by Rachel Howells

Created on: August 10, 2010

Only divine intervention could change her mind. Mary was done with living and yearned for nothingness. She'd gone through pain, and now she was expected to go through happiness.

She glanced over at her newborn daughter crying in the hospital bassinet. She felt no emotion. If she hadn't been so sedated, perhaps she would've felt something, like revulsion.

She'd hoped for a boy, thinking only a boy could be a savior. She already knew what it was to be a girl and had no desire to recreate the experience. Her own girlhood was one where demons dwelled. She prayed to God every night to make them go away.

But only evil spirits answered in the slur of her father's drunken voice as he beat her pleading mother. The pitiable sound of suffering jabbed at Mary's ear. Not even a pillow and the distance between three floors could muffle the noise. She begged God to make it stop.

Early the next morning, Mary was elated when she woke to silence. God had answered her prayers! She bounded up the stairs, but halted at the sight of her mother. She was sitting on a step, arms outstretched, as if in supplication, with palms facing upwards. Bright red blood flowed from her gapping wrists and streamed down her arms. She held a blank stare, looking straight through Mary.

Her father moved in a new woman soon after the suicide, and the demons laughed. The proceeding years were filled with unspeakable abuses Mary tried to forget. Drugs helped to blur the boundaries of her memory, but never enough to obliterate them. And here the demons were again, mocking her with a daughter conceived by brutal rape.

Mary reached for the Gideon's Bible left near her bed. It would be the last time. She flipped it open, as a gust of wind blew through an open window. It calmed Mary's baby and rustled the pages of the Bible. A single drop of familiar bright red blood swirled from Mary's nose and landed at Isaiah 41:10: Do not fear, for I am with you.

The demons were stilled. Love overwhelmed Mary and she knew the Lord was there. The rest of her long life and that of her daughter's was devoted to missionary service. On her deathbed, when she was asked the secret to her happiness, she replied, "Divine intervention."

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