Tag Archives: Healing

Needing the Prayers of the Saints

I have shared on the show how I am dealing with the fallout of some wild and crazy years when I was younger. This situation I now face with my health is requiring treatment that makes me physically ill – but will, in the long run, rid my body of this condition that is trespassing on God’s temple!

If you have watched our show, you know that Jim and I are not “religious” about the things of God, and we don’t put God in a box based on a certain way of thinking.  That’s why we’re okay with however God chooses to deal with this affliction.  God could heal me in a split second, but if He chooses the medicinal route, who am I to question His wisdom?  He knows best in all things, and I trust Him with every aspect of my life, both now and forever.

I have always loved and trusted God, even in the crazy years.  I know that sounds weird, but it’s true.  God never left me, though I left Him for a season.  He never stopped wooing me back, and He never stopped showing me that the path I was on was not what He intended for me. The prayers of my Mother and others came before the Lord constantly. Continue reading →

“Blue Christmas” Services Reach Out To Hurting People

While Christmas is a time of celebration, joy and family for many people, there are millions of people who face a less than joyous time.

Churches across the country have been holding what are called “Blue Christmas” or “Longest Night” services to reach out to people who are working through the loss of a loved one, a marriage or other difficulties during the holidays.  The services are more somber than many Christmas celebrations and focus on the power of God’s forgiveness that came through the birth of Jesus.

In St. Louis, a man attended the service because he was still dealing with the loss of his mother earlier this year.  Charles Brown told the Associated Press he felt the service was a time for him to lay his burden down and took comfort from the message that God is with him.

Pastors prayed and anointed parishioners with oil who sought prayer, salvation or comfort.

Some of the churches did not even include a sermon.  The services focused on the reading of Scripture, prayer and songs of healing.

A Little Boy’s Voice (Pt. 4)

Sunglasses could not hide the tears streaming down my face, and I was glad the beach was not crowded that day. I walked toward the water, oblivious to the warm ocean breeze or the strident call of the seagulls. My shoulders slumped under the weight of the reality that now settled on me. Dear God, what have I done? My feet were leaden, my legs would no longer hold me. I sank to my knees in the hot sand, completely devastated. I murdered my children!

A man and a woman passed by me and discarded the remains of their picnic lunch into one of the large trash bins dotting the beach. It occurred to me that I had thrown my children away, almost as unthinkingly as they tossed their soda cans in the garbage. I had killed my babies to keep my husband. A husband I wound up losing anyway. A husband who had betrayed me and abused me, again and again. Continue reading →

A Little Boy’s Voice (Pt. 3)

Babies? I had steeled myself not to think of them that way. Planned Parenthood had said they were blobs of tissue. I knew better, of course—at least on some level. But that’s the only way I could live with myself, to think of them as “problem pregnancies,” the flotsam and jetsam of an untimely conception, not as babies.

Heaven? Until that moment, I had vaguely thought of them as formless blobs out there in the universe somewhere. Were they really babies, really in heaven, as Melissa had just said? Continue reading →

What Easter Means to Me

On Easter Sunday, 1989, I wandered into a wonderful church and heard the pastor tell me that I could be forgiven and saved by grace; I didn’t have to do it myself. That day my scarlet sins became white as snow. And for the next ten years, I went through God’s training program, conducted by the people of the church. Little did I know that God was preparing me to speak to millions of women and that I would be an instrument to help heal their scars from abortion, drugs, and sinful living. Nor did I know that He was also preparing me to be the wife of Jim Bakker. But I’m beginning to learn that broken and wounded people make the best healers. Continue reading →

Joy Came in the Morning (pt 4)

Early August 1998

“The next year, 1977, I got pregnant again. Jesse and I had moved to Farmington, New Mexico. I remember we drove there the night Elvis died, pulling a small trailer with everything we owned. Jesse was working a lot of hours as a boilermaker for a power plant there. We rented a double-wide mobile home, and it was one of the nicer places we lived. I fixed it up, and I was the typical little housewife—except that I smoked pot all the time. We weren’t doing major drugs then. My grandma Graham died, and when I flew to Phoenix for the funeral, I made a doctor’s appointment. I needed to have a cyst removed, and since I had just found out I was pregnant—and Jesse didn’t want the baby, of course—I decided to have an abortion at the same time. That was the only abortion that was done in a hospital.”

Chris and Jolene asked a question now and then to prod my memory, but mostly they just let me talk.

“Jesse and I separated for a while, and he had a girlfriend. When we got back together, we moved to Pinetop, up in the mountains; it was very beautiful there. Because of Jesse’s work we moved a lot, little towns all over Arizona and New Mexico. I once counted fifty different apartments or houses or hotels where we had lived in the ten years we were married.

