Several months ago, Christina and her husband got into a fight, and he stopped paying for her living. Although they share a house and a marriage license, they live as though separate. He has his own truck, and he has stopped paying for hers (“It’s been four months. The police could come right now and take my truck away, and then where would I go?”). He stopped paying for electricity at her house—she calls it her house because he comes home near-midnight and leaves at 3AM every day. He spends so little time there, apparently, that the lack of electricity and AC doesn’t bother him. And she has no idea what he does during the day. Last she knew, he still held a job as a construction worker for the City of Austin. But where does the money go? Where does the rest of his time go?
She’s now looking for some kind of part-time job that she can maintain from home, while taking care of her seven children.
He’s been distant for more than a while now (she found out he had been cheating on her once or twice, and could do nothing about it). But he wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, she was 15 years old, he was 17 years old, and they started dating. He told her her eyes were beautiful in the sunlight. He showed up uninvited with roses. She turned 16 and he turned 18, and they got married, her mother consenting. She wanted to stay in school, but she was pregnant by 17 and forced to drop out by school officials.
(Her oldest daughter is 12 years old.)
She’d fallen in love with the boy in the first place because he was so strong, so charismatic, in stark contrast to her life hitherto lacking both qualities. She was living with her mother in a dirty apartment. Her aunt was living near and, Christina was convinced, casting curses over them constantly. The rest of her family was back at home in Mexico, and she missed her siblings terribly. This boy would be her anchor in a new place, her salvation, she thought.
She has considered divorcing him. It hadn’t taken long before he started drinking, started looking at other women. After all, they were barely adults. But every time she had the thought of separation, she heard God’s voice in her head, she saw his words in his book. Christians do not divorce, she reminded herself. And every time she almost did it for good, thought to definitely do it this time, she got pregnant. And had to stay with him. She took it as God’s sign.
At the same time, she was losing her faith for a while. “I felt like I was too far away from God. That I had meant everything. Because when I got married with my husband, I didn’t go to church much anymore. I didn’t pray much anymore. I was bad. I was bad in a way that, I would talk bad—I would say bad words, and I never did before. But when I met my husband I changed. And I would be saying bad words. I thought God wasn’t going to be with us.”
Then, about six years ago, she was driving her truck in the rain when she lost control and swung into the opposite lane. She honked desperately at the incoming cars, still far off, but they either didn’t hear her or weren’t paying attention. Automatically, she prayed.
“I felt my spirit go, ‘God, I put my kids in your hands, I put myself in your hands. I’m sorry for everything I did wrong.’ I didn’t think that I would do that. But I guess my spirit did.”
She felt the jolt and the truck careened off the road. When it came to a stop, she looked in the backseat—one out of her three kids was sitting there, unharmed.
She struggled to exit the mangled mass of metal, then spotted her daughter. Dead. Lips purple, face steely cold. She prayed, cried out to God—the life came back. She sat up straight.
“She told me that someone had told her that I needed to look for my son. Even she said that someone had put them where they were, so I’m guessing that the angels did it.”
She made sure that her daughter was ok, then ran. The police and ambulance had arrived, and she ran to them—they needed to help her find her son. They eventually did, and they put him and his sister into separate ambulances.
Christina sat by her dying son and prayed. They told her it was unlikely he’d make it—she prayed and his vitals were sustained. They told her, amazed, to keep doing whatever she was doing.
They arrived at the hospital.
“And not even like, 30 minutes passed by. And they come and they say, Ok, you can go check out your son. He’s sleeping, he’s talking in English. And I was like really? He’s talking in English? Cause he didn’t like talking in English. He speaks Spanish, not English. And he was speaking it really good, and he’d never been able to speak English good. I’m like, wow! Thank you Jesus. So, he’s alive, and he’s doing okay. They said they were going to put some kind of plate for his foot to get better. But they never did, because they said he healed. They were surprised. They said, they didn’t think he was going to heal because there was a lot of kids that didn’t heal.”
This incident altogether brought her fully back to her faith. It’s her faith that sustains her now, even as the structures of her life deteriorate.
Her brother was kidnapped in Mexico. No one has heard from him for ten years.
Her husband is letting his family rot.
But she trusts God, that God will provide. If not, the next step is homelessness.
Dear Isabella, this is very touching story of faith journey with trials, hardship, and miracles, full of hope. Thanks for writing down lively to inspire people to watch and help those in need. Great work and keep it up!