God Sent Me
By Hal Haralson, Austin, TX
Note: The author has been a regular contributor to CET since its beginning in 1995. Recent illnesses have limited Hal’s work these last few years—we are pleased to print his latest article.
I lay on my bed in the hospital. I had been there fifteen days this year. On April 12, I celebrated my 75th birthday in Room 213 of St. David’s Hospital in Austin, TX.
Judy, my wife of 53 years, smuggled a plate of Bar-B-Q sausage in for our evening meal. David and Annette (our son and daughter-in-law) brought a cake, and with grandsons Hayden and Holden, we celebrated my birthday.
The last three days in March I lay in my own bed—no energy—only getting up to eat or go to the bathroom. At 3:00 a.m. Judy woke me: “Let’s get you dressed, you aren’t getting any better. I’m taking you to the emergency.
I remember someone saying, “We want to do a CAT scan.” Then, “We want to keep Hal overnight.”
The next day the doctor said I needed to be in rehab for a few days. St. David’s rehab was full. No beds.
I was sent to another hospital. The doctor there ordered an MRI. The report came back showing I had had a stroke at some point in the past.
I’m afraid we will have to keep you longer than we thought,” the doctor said.
“How long?”
“We don’t know. That will depend on how well you respond to therapy.” The next day the therapy began.
I had my own physical therapist, occupational therapist, speech therapist, and therapist in the heated pool.
The schedule was hectic every day. Then, three times during the night: blood pressure, temperature, and listen to my chest. The night before I was to go home a beautiful, African American woman came to my room. Her nametag said, “Helen.”[i]
“Hal, I want to talk to you.” She knelt by my bed, “Please tell me your story.”
“You mean all of it?”
“Yes.”
I began: “The first eighteen years of my life were spent on a four hundred acre farm, eight and a half miles north of the small West Texas town of Loraine. We drove down a dirt road twice every Sunday to attend services at the First Baptist Church.
When I was sixteen years old, I felt God’s call to the ministry. The church at Loraine ordained me. I enrolled in Hardin-Simmons University in 1953 and graduated in 1957 after four years studying for the ministry. For the next ten years I was a minister, a pastor of several churches.
The first one was as an Army private in the Military Police Corps while stationed at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico. As a mission of First Baptist Church, Las Cruces, nine people were meeting in an Oddfellow’s Hall. Eighteen months later we had a newly constructed building and were averaging two hundred in attendance every Sunday.
I was discharged from the Army and moved to Abilene where I became Associate Pastor at the First Baptist Church.
After a year in the seminary I experienced my first serious bout with depression. I lay in bed for days. My doctor told Judy (who was six months pregnant) she should take our four-year-old daughter, Jill, and spend Christmas with her parents in Littlefield, Texas. Monday morning, December 16, 1962, I woke up with no one in the house but me. There is nothing worse than being depressed unless it is being depressed when there’s no one around to be impressed with how depressed you are.
I turned on all the gas jets in the house and went back to bed. The gas exploded!
The Fire Department put out the fire and took me to San Antonio State Hospital where I was admitted.
Failed suicide attempt.
The state hospital would be my home for the next three months. I woke up in a padded cell. There were padded walls, ceiling and bars on the door.
The next day the shock treatments began. I was strapped to a gurney. The electrodes were placed to my temples. The shock began. They were terrifying. Each day for sixteen days—but it worked. I was pulled out of the depression.
I met with my psychiatrist. He said to me, ‘Hal, your diagnosis is bi-polar illness. You will have it for the rest of your life. I am putting you on a drug called Lithium and strongly recommend that you leave the ministry.’
I stayed on Lithium for the next thirty years. I wrote the church in Loraine, ‘I am leaving the ministry…I want you to revoke my ordination.’
They wrote back, ‘We don’t know what to do. We’ve never done that before.’
My reply, ‘You are Baptist, vote on it.’
They did.
I found a job. I became partner with two doctors, handling all their personal businesses and operating a thirty-five-bed hospital and clinic.
After two years I sold my business interest to them and I took the payout over the next thirty-six months it would take me to finish law school.
We moved to Austin. I was thirty-three years of age with a wife and three children. I entered the University of Texas School of Law, graduating at age thirty-seven.
I hung out a shingle and practiced law for thirty years. I’ve written two books: Gentle Mercies, Stories of Faith in Faded Blue Jeans and The Lost Saddle.*[ii]
Dr Foy Valentine, founding editor of Christian Ethics Today, said of my writing: ‘Here is stardust in boots and blue jeans. From the overflow of a richly eventful life, Hal’s writing is profoundly human—wise, warm, tender, earthly, insightful, honest, gloriously authentic, and deeply spiritual.’
After practicing law for thirty years, I retired.
That’s my story.
Helen, I’ve been here in this hospital for fifteen days. I’ve never seen you. I’ve never heard your name. You have come to my bedside the night before I’m to be discharged. Why?”
She looked me in the eyes, tears filled her eyes, “God sent me.”
She left the room.
God always speaks.
