Through Many Toils and Snares

Dyanne Martin

I came to the Lord late in life at the age of twenty-five. I was raised as a nominal Anglican in Jamaica, and my paternal grandmother made sure I attended church as a child, but when my family moved to the United States, church fell by the wayside. My grandmother had given me a beautiful picture Bible, and my mother claims that even as a very young child I read voraciously; however, I did not like that particular book because the pictures frightened me. I think the rather zealous and macabre illustrator forgot that his audience included small children. As a teenager, I tried several times to read the tiny, pocket-sized New Testament my grandmother had given me, but the thees and thous were off-putting to a young girl more interested in mastering the nuances of a foreign culture and in “fitting in” with her new peers. Even so, God was calling— speaking quietly into my life through various people and in subtle ways.

I always believed in God, but I did not know God. I did not know one could know God personally. But in my mid-twenties, I began dating a man who gave me a study Bible and several apologetics books. As I read one particular text alongside the Gospel of John, I became piercingly aware of my sin and my need for a Savior. Mid-page, I lifted my eyes and my heart to heaven and prayed, “Lord, I don’t know what this all means, but I want to know. Please show me.” And he did. I learned that Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross enabled me to have a personal relationship with God and delivered me from the eternal consequences of my sin. I also learned that this gift was by grace alone and not through efforts of my own—a difficult lesson for someone who was accustomed to performance-based acceptance. God transformed the spark in my soul to a firestorm and filled me with an insatiable hunger for his word and for sound teaching.

The way in which I regarded death changed almost immediately. Before I accepted Christ, I harbored an unnatural fear of my mortality, even wishing I had never been born so that I would not have to die. I searched for meaning and purpose in books about reincarnation and the power of love. The feel-good nature of these books eschewed the idea of an Absolute Truth or of moral accountability while promoting universal oneness through love. They were comforting, yet something kept niggling at my soul. I was, as the song goes, searching for God “in all the wrong places.” At dinner one night, I shared my enthusiasm about the New Age books with my then-boyfriend. He countered my statements and challenged me to read a Bible. I responded, “Why? It was written by fallible people. Why should I trust it?” He asked how I could possibly argue against something I had never even bothered to read. So, I read. And in my quest to prove him wrong, God proved me wrong. In that proving, God brought the light of his love and expelled my fear of death. The surety of what comes next now fills me with peace: I may not know how I am going, but I know where I am going.

The next six years entailed severe trials and hardships because of my relationship with the man who had given me the Bible. We married, but his ongoing abuse and adultery made the relationship impossible. When the marriage dissolved, I thought I would never recover from the pain of divorce, but God used that suffering to build my faith. I devoured the Bible. I attended church faithfully and used my experience as a professional dancer and choreographer to start a worship dance ministry for the youth. I bought almost every sermon I heard on the local Christian radio station because I could not get enough of God’s truth. I memorized Scripture and hid it deep in my heart, where the Lord knew it needed to be for the trials that loomed ahead.

Many years later, my second husband died suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive heart attack three months after our ten-year anniversary. The pain I felt throughout my divorce was but a grain of sand compared to the vast, gritty desert of sudden, unexpected widowhood. In addition to the icy shock of my husband’s death, confusion and fear threatened to heave me off the edge of the cliff to which I was so desperately clinging. A selfmade businessman, my late husband had no life insurance and left no savings. His will and his retirement account beneficiaries had not been updated since before our marriage ten years earlier. My name was not even on our mortgage, so the bank refused to speak with me about my own home. My husband had, however, left a business that needed immediate and direct supervision. The overwhelming responsibilities of managing his company while teaching my college classes and while struggling mightily with a deep, abiding grief marked a line in the sand between me and God. My heart cried, Why have you forsaken me?

The stress caused my hair to fall out and my skin to erupt in hives. Unable to consume anything more substantial than periodic sips of protein shakes, I lost twenty pounds in two weeks. My heart began to skip beats, and I hoped it would stop permanently: Let me go home to be with you, Lord. But I held fast to God’s promises, choosing to trust that he would work even this incomprehensible ordeal for my good and for his glory. I knew from past experience that the Lord who saved me for all eternity would not leave me to traverse the desert alone. So, I reminded myself daily that—despite appearances to the contrary—God’s Word is always truer than my feelings and that he always knows what he is doing. I could not trace his hand, but I trusted his heart.

I entrenched myself in prayer and Bible study. I slept with my Bible clutched tightly to my chest as if the words that served faithfully as a balm would somehow seep from the pages into my soul. I reminded myself continuously of God’s promises, and no matter how bleak things looked or how dire situations became, I refused to break faith with him. I chose to trust him with all my heart and not to lean on my own understanding. For two years, I faced Goliaths as I grappled with my late husband’s avaricious, estranged family members; with dishonest, thieving employees and accountants; and with unscrupulous lawyers for the contested estate. I ran a business about which I initially knew little in order to honor the work of my late husband and the employees in his hire. While I ran interference on all these business and legal affairs at night, during the day I tried to teach my classes with a smile on my face despite the pain that bored unremittingly through my soul. A good friend and wise mentor reminded me at the time, “God will not leave you here. He has a plan to bring you hope and a future.” I undertook prayer walks every single night, my heart crying out to God.

And though I slept little in those dark days, it is Adonai, Lord of all, who brought me out of that seeming Gethsemane into the joyous life I have now, a life that includes Tom, my sweet, tender husband—a man of integrity who loves the Lord above all else. I learned the hard way that my peace and my joy are not contingent on my circumstances. They are, rather, outcomes of abiding in Christ. They are signifiers of a life lived in dependence on and trust in an omniscient, omnipotent God who made me and loves me—who beckoned and wooed me—and who redeems all things for his glory.

God has repeatedly used the most difficult times in my life to teach me of his faithfulness, love, and power. In fact, this past year, he manifested his abundant grace and strength yet again when my father, a towering figure in my life, died unexpectedly from COVID-19 under Machiavellian circumstances in which his caregiver, for nefarious purposes, tried to keep me from knowing he had the virus and was dying. Not only did the Lord reveal the truth to my family in a miraculous fashion, he also enabled me to reach my father in Florida in time to be with him in the final seventy-two hours of his life. Through painful situations such as these, the Lord has also taught me, among other things, how to bless those who curse me and how to pray for my enemies—lessons, if we are honest, no one really wants to learn. They are, however, lessons that draw us closer to God and enable us to manifest his love and mercy to others on this side of eternity.

Although valleys and troughs have dotted my life as with all who walk the path of faith, with each new experience, God has strengthened and matured me. In all of my ordeals, he has allowed me opportunities to share the wonders of his steadfast faithfulness with other hurting people. We may never know where God has stationed us in the planting process of someone’s life—whether it be to cast seeds of hope or to water them—but without doubt it is the Lord who brings the harvest. We must be faithful to share his love and the hope we have in Christ no matter which role we play in the gardening of a soul. May God bring an abundant yield for the glory of his name.