Dragons in the Dungeon

Hi, this is Bernie Dake. Welcome to the Salvation Army's Words of Life.

Welcome back to the Salvation Army's Words of Life. I'm joined in the studio again today by my co-host, Cheryl Gillum. Hey, Bernie. How are you today? I'm doing great.

All right. Last week, we had a special guest with us, former Words of Life co-host, Sheila Lanier. She joined Suzy to share her incredible story as a fellow, as Suzy calls them, barefoot Cinderella.

If you missed that episode, be sure to check it out. And as we continue to follow along with Suzy's book, we are now in chapter three, and this is such a powerful and heartbreaking chapter about growing up in a household with addiction. This week, Suzy is joined by another friend of the show, Lori Miller. This episode is certainly another survival story as we hear from women who have found more strength than they could have ever imagined in God. Now, like Sheila, Lori is a former co-host of this show.

I didn't know that. We get to work with Lori here in Atlanta. She helps the Salvation Army with programs that are coming out of our social services department. But one of the great stories I love to tell is Lori is the mother of five children, and she calls them two sets and a spare, because two of the sets of her children are twins.

That's an incredible story. But she's also a widow. Her husband, Keith, died years ago, and that's part of her journey. So I'm excited for our listeners to hear some of that. Looking forward for her to share her own story and loss in that way.

We hope you're being blessed by these series. If you've missed any episodes or to find out more about the book, visit Salvation Army Soundcast dot org slash words of life. Hello, I'm Major Suzy Erickson with the Salvation Army, and I am in the studio today with Major Lori Miller. And welcome, Lori. It's a joy to have you here. We love any opportunity that we can get together and just talk.

And so I've been so excited about this day and having a chance to just sit down and hear your heart and hear your story and your journey. And your journey really started out as just pretty ordinary, right? Yeah, it's one of those ordinary, normal little girl kind of charmed in a way.

Not really. It was imperfect. I don't want to say that because nothing is perfect, but it was pretty good. I had parents who were in ministry who loved the Lord. We moved around. They loved me.

And there was very little about my childhood that I would change. And I'm sure that you took some of those little girl dreams and what you saw in your parents into your own ideas of what marriage would be. So tell me about meeting the love of your life. So I met Keith actually in a Salvation Army church. I was about, I think it was about 23, and I was working at a hospital and I had moved to Augusta, Georgia, and I didn't know anybody. So I thought, okay, well, where do you go? When you don't know anybody in a town, you go to church and you go to the army and surely in that setting, you'll know somebody.

And if you don't, they will accept you and love you and welcome you in. And so that's what I did. And so I actually first met Keith's sister. He has a twin sister. Her name is Amy. And Amy and I became friends. And so through Amy, I was introduced to Keith at the Salvation Army church there in Augusta, Georgia. So... Was it love at first sight?

No. Keith... One thing about Keith is we are very different, which is really funny. Keith is very kind of laid back and sort of go with the flow and funny and charming. And I was a little more serious and quiet and sort of cerebral and those sorts of things. So it took a little while. But slowly but surely it came around and I was actually found that I was actually drawn to those things that were so different than myself. And so just over time, we just started talking and to hearing his story and listening to... He had been through a lot at that point that I had been unaware of any of that. And so sort of connecting in that way, we connected over our sort of shared history with the army.

His parents were officers and my parents were Salvation Army officers. And so we had similar experiences in that way. But there were a lot of other things that were very different that I was sort of attracted and drawn to.

But Keith was very charming and adorable. And all of those things that at 23, you're just like, oh, there you go. That's exactly what I need in my life. And so that was sort of our introduction. Yeah. And then you fall in love, you marry, and then life really starts to happen, right?

