MIRACLES IN MOTION

Copyright © 2024 by Vivian Mary Brown.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/30/2024

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

861681

CONTENTS

Part One   Saltwater to Living Water

Chapter 1   Seeds of Darkness

Chapter 2   Anger to Mercy

Chapter 3   From earthly father to Heavenly Father

Chapter 4   Angel in a Leather Jacket

Chapter 5   Death of a Dream

Chapter 6   Happily Ever After

Chapter 7   Final Home Run

Chapter 8   This is What You Need for Today

Chapter 9   Saltwater

Chapter 10   Dark Tunnel

Chapter 11   The Potter’s Clay

Chapter 12   Hope for a Future

Chapter 13   Chocolate-Covered Dirt Wad

Chapter 14   No More Band-Aid on My Bondage

Chapter 15   Safe Under His Wings

Part Two   Finding the Gold Ring

Chapter 1   Follow the Nickel

Chapter 2   Solo in SLO

Chapter 3   Digging Out Old Roots

Chapter 4   Climbing to New Heights

Chapter 5   Where is the Gold Ring?

Chapter 6   A Little Church in the Ozarks

Chapter 7   Gathering Empty Jars

Chapter 8   Reaping My Harvest

Chapter 9   Miracle Performing Business

Chapter 10   Taking Out the Trash

Chapter 11   Promise of Living Water

Chapter 12   The Golden Calf Theory

Chapter 13   Amazing Revelation

PART ONE

Saltwater to Living Water

(aka Thirsty for Love)

CHAPTER 1

Seeds of Darkness

It is a beautiful sunny day in Los Angeles, California. Donald and his sister, Vivian, are smiling as they hold their pennies tightly in their hands, discussing what they will buy when they get to the neighborhood grocery store. You can get three pieces of gum for a penny, chew one, and have two more for later, Donald said, Or maybe I’ll get some Kool-Aid sticks. Vivian was thinking about some taffy with peanut butter inside --it is her favorite. But she remembered how she had a similar dilemma with Donald and Cheryl at the King Kong movie last Sunday afternoon. Each of them gave the lady at the ticket booth a dime and got a penny back in change, heading to the refreshment counter to decide what candy to buy. Vivian chose the taffy. During the movie she bit hard on the taffy and pulled out her front tooth. She missed the best part of the movie, crawling on the theater floor looking for that tooth to put under her pillow for the tooth fairy.

Now Vivian and her brother had candy money and were happily reviewing in their minds all the delicious candy selections at the store ...when suddenly Vivian saw a huge, black, snake-like thing making its way over the top of their neighbor’s white fence toward them. She screamed. Donald got out his pocket knife as they watched what was connected to this ugly black thing. A monstrous head of a spider peeked out over the fence. Donald stabbed it, but instead of backing off, the wound opened and two more spiders about the same size as the children aggressively moved over the fence toward them. Donald stabbed these two spiders and they turned into four spiders half the size of the prior two. Vivian slapped the four spiders with her hands as they jumped onto her, but they turned into eight that were now biting her. She kept hitting them and screaming, but now there were sixteen. Each time she hit and killed one, it would multiply until she was covered with these spiders...crawling all over her and biting her . . .

Suddenly the nightmare was over. It’s all right now, I tell myself as I wake up and try to calm down, Let’s take inventory. My heart is pounding; my throat is sore from screaming. I feel my body for sores from the spider bites, but there are not any. I wonder how much longer I will have this same dream. It has been so long and just when I forget about it, the ugly spider dream occurs again.

I tell myself, It’s OK. Some people have allergies and sneeze a lot or have skin rashes that itch. Vivian has nightmares. This dream that has haunted me since my youth is again over. In a strange way it seems natural to me.