“We went to Prescott for the fourth of July. It was wild there in the ‘70’s. The Hell’s Angels would ride into town, and the police would close the streets for the holiday. Prescott is a quaint little town with antique shops, and there’s a street called Whiskey Row with a bunch of saloons. Jesse and I were doing Quaaludes and partying in and out of the bars. I was so spaced out, I was offering Quaaludes to cops; there was no way they could control the drugs and alcohol, so they simply tried to keep the peace. We were in front of the courthouse, in the center of town, when Jesse went nuts and started hitting me, and the cops had to pull him off of me.
“Jesse screamed, ‘Just get the ______ out of my life. Go find somebody else.’

“I literally took him up on it. I turned around, walked across the street, went into a bar, and met a man. Paul took me to his cabin, and I spent the night there with him. We had an off-and-on relationship for the next couple of years. Whenever Jesse beat me up, I called Paul; he came and got me and nursed me back to health. He was a very gentle guy. I don’t think he ever wanted me to leave Jesse to marry him, but he was always there for m. Jesse never knew about him.”

…..more to come.

Joy Came in the Morning – Part 1
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 2
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 3

Joy Came in the Morning (pt 3)

Early August 1998

We had a beautiful suite with a separate bedroom and a kitchenette off the full-size living room. From the moment we walked in, I felt the presence of God, and I began to realize that something truly supernatural was in store for me that night.

Because I knew it would be an emotional time, I went to the bathroom, took my contacts out, and washed my face. While I was putting my pajamas on, Chris and Jolene prepared the living room. They placed boxes of tissues in various spots around the room, and they decorated one of the tables with a white linen tablecloth with lace trim. Continue reading →

Joy Came in the Morning (pt 2)

Early August 1998

That summer, my new friends Chris Harper and Jolene Dreisbach had been to a post-abortion healing conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’d never even heard the term post-abortion before that time, but I knew God was dealing with me about the abortion issue, and I knew that’s why he had brought Chris and Jolene into my life. I also knew it was time to leave Master’s Commission but did not yet know what I would do after that. Pastor Barnett had asked me to go to L.A. and help start the LAIC, the outreach that eventually became the Dream Center. Jack Wallace, who had been teaching the singles’ class the Sunday in 1989 when I made a commitment to Christ, was now pasturing a church in Detroit and wanted me on staff there. It would be a paid ministry position, and that would be a first for me.

As I prayed for direction, God started putting all the puzzle pieces together, and by August, Chris, Jolene, and I had decided to start a ministry to help bring healing to women who’d been through abortions. Before we formalized our plans to start Truth Ministries, the girls had told me they wanted to hold a memorial service for me. They’d been working on the ideas they’d learned at the Milwaukee conference, which had been not just for helping women heal emotionally after abortion but also after miscarriage and SIDS. “If we incorporated the Holy Spirit into the memorial,” they told me, “incredible things could happen.”

“Lori, think of it this way,” Chris said. “You never had a baby shower or did any of the things that would commemorate having a child. That’s what this memorial will do.”

“Or think of it this way,” Jolene added. “If you’d had a still born child or even a miscarriage, friends would have consoled you, and you would have mourned. But women who’ve had abortions—women like us—actually had the same kind of loss, yet we never had the experience of grieving for our children.”

I thought the idea of holding a memorial service for me sounded kind of strange at first, but they persisted.

“This is a way to deal with the abortions once and for all and to bring closure on the past,” Chris said.

Jolene agreed. “Please let us do this for you, Lori.”

We scheduled the memorial for the last weekend in August, right before my birthday. The week prior to that, God started softening my heart. I had always been the strong one, the one people came to with their problems. That week I became mush. Pastor Barnett rarely mentioned abortion from the pulpit, but that week he mentioned it twice, Sunday morning and Wednesday night. For some reason it was on his heart; he didn’t know I was that reason. He preached that abortion was wrong, but he also expressed compassion for women who had felt they had no other alternative.

On Wednesday night after church, Chris and Jolene told their families good-bye, then we drove to neighboring Scottsdale, where they had rented a one-bedroom hotel suite. We planned on staying until Friday night, so the fact that Chris and Jolene’s husbands were taking care of their kids for two days so we could be free to do this was a big deal to me. I didn’t think I deserved it. I was always telling people that God had great things in store for them, but I didn’t believe I would ever have the great things of God because the sin I had committed—abortion—was so horrible. I felt I would have to live with the pain and the emptiness, the loss and the shame, no matter how great a Christian I became. As we drove to Scottsdale, I sensed God saying to me, “Let these people minister to you.”

…..more to come.

Joy Came in the Morning – Part 1
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 3
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 4

A Little Boy’s Voice (Pt. 4)

Sunglasses could not hide the tears streaming down my face, and I was glad the beach was not crowded that day. I walked toward the water, oblivious to the warm ocean breeze or the strident call of the seagulls. My shoulders slumped under the weight of the reality that now settled on me. Dear God, what have I done? My feet were leaden, my legs would no longer hold me. I sank to my knees in the hot sand, completely devastated. I murdered my children! Continue reading →