Hilarie Roseman

I wasn’t very happy with God sometimes. I mean, I just really couldn’t be very happy with Him because He let all these things happen to me. You’d think, well, I’ve committed myself to Jesus and Jesus is going to be there for me, and everything’s going to be pretty good now. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t pretty good. And it hasn’t been. All of my life there’s been all these huge things in my own family. My mother left me. I had to heal that somehow, and then she came back; poor little Bessy came back.

I’ve got epilepsy. You’ve got to start laughing about it because you couldn’t possibly have all these things wrong with you. My poor husband took me on as an epileptic. My husband married me after coming back from overseas with not much money. I’d saved up, but my mommy needed a car. I said, “I’ll never be able to give you any more money.” But…I gave her the money for the car. My saintly husband took on an epileptic woman with no money who had just given 600 dollars to her mother for a car. He had to be very forgiving.

I've been sick most of my married life, so we both had to put up with my epilepsy and kidney problems. One of my daughters had to have her kidney out when she was 12 weeks old. So, you see I needed God all the time, but I can’t say that I’ve been absolutely happy with Him all the time. I’d say, “Look! How could you do it? How could you find something…? Couldn’t you kind of stop this?” But He didn't stop it. He was there with me in all these stages of my life, when all these awful things happened.

There was a stage when I started to cry. I thought, “I’m not going to cry,” but he brought these people to me, all these beautiful people. I had to be humble. And there was one stage where I did not want to be humble. I thought I had done enough. And that was when I had the two whiskeys at night; or maybe three sometimes, while I just thought, “Look, I’ve done so much. I don’t want to do anymore. And this is humiliating if I have to go and do this. Very humiliating.” And I thought, “Well, if I want to get better, I have to go to the people who will help me.” And I did go. I have learned how to be humble. I don’t want to be humble. I’d do anything not to be humble. I have learned to be humble. I have learned to be very grateful. I have learned that Jesus is there all the time, but I just have to look, and I have to respond. Because He made everyone, therefore He’s there.