It's the time of the year when berries appear on trees and the leaves have fallen or are falling. Years ago a friend told me that the yellow and red berries that appear on one of the bramble bushes are called bittersweet, and whenever I see them I remember that time walking with her on an island near the ocean and I think of what the name means. I am someone who loves words, and even if there is a meaning, it is more what the sound of the words means to me that I think of, and when I think of bittersweet, I think of the taste but also of memories, of the way that our lives can bring back memories of things that have gone before, of people we knew and things we did, and that there can be memories that are both bitter and sweet all rolled together in the past.
Today is the anniversary of when I was born again, my born again birthday, sixteen years past, making me a sixteen year old born again Christian. To recognize that date, I wanted to share a testimony, a story I wrote for the Episcopal New Yorker magazine a few years ago that tells a bit about how it came to be that I am who I am today. There is so much more to the story, and so much that has happened since and continues to happen, but this was the beginning, a glimpse into who I was and how I started on my journey into this new life.
HOW I CAME HOME
I was born again above an Irish bar. At the time in my life that was the darkest it’s ever been, God reached out His hand and pulled me out of the pit I had dug myself into.
For many years, I had my own business doing public relations for performing and visual artists and putting on events in the community, and I had a dream of starting my own community center. I sent out an email to my friends and contacts describing my vision of sharing living and creative space to create a place for artists to come together and show their work. I heard back one February night when the phone rang and a friend told me he’d forwarded my email to an artist who had a space he was looking to rent. By April I had moved in. It seemed so perfect I thought it was heaven sent.
In retrospect it may have been a Divine appointment. God sometimes allows us to go down paths that lead us to destruction if that’s the only way we can come to our senses and turn to Him. By 2005 I had lost everything. I was in debt, friends and family had either forsaken me or couldn’t help me, the mess I was in was so deep. The place where I was living was being taken over, and I was dealing with an angry landlord who wanted me out so badly he was threatening me daily and had people destroying the walls and turning off the water and heat. I had nowhere to go and I thought I’d be better off dead.
People kept telling me I had to start praying. Some were Christians, some were not, but the message was always the same. They told me I needed to forgive and pray for everyone in the situation, including the people who were harassing me. I said no way. I hadn’t ever spent much time in church, but whenever things went wrong in my life I’d beg God for help and He always came through. I’d start praying now, but I wasn’t going to pray for these other awful folks.
One night on my way home I saw a cartoon booklet lying on the ground. I was walking down a dark street and a shaft of light from a street lamp on the corner beamed on it. It had been raining all day but the paper seemed dry. The cover picture was the character Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ ”A Christmas Carol,” saying the words “Bah Humbug!” I love cartoons and always have and it is a family joke that my father used to walk around at Christmas time saying that. It made me smile, something I desperately needed, and reminded me of my father who I desperately needed too. He died in 1998 and I never missed him more than I did then. I threw the booklet in my bag and forgot about it until the next morning.
When I started to read, it was a Chicks publication tract, with the story of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” told in scripture, and the theme was all about forgiveness. When I got to a page with a picture of Jesus on the Cross saying, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” I threw it down and said, “I know you want me to forgive them but I can’t. I know you were able to forgive when you were on the Cross but I’m not you.” The answer came back, “You’re not on the Cross.” In that moment I was filled with the knowledge of the love of God. I understood that I was a sinner, that I was no better than the people who had been threatening me, I understood that God loved them just as much as He loved me and that He could forgive me and love me even more if I could forgive them. I started weeping and said, “I understand, I understand, I understand, I forgive them, I forgive them, I forgive them.” An enormous weight came off me, and in a few days I found a new place to live. I didn’t know what had happened to me except that I was now talking to God all the time.
Six months later when I was visiting a church, the Pastor made an announcement that they needed Soup Kitchen volunteers. I heard the voice of God saying, “You need to go.” I was scared because I didn’t know what kind of people I’d find there, but the voice kept saying, “You were almost homeless. Go.” When I walked down into the basement and saw the depressing environment and the unhealthy food, I heard the voice of God saying, “Only the best for my children.” He sent me to high quality markets for donations and they started pouring in. He started opening doors and one of them led to teaching nutrition and health workshops to faith based and non faith based organizations all over the five boroughs. I went to shelters and soup kitchens and harm reduction centers, food pantries, recovery programs and schools. I also worked as the Director of an After School program in public housing on the lower east side, bringing arts programming and enrichment programs to youth. My work and my daily life are walking testimonies to the transforming power of God’s love, forgiveness, redemption and salvation, and through word and action I do all I can to show His love and bring hope. I continue to teach nutrition and wellness and I am also working with artists, designers, small business owners and entrepreneurs and not-for-profits, helping with public relations and marketing, collaborative events and a variety of business management needs, and I am embarking on a new project to facilitate life skills and empowerment workshops to adults and youth who are living in transitional housing. The business I had lost has been restored a hundred times over, and the work I am doing has expanded beyond anything I could have imagined.