The first major scene of my mystery drama was when I learned from some kids in the neighborhood that the woman in our home who I called mother was not my real mother. Our family went to the drive-in theater to see a movie titled The Bad Seed. Donald, Cheryl and I loved to go to the drive-in because we would get to play on the playground before the movie began. We would be dressed in our Pjs (the ones with the rubber on the bottom of the feet) and usually be so tired that we’d be asleep after the cartoons were over and the main feature would begin. Unfortunately, this was not the case when it came time to watch The Bad Seed. The movie was about a cute little girl with blond braids who was adopted by an upstanding family. She kept murdering people, and no one could figure out who was doing it. Finally, when the clues were stacking up against her, they traced her family bloodline and discovered her real mother was a murderess. It was as if she was cursed to be like her real mother. It was scary.

I became obsessed with finding as many clues and facts as possible about my real birth-mother.

There were two aunts, my father’s sisters, that would reinforce my fears by telling me how much I looked and acted like my real mother. Later, they told me my mother neglected my brother and me. She would leave us unattended for days. In the morning, my dad would leave for work and everything would seem fine, but when he got home that evening, he would find out our mother had wandered out of the house and left us. My aunt would keep us for a couple of days, then my mother would return. According to my aunt, my dad took my mother back several times after these wander-lust incidents. Then she was with another man and didn’t want to return home.

When my aunt had received another complaint from one of our neighbors about my loud crying, she found my dad immobilized on the living room sofa, my brother in his bedroom, and me in my crib with a three- day accumulation of waste from my diaper, spread everywhere a one-year-old could reach.

Next scene in this life drama unfolds...my stepmother, Audrey, and her two-year old daughter, Cheryl, move into our home. Audrey was originally there as a live-in babysitter and housekeeper; however, through osmosis, she took on the role of my father’s common-law wife. Donald and I were taught to call her mother.

Even before the neighborhood kids told me about my real mother, I knew there was something wrong. There was a big gap of difference in treatment between my stepsister and me. We shared the same bedroom, and I would watch as her mother tucked her into bed with hugs and good-night kisses, then leave the room ignoring me. One night, after I watched this affectionate exchange, I spoke up loudly saying: Good-night mother in hopes of receiving some loving attention, but she coldly replied, Good-night, Vivian with annoyance in her voice as she turned off the light and left the room. The message was strong. She didn’t like me. But why? Feeling scared, alone and rejected in the dark, my child’s mind couldn’t pinpoint where the problem was, except to wonder, What’s wrong with me?

I truly thought I was cursed. Words said by my stepmother hurt more than any physical abuse she did to my brother and me. Words like… You’ll never amount to anything. ... You’ll grow up to be a no-good tramp just like your mother was. As I reviewed these harsh words, darkness began to invade my heart and mind from many different directions. These words played over and over in my mind. When they would stop, someone would push rewind and they would start again. As a young child, there is not the option of accepting or turning down our missions like that guy on Mission Impossible, and the tape does not self-destruct in ten seconds. You soak everything up like a sponge and are not able to sort through what is true or real. My only hope out of this mess was to find my birth-mother and discover everything that was said about her was a lie. I was certain that there would be understandable and good reasons for our real mother having left us.

Someday I would meet my real mother and she would be sorry. She would then hold me in her arms and love me. This would break the curse.

Useless to Useful

Several times in my life I have felt useless.

The more I’ve restricted the flow of God’s love with my fears, the more useless I have become.

Now, as I’m learning to be more open to the flow of my Heavenly Father’s love,

I’m finding that His love is what makes me more useful to myself and those around me.

Of one thing I am certain-- through trying and scary times when I was a child, someone somewhere was praying...

CHAPTER 2

Anger to Mercy

Being a Brownie was a very important part of my childhood. As a seven-year-old, it was fun to wear in my Brownie uniform once a week and parade around school all day before attending Girl Scout Brownie meetings after school. I knew for sure that Russell liked me when he crawled to the top of the school playground wire fence in front of his friends and selected my brownie hat to spit on. As I chased him across the yard waving my Roy Rogers lunch pail in the air threatening to hit him on the head while the girls in our class watched and secretly wished they had a reason to run after him, I decided being a Brownie was delightful. The best part was the fact that the meetings were in a home located on the same block where Russell lived. This gave me the perfect reason to walk in front of