Uncategorized – Page 3

Posted on November 26, 2015May 23, 2018 by zorazebic — 2 Comments

The angel of light

Exodus 33:20

“But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”

2 Corinthians 11:14-15

“And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.”

It was 1990, and I was 34. I’d been out at a bar in Windsor, Ontario to hear a band. They weren’t the greatest, but I applauded to encourage them after they concluded their set. A man sitting at a table next to me sneered, “They weren’t good.” I smiled at him and said, “If it weren’t for the little stars the big stars wouldn’t shine so bright.” He didn’t comprehend so I explained the singers and musicians who are not as talented help the big stars. If everyone were equally talented, none would be special. “Yeah, okay,” He said, “but they don’t deserve applause.” He put heavy emphasis on the word “they.”
Another act at the bar that night was a hypnotist. It was the man who didn’t appreciate my applause of the band. I didn’t much believe in this ‘art.’ Still, it was a performance, so I stayed to watch. The show was hilarious. People became chickens; men became thumb-sucking girls with pigtails, two women became famous male boxing champions challenging each other to a fight and one of the waitresses put on a hilarious act of being a famous movie star.
Later in the evening, the hypnotist challenged me. I honestly believed he couldn’t put me under his spell. Before me sat a man dressed in white garments. He told me he was God. I said him that was ridiculous. “How dare you call me ridiculous!” he snorted “I will prove to you I am God.” Suddenly brilliant lights emanated from him and surrounded him.
I laughed at his show, and he became all the more furious and bellowed, “You will burn in hell for your insolence!” I laughed all the more. The light vanished, and he said, “Why do you refuse to believe I am God?” I smiled and answered, “There are a couple of passages from the Bible that come to mind. One of those is a clear message if anyone were to look at God they would perish, and, I’m not dead. The second is the bible says Satan can transform himself into a being of light.”
“You’ve never read the bible.” He challenged me, and I replied, “I have read the book three times.” “If that is true tell me where you read those things in the bible.” I laughed so hard I almost doubled over and answered him, “I read the book I didn’t say I memorized it. Besides, if you were God, you would know where to find those passages! God wrote the bible.” “That just proves you didn’t read it.” He said.
Later that year, in St. Catharine’s, Ontario I had gone to see a doctor about my debilitating migraines. He suggested I try hypnotism. He told me how people had successfully stopped smoking and he’d wondered if the headaches were psychosomatic. He asked if I had suffered any trauma and I told him some of the stories of my life. He said any and all of the events could have caused my migraines.
Unbeknownst to the doctor, he became another genuine angel for me. The doctor’s voice was calm, and his request was easy to follow, “You will wake slowly and remember everything. Take your time and breathe using the exercises I showed you.” As I regained cognizance, I became painfully aware of another similar incident.
In a rage because I would not believe he was God he had commanded my body to refuse to respond to me. I was unable to move my arms, my legs and I could not scream. Another man lifted me and carried me to a bed. I was painfully aware of what was going on. The two men had a camera on a tripod to film their violence and the degradation of me. I did the only thing I could do. I prayed.
The vile man lifted his head and smiled at me. He said, “I know you want me. Show me how you want me.” Suddenly I had control of my neck I turned toward his face, and he snuggled his cheek next to my mouth in anticipation of a kiss. He shrieked as my teeth sunk into his face. I felt his blood run into my mouth as my teeth broke through his skin. I bit harder into the fat and flesh. I was debating my ability to rip away the chunk of him that was firmly between my teeth. He writhed in pain and fear. He begged his accomplice to help him. The other man struck me a couple of times, but the man begged him to stop. “Don’t do that. She’s biting me harder!”
The other man had gotten a screwdriver and wedged it between my teeth to break my grip. He succeeded, and the two of them fled, taking with them their gear and the blood-soaked pillow. Were they worried about leaving behind their DNA? DNA was a relatively new science in 1990. I had no memory of that rape until waking in the doctor’s office.
A few years later, having returned to Windsor, I sat in a dentist’s chair, He asked what happened to the lower tooth. I said, “That is from a man who used a screwdriver to pry my mouth open. Another man was raping me. I had been biting down on the other guy’s face and wouldn’t let go. I felt the tooth break.” The dentist, shocked, simply said, “That would do it.” I often wonder if the rapist has scars on his face to remind him of the time he thought he could pretend to be God.
© 2015 Zora Zebic

