addressed to Larry at a post office box in a nearby town.

A wave of nausea swept over me. Surely he was using this material for some school project on this subject. Larry, our third son, was twenty and in his third year of college; surely there had to be a reason why he would have all this material stashed away.

Suddenly, I remembered someone was hanging on the telephone, waiting to know if I had located the book. I managed to conclude the conversation and hung up the phone in a daze of emotions.

I returned to Larrys room and fingered lightly through the advertisements for homosexual films, pictures and other materials. Even touching the stuff I felt as if I were contaminating myself. What was this all about? There had to be a reason why Larry would order these books or be reading about homosexuality. I threw myself down on the bed and a terrible roaring sob burst from me. I was alone in the house, and for several terrifying minutes sobs from fear, shock and disbelief shook me.

Flashing in my mind was this wonderful son who was so bubbly and happysuch a joy to have around. Thinking of him entwined with some other male brought heaves of heavy sobbing from deep wounds of agony.

My reeling thoughts were interrupted by the realization that I had to get to the airport, no matter what state my emotions were in. I thought, If only I can zip up my questions and all the panic until twenty-four hours from now when the relatives are safely on their way out of here. Then surely Larry and I can have a talk, and he will have a logical explanation for this.

Perhaps he had a friend whom he was trying to help. That was Larry, always wanting to help someone else. I snatched the literature and letters from the bed and tossed them all in a sack, thinking Id keep them with me where theyd be safesafe from what?

My head felt like a pressure cooker about to explode. How could I let him know that I had found the magazines, but still go through with our plans for Disneyland tonight? Tears were still flowing down my cheeks and my hand was shaking as I took a pen and wrote hurriedly.