Remembering June

June's Memorial Service (2/14/07), Christ Church, Savannah, GA

I wasn't sure I wanted to say anything at June's memorial service, or even if I could, but then this literally downloaded into me during the wee hours the night before.

Today I'm going to have to read this so I apologize in advance to those of you who would prefer to hear me unscripted.

I first saw June when she came to pick me up at my house with another girl from Eastern North Carolina, so we could go off for three days of training with Holiday Inn. Knowing that two girls I had never met before were coming for me, I struck as debonair a pose as I could manage, with my sports jacket slung over my shoulder as I casually leaned against the porch wall of my parents house waiting for her to pull up. I'm glad I did.

She always said she knew from the first moment she laid eyes on me. Typically, it took longer for my own eyes to be opened. That moment came several weeks later, on one of our first dates when she cooked a spaghetti dinner for me. It was good really, really good. I was blind, but now I saw what a treasure was being offered to me. We used to joke that for her it was love at first sight, but for me, it was love at first bite! There was never any question that we were true soul mates, destined by the universe to meet a universe whose God neither of us had as yet encountered.

June was the one who came to faith in Christ first. Or rather, He came to her.  While she was reading a Christian comic book that told the story of the crucifixion, suddenly she was shown Jesus hanging before her on the cross. Looking up she could clearly see the crown of thorns upon his brow, the nail-pierced hands, and feet, the blood dripping from the wound in His side. And SHE KNEW. She knew that it was her own sins that had put Him there. She fell at His feet in heart-rending repentance, and rose a New Creation, re-birthed on earth through faith and grace.

For three years I knew nothing of what she had experienced. She knew better than to approach me directly for what was still in me of that world of spiritual darkness I had embraced during college years was adamantly opposed to anything Christian. So, she laid a trap. Whenever she went out on Sunday mornings, she would leave John Michael Talbot playing on the phonograph knowing well that I was too hungover or lazy to get up to turn it off. This was before John Michael entered his mellow period. This was his early rock and roll phase the lyrics about Jesus and the music were all in your face, rattling your cage. Or, she would turn the TV on to the 700 Club in the room next to where I was doing home office work at night and crank it up so I couldn't help but listen.

And all the while she was secretly recruiting prayers for my salvation from anyone she could find who could name the Name of Jesus. Secretly, because I would have forced her to stop had I known about it. She even had people inspired to bring much-prayed-over, sacred pictures into our workshop for me to frame. So, I began meeting a lot of flaming Christian witnesses and had to deal with it. They had such overflowing joy that the darkness in me was screaming to find a hiding place from them. And they didn't just let their lives be a witness, they used their words too and I needed that.

But best of all she told the Lord in no uncertain terms that she didn't want to be a church widow waiting for years to see her husband converted. She wanted me walking with her NOW! And God who is rich in mercy heard the cry of her heart and rescued mine from twelve years of an unspeakable horror that few have ever known. (Note: For that part of the story look for Rescued from Hell at Amazon.)

It was late at night on the evening in which my own conversion had taken place that God showed me the face of Jesus Christ. Earlier in the evening, as June and Barden Browning were praying away quietly on the sofa, my friend Eddy Browning led me in a prayer that opened heaven's gates: Lord Jesus Christ, come into my heart. Come into my life and live your life in me.

Immediately the eye of my heart was opened, and I saw clearly, though very dimly like a very snowy picture on an old TV set Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father. He turned my way and reached with an effortless grace through time and space to touch me and loose the chains that bound my tormented soul. In a shimmering moment of divine revelation, I KNEW that the Father is perfect love and that Jesus is Lord of everything that happens in the universe. I heard the Holy Spirit proclaiming inside me: The scriptures are true. The scriptures are true! and my answering thought rang out: Yes, and if I had only believed them, I would have been spared from years of an agonizing deception!

Later, in our bedroom, with June in bed and me by the closet at the foot of the bed, changing out of day clothes, Jesus came to me again. We often speak of seeing Christ in others and there is a truth to that, but as I looked at June with spiritually refreshed and awakened love, her beautiful countenance morphed and Jesus was thereunmistakably revealing His Face to me and engraving it upon my ravished heart. It took my breath away. I couldn't move while the heavenly vision was still in place, and then He was gone.

Right there He had me He was showing me the one through whom He had most truly come into my life. Without hesitation, I began a lifetime habit of giving myself entirely over to finding out where that life in Him with her would lead me. And the Lord gave me a dream to live for, a vision of a time when we would run with freedom and strength into a life of ministry together. It was to become a very costly vision. I had no idea at that time how hard it would be or how long it would take to see the encumbering mountains of emotional damage lifted off both of us.

But now 25 years later, we were finally at the threshold of that vision becoming reality. We had just finished a year of receiving first fruits in terms of liberated lives and testimonies of healing and we knew we were absolutely convinced that the time of harvest was now lying before us. While driving to Charlotte, June told her best friend during a cell phone call that she knew God was doing a painful cleansing to fully prepare us for what was coming, and she wanted to deal with it and be ready. And then something went unexpectedly and horribly wrong.

I am fully sensitive to how hard this blow has struck into the hearts of our children and all who love her, but I have been telling you this part so that you will have some idea how hard, how unutterably impossible Saturday and Sunday were for me once we heard that she was gone. I had literally been fighting hell for her life and our life in unremitting interior warfare on an almost daily basis for the entire length of our life in Christ how was it possible that God-envisioned life together could be lost right on the verge of its appearing?

And yet in a powerful working of grace the Lord has been speaking into my spirit messages of incredible hope and comfort ever since Monday when after a night of travail and tears and four hours of pouring out my heart to a good friend in the wee hours, joy came in the morning: unsought, unlooked-for, impossible to ignore with all the clarity, strength and purpose of a fresh God-given assignment. Amid the grief, a new river of life is flowing!

Take heart you who mourn with us, this is but the beginning of a whole new day. God is at work to bring about a gigantic reversal of that which an enemy meant for evil. Did you get my email? June came back to her right mind and got out of the car! Before collapsing, she made it as far as the door that led to her freedom. She had re-chosen life with us and with her God in this life! This was no suicide this was a robbery. God is at work to give June an even greater legacy through her death than she would have had even through her life.

Pray for us that we will grieve and press forward in ways that honor her love for us and ours for her.