Posted on November 14, 2015May 28, 2018 by zorazebic — 2 Comments

The Christian rock band & tithing

During the early 80’s, and I was living in Calgary, Alberta. I was married, and it was rocky, but we were still going to church each Sunday.
My husband played drums, and he’d joined a Christian rock band. I didn’t think they were talented, though I never let my opinion be known. My husband seemed happy, and I didn’t feel there was any harm in his activity.
I hoped his new peers would be a good influence. With his previous band, he did not make me welcome at their rehearsals; the few times I was invited, it was at the behest of the other wives or girlfriends.
I wasn’t impressed with my husband when I had surgery on my right foot. I had broken the foot years earlier, and I had gone to a surgeon begging for help. I was in my 20’s, and after walking a mere few blocks, I was forced to sit on the curb in tears. The pain was that intense.
On the day I was released from the hospital my husband came with one of his Christian rock band members to give me a ride home. My husband told me he and his buddy were going horseback riding. I said I was hungry, as the hospital had given me breakfast but no lunch because the doctor had scheduled me for release. I asked him to make me a sandwich, and he flatly refused to say he wasn’t going to be late for his plans.
His buddy looked down at his feet in shame, I presume? In pain, I hopped on one foot into the kitchen to make a sandwich. The two of them went out the door and watching them leave I noticed something bizarre. My two budgies had wholly changed colours! How could that be I’d wondered? Now is not the time to tell the budgie story.
Meanwhile, going to church gave me hope our marriage could improve and the ‘until death do us part’ stuff would be a reality. More importantly, I was the mom of a three-year-old who was living in the southern United States with his birth father. The church gave me a place to pray for my son to come home.
My son’s dad had never really been a part of our lives – to the point once the child was born he denied being the father. Learning we were planning to move out west he had asked for a three-week visit with his son. I didn’t like the idea, but it did seem logical my husband, and I would have that time to find an apartment and ready the home for my son. Three weeks passed, and my son’s father told me he was not giving my baby back to me.
I was devastated. A few years later I regained custody of my son. Back then there were no agreements between Canada and the United States concerning child custody. To make matters worse, I hadn’t been advised to go to court to gain legal custody of my child. I had no idea that was a requirement – nobody had even mentioned such a thing.
Not having legal custody meant the child could live with either parent. I was in that proverbial boat without a paddle. Shattered on so many levels, going to church was the only hope I had. Surely my faith in God would ultimately make it all better.
It was Mother’s Day, and the minister called all mothers to stand and be acknowledged. I stood and was shocked to see the many stares of disbelief from the minister and his congregation. I was shaking from their condemnations and wanted to sit (in fact my husband was whispering to me that I should stop embarrassing him and sit down), but I knew God wanted me to stand proudly before him.
Later that week a young mother from our church confronted me in the mall. She told me I had no right to call myself a mother if I didn’t have my son at home with me. I was furious and loudly and angrily told her she was a clueless busybody. I went on to say to her it wasn’t my fault my son’s father had stolen my child from me, and she was downright sinful to accuse me falsely. A small crowd had formed, and I wasn’t ashamed by the horrible intense redness of shame that overcame her entire face. I worked in that mall and suddenly was overtaken with a fear that my boss would learn of my outburst and fire me.
The sound of a single person clapping hard diverted me from my thoughts. A man in a business suit was the person clapping and when he saw he had my attention said to me “Good for you. Whether father or mother, when someone takes away our rights to our children it does not diminish our roles as parents.” That man knew my pain. He was like an angel to me at that moment when I needed the support. The young woman scurried away in her shame, and I went to work not caring one way or another if my boss would fire me.
We continued going to church, and I continued to drop our weekly envelope of precisely 10% of the earnings from my job and that of my husband. He wasn’t happy I was insistent on paying our 10% tithe, but I was determined. I’d read the expectation of God in the Bible, and I would be doing my part. The Bible also convinced me my husband didn’t need to believe – it was important I found God, and this saved both of us!
A few weeks after the confrontation in the mall the minister focused his sermon on the sin of failure of those to offer their 10% tithe. Throughout his lecture, I felt the minister’s eyes alighting on my husband and I. My husband squirmed in his seat as many eyes of the congregation stared at us – proclaiming us as guilty! Only my husband had known I had been, anonymously and faithfully, dropping into the collection basket an unmarked envelope. My husband argued with me that I should at least put our names on it so the minister would know we had been faithful after all. Besides, he said, we could use the benefit of the tax receipt. I had argued in the days of Jesus there were no tax receipts. Moreover, as the collection plate had already taken our weekly envelope, there was nothing I could do.
The next week and for the weeks we continued to attend that church I never again dropped in an unmarked envelope or any other envelope. I wondered if the minister noticed the drop in his income and my husband scolded me each week for having a “bad attitude.” My position was this man had centred us out in his church. He and his faithful flock had condemned with their eyes. I didn’t care what they thought of us now.
© Zora Zebic 2015