There is a beginning to this story that is another example of God’s love, mercy, and wonderful sense of humor. When I was applying to college, I had wanted to go to Sarah Lawrence where my mother had gone and I was accepted, but though I was an excellent student I was unable to get a scholarship there because their scholarships are extremely limited. I had also applied to Harvard and Yale, but in a strange sequence of events was not accepted because I needed a scholarship, and they had awarded scholarships to two different students from my high school and told me that the quota for that school was limited. I was accepted at the University of Puget Sound which was a very affordable school, and though I had thought I might like to study marine biology, my real love was acting and I didn’t want to be so far away from the East Coast theater world. That left Chatham College in Pittsburgh, which at the time was an excellent small liberal arts college for women (it is now a University that accepts men for classes). Chatham gave me nearly a full scholarship, and so off to Pittsburgh I went.
Before we started the fall semester, Chatham connected us with our soon to be roommates and suggested we contact them and tell them something about ourselves. I got a very friendly letter from a young woman named Jewel Hendrix who told me how much she loved Jesus. That was enough to send me running in the opposite direction. I had always been a geek in school, not popular, though I did have a boyfriend from another town who was in my youth orchestra. I loved learning and school, but didn’t want to be a geek my whole life – I longed to be accepted into the in crowd. One of my other friends from youth orchestra had been talking about how great Jesus was and that she was born again all of a sudden, and I couldn’t get far enough away from her, and now here was this other girl who I was going to be stuck in a room with talking about that same thing.
As soon as I got to Chatham, I started meeting some very sophisticated girls who partied and did all kinds of things that seemed so cool – everything I thought I wanted. They were trendy and hip and fashionable and they invited me to dorm parties and parties at the frat houses they went to at Carnegie Mellon and The University of Pittsburgh. And each afternoon when I’d wake up after 1pm after a night of being out with these very cool girls, I’d find this young woman Jewel Hendrix sitting next to my bed praying for me. It made me so angry. How dare she! I complained to the Resident Advisor that she was crazy and awful and as soon as I could I separated from her. The RA told me that Jewel had agreed to separate because she didn’t want to cause me any harm or discomfort, but that she wanted me to know that she thought God had put us together so that she could save me. “See what I mean?” I said to the RA. “She’s nuts!” I ended up transferring from Chatham to Sarah Lawrence after my Sophomore year, but I would see Jewel from time to time during the time that I was still at Chatham and when I went back to visit with friends. She was always very friendly, but I snubbed her every time. I couldn’t get away from her fast enough with her weird Jesus talk. One of my closest friends who is still a friend to this day always said that she thought Jewel was a very nice person, but I wasn’t buying it. She might be nice, but she was nuts and I wasn’t interested in getting to know anything about her.
Fast forward to twenty years later, after I found myself talking to God above an Irish Bar, and I wanted to try to find Jewel to apologize. I was talking to that same friend who had always thought she was nice and my friend tracked Jewel down on the internet. At the time she was working with a group called Feed The Hungry, and she traveled all over the world as a Missionary. I called the main number listed on her page on the website and left a message, and a few weeks later I got a phone call one afternoon from a voice I hadn’t heard in years but that I could never forget. She told me she’d gotten my message when she returned from Guatemala and that she’d had to listen to it several times because she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. We laughed a lot that afternoon, and we’ve continued laughing, and at times when things seem very difficult and it’s hard to trust God in a storm, I always remember Jewel Hendrix and Chatham. In a wonderful way even when there have been times that I’ve been too weak to remember, an email will come from Jewel, and on one very memorable occasion when I was really going through a tough time, I asked God to have someone call me out of the blue so I could know without a doubt that I was hearing His voice, and Jewel called me. When I tell this story to people sometimes they look at me with that look that says that even though it sounds crazy, they know I’m telling the truth. Jesus tells us that we will know the truth and the truth will set us free, and because He is the way and the truth and the life, He does.
In a very strange denouement, I had written the first part of this testimony for an article on Forgiveness and Salvation in The Episcopal New Yorker a few years ago. As I was writing it, I went back to look at the Chicks tract that had so impacted my life and though I went through it page by page I could not find that image of Jesus on the Cross. It simply wasn’t there. But it had been there so clearly in my memory that when I told the story for years afterward, that was an integral part of it. But it wasn’t there, at least not in the natural world. A good friend who has known me for years says that I have a memory like a steel trap, and I pretty much do. I have a photographic memory for things that people say and things that happen, and images stay with me seemingly forever. I can still see that page in that tract, and feel how angry I was when I threw it down in frustration. It was there just for me in that moment, the last straw on a very stubborn camel’s back that helped the camel get through the eye of the needle and go home.
Jannie Wolff
July 22, 2019
Parts of this Testimony Appeared In “The Episcopal New Yorker” Fall 2014 Issue
Jannie Wolff In New York in 2019
Photograph Taken By Montgomery Frazier
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