Right. And so we fell in love, we got married and something... There were underlying things even at the beginning because I wasn't fully aware of Keith's history and the things that he... I was aware that he had been through some things as a teenager, but I wasn't completely aware of the extent. And so as we got married and started our lives together, we started to realize the impact of actually Keith's adolescence and what had happened in his adolescence. And what that was, was Keith was heavy into drugs throughout his adolescence. He started at about 15, using heavily. And so 10 years of his life, really from about 15 to 25 even, maybe a little younger than that, had been marked by addiction and drug abuse in this really dark world that I, as a little girl and an adolescent, had not really experienced myself. And God had done amazing things in Keith's life. He never went back to using in that way. His life was never again once he was redeemed, marked by use. But what it was marked by is the trauma of addiction.

Right. And so there was a strange dynamic there even from the beginning, but we loved one another and so we sort of walked through those challenges pretty easily when it was just he and I. And then we became Salvation Army officers. We very quickly brought five young children into our lives. We had five children in four years and that will put a strain on even the healthiest people and the healthiest relationship. And so it was very difficult. I would say that as soon as those children came in, that love story started to shift a little bit.

The love never went away, but the pressures of officership and having a church and having five young children and all of those pressures began to really take hold in our relationship. So tell me about that moment when the clock stroked midnight. There were little signs along the way, so I don't want to say it was sudden, but there was a moment where we could not keep up going the way we were going.

It was not the right thing to do. We were ministers. We were pastoring a church. We had young children and so that stroke of midnight to me was when he left and it wasn't necessarily his choice.

It was something that had been forced upon us, but it needed to happen. And so I just remember for me it was that minute where the garage door opened and I could just hear it and then I turned around and saw these five little people and I thought, oh great, what now? And my kids were four, seven and eight, four, four, seven, seven, eight and eight and they were very young.

Two sets of twins, right? Yeah, two sets of twins and it was just that was the moment I just realized I guess when he left, not only the grief of losing him in that way, but also then to turn around and to look at, wow, my life is not going to look like my parents or like the rest of the world or like I thought that the story should be. My life was going to look different.

I was going to be a single mother. What did that look like in the world? I didn't know. It definitely didn't look like what I had imagined at that point.

Right. So what would you tell someone who is walking the journey right now that you walked? Yeah, what I would say to anybody facing the same thing is I promise you, it'll be okay.

It may not look like you had imagined. You have to change your perspective. You have to broaden your view and you have to really give it up to God and allow him to take every broken piece of that experience and to use it and the way he doesn't isn't always to make everything okay. Things are hard and that's okay, but what he's going to do with that hard is to use that hard to help someone else. Right. Because someone's going to benefit from your story and your pain and your experience and that's what redemption is about.

So that's how he redeems the hard in your story. And you really truly have survived some very difficult days. Yeah. And through those journeys, you do learn that all things are possible with God. Absolutely. And I am a far stronger person having had to experience a lot of those things and it has not been easy.

I don't want to give that sort of thought out there. Everything has been very difficult from that point on. Life hasn't necessarily gotten easier. I've gotten stronger and I've learned that every single thing that's ever happened to me in my life just fills me with this empathy and this understanding and this connection, a way I can connect with people that had I not experienced those things, it may not have been the same thing. So I can sit across the table with a woman who's been through some of the same things I have and connected in a much deeper and different way than I ever would have been able to had these things not happened. I want to share another line with you from Barefoot Cinderella's because I really do, as we listen to your story and I think about my story, I really have come to the conclusion that our beauty was birthed by the scars. This unique blend of scarring sets us apart. As Barefoot Cinderella's and that unique scarring is where we have this ability to pour in to the lives of other people. I think as a result of all this, I'm so less drawn to perfection than I am to authenticity and genuine real people. And so every scar that I have, I have had to learn not to cover because it's those scars that attract people to me. And I am being my whole real genuine self when I allow people to see those imperfections as difficult as it may be, as uncomfortable as it may be, as perfect as I wish I could be.

The fact of the matter is God uses those scars far more than he would ever use my perfection. The Salvation Army's mission, Doing the Most Good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit salvationarmyusa.org to offer your support.

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