Proof of Heaven

There was only one wound that wouldn’t heal: the loss, ten years
earlier in 1998, of my biological sister Betsy (yes, the same name as one
of the sisters in my adoptive family, and they both married Robs, but
that’s another story). She’d had a big heart, everyone told me, and, when
not working at the rape crisis center where she spent most of her time,
she could usually be found feeding and caring for a menagerie of stray
dogs and cats. “A real angel,” Ann called her. Kathy promised to send me
a picture of her. Betsy had struggled with alcohol just as I had, and
learning of her loss, fueled in part by those struggles, made me realize
once again how fortunate I had been in resolving my own problem. I
longed to meet Betsy, to comfort her—to tell her that wounds could heal,
and that all would be okay.
Because, strangely enough, meeting my birth family was the first time
in my life that I felt that things really were, somehow, okay. Family
mattered, and I’d gotten mine—most of mine—back. This was my first
real education in how profoundly knowledge of one’s origins can heal a
person’s life in unexpected ways. Knowing where I came from, my
biological origins, allowed me to see, and to accept, things in myself that
I’d never dreamed I’d have been able to. Through meeting them, I was
allowed to throw away, at last, the nagging suspicion that I’d carried
around without even being aware of it: a suspicion that, wherever I had
come from, biologically speaking, I had not been loved or cared about.
Subconsciously, I had believed that I didn’t deserve to be loved, or even
to exist. Discovering that I had been loved, since the very beginning,
began to heal me in the most profound way imaginable. I felt a wholeness
I had never known before.
It was not, however, the only discovery in this area that I would make.
The other question that I thought had been answered in the car with Eben
that day—the question of whether there really is a loving God out there—
still held, and the answer in my mind was still no.
It wasn’t until I spent seven days in coma that I revisited that question.
I discovered an entirely unexpected answer there as well . . .