I decided to turn my life around when the only choice I had left was to make a phone call from a phone booth near a church in a rural small town that sits quietly beside the Delaware River in Pennsylvania.
I don’t remember what I said and I’m sure I made the call to my mother collect, so it was a relief she accepted the charges. I had my doubts. Countless attempts to get my life together failed and by the time I reached for the phone’s receiver and mustered up the courage to make the call, I had run out of ideas. I knew I couldn’t return home because that was a “Sink or Swim” rule set forth by my parents. There was no going back, but I had no idea how to go forward either.
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There was such an emptiness in my entire being mixed with terror. I believed there was nobody on the entire planet who cared if I lived or died and so it was such a shock to hear my mother say into the phone, “Thank God you’re alive” and then she directed me to drive out to the center of the State where they lived and we’d figure things out. The shock of being important to somebody and incredible feeling that someone wanted to help me was so intense I can still remember it clearly over 30 years later.
Did I cry? I don’t recall. In the years that followed that phone call I cried often. Putting me back together was no easy thing and it took years. I was not liked much and I could count on one hand the number of people who may have actually loved me. I didn’t deserve to be loved, nor was I easy to love. For a long time, anyone who tried to love me would just get hurt. My Dad said to me once during those putting humpty-dumpty-Kim back together years that I was the angriest person he’d ever known. I remember wondering how he knew such an ultimate truth that I hadn’t even admitted to myself.
There’s no getting around the fact that after I made that phone call my life was going to become extremely difficult because I was 23 years old, broke, jobless, homeless and hopeless. And angry. I don’t like to remember it.
There was one gigantic turning point however. Actually, there were two of them but the first one is too painful to write about. The nicer one occurred when my mother took me to see a talk given by a man named Terry Campbell, who stated these words that shot through me like a lighting bolt – “You exist because God loves you.” Remember that I believed that nobody loved me and worse, I made that happen. It was my fault. I was a terrible person and didn’t deserve love. It never occurred to me that God loved me no matter what. Terry spoke about a religion called Eckankar and how we are all Souls and much more that made absolute sense. My childhood and teenage interest in world religions was rekindled and for the next 25 years I followed the path of Eckankar and its teachings healed me; and they saved my life.
Today I’m a spiritual mutt, grounded in Native American teachings, with an Eck backbone, and strong tendencies for Buddhism, Essenes, Judaism, and the core teachings of love and tolerance that Jesus taught. I bristle at anything intolerant because I know how it feels to be judged. I never believed in the concept of sin. Ever. I felt bad enough about myself without the added bonus of being a sinner, even as a baby. Although baptized as a Lutheran, I did that because it was a demand when I was 19 years old – another story, another time, another bunch of sad memories .
I’m in my 50’s today. From my past life in this lifetime I retained my sense of humor, smile, and ability to love others. I learned it’s true when they say that you have to love yourself first and then the pieces of your puzzle work into their proper place. By age 29 I was rebuilt, and dating the man who would be the father of my two kids when I was 32 and 35 years old. I had another burst of growth at age 38 where I realized who I was and where I wanted to go next. That too is another story, but it has a happy ending.
I haven’t been back to that tiny riverside town since I made that phone call from the phone booth by the church. I’m sure the phone booth was removed but the old, small church is still there. I wonder if anyone in that church knows that their phone booth rescued a lost young woman and that from the moment she made her phone call, God took over from there.