Posted on November 6, 2015May 28, 2018 by zorazebic — 4 Comments

That Cup’pa Warm Is a Blessing

We had opened our new centre for the homeless on June 1st, 16 years ago. The winter to follow was a mean one.
We received a small amount of funding to hire a team to work with homeless people living on the streets. A local charity offered to provide the payroll service and did so for a few years – I eventually learned how simple the process was and took over the payroll on my own.
I insisted we hire only people who had recently experienced homelessness as they would be in closest contact with each other. They would know where the other folks were calling ‘home.’ Some of these places were a wooded area affectionately called “The Bunkers,” and particular dumpsters, emptied on regular schedules. Abandoned cars (usually the property of the homeless but without gas to operate them), abandoned buildings, crawl spaces under porches, unheated garages or sheds behind homes and both underground and multi-level parking lots.
The City of Windsor had received numerous complaints from the patrons of the downtown library. The most common complaint was “fear” of the homeless. People had to walk from the parking lot into the back entrance or around to the front. In response, the vents that poured out heat behind the building were sealed off by a chain-link fence enclosure.
An employee of the City of Windsor Social Services had learned a few industrious homeless men had tunnelled and shored up a cavern under a group of bushes next to city hall. One of the men had experience working in the nickel industry, and they had built a fantastic genuine Man Cave!
The next day the men found a working crew bulldozing the site. They had uprooted the bushes and filled in the cave. All of their possessions were gone – the men lost their photo albums, identification and other personal items buried perhaps. They never did find out.
A tarmacked parking lot took the place of the grassy area. (1) “Don’t it always seem to go…”
I am confident the welfare employee went to bed with the self-assurance she had done her part to secure and beautify the city.
Our patrollers were going out each evening locating the homeless and providing sleeping bags, warm socks, hats, scarves, and mitts. Orders were taken for footwear when needed, and special requests were put out to our Union friends to help us provide the much-needed boots.
Sadly, it isn’t uncommon for a homeless person to wake up to find someone has taken their shoes or boots off their feet while they were sleeping. The perpetrators think it is funny or they believe they are doing the community a service to “punish the homeless.”
If these people could witness the aftermath of their cruelty, I am sure they would have a change of heart.
A client rushed into the centre one morning to tell me a homeless lady had frozen to death. Denied shelter because she had been drinking, she was without options. She sat in a doorway and froze to death.
We would not shut our doors, and we would stay open the duration of the winter. Somebody had to care.
We would have to deal with the brutal reality of charity competition and government micromanaging for making this decision – but that is another story.
I was selling roses in the downtown bars. It was the way I made money to buy the items I could not purchase with the government funding – things like computers which were essential tools in the fast enveloping “information/electronic age” – as I sat down at my desk I heard a terrible moaning from the back of the room.
Bill would later become one of our employees but that night he was not at all well. He had injured his feet but would not go to the hospital.
I went over to Bill and demanded he let me see his feet – sometimes it is a good thing to be a motherly middle-aged woman!
Bill pulled the covers away, and I saw he had no skin on the bottom of his feet. Bill told me the morning before he had woken to find someone had stolen his boots. He said it was surreal, as he had looked back seeing his skin clinging to the ice on the sidewalks.
He was afraid to go to the hospital. I assured him they would not judge him or cause him to suffer more and with that, I called him an ambulance.
Bill was sent back to us the next day with bandaged feet, and after a few days, he entered a homeless shelter.
The big problem was Bill could not shower unless they could furnish a clean area. He needed a home and attendance from homecare nurses.
(2) The Windsor Star featured Bill in a story published on Friday, February 28, 2003.
In that story, Bill recounted how he had almost died trapped in a truck’s trash compactor! The danger was real, and that was why he had joined our team and happily searched the dumpsters.
Our patrollers worked the downtown core searching alleys, streets and other locations for the homeless trapped outside until the winter 2008/2009 when we learned the government would no longer provide funding for our much-needed service.
In fact, we lost all funding for all of our programs for the homeless. The survival of our agency from then until now has been a story of despair, faith, and many blessings and once again that is yet another story to be told!
God has now blessed Street Help and our homeless folks again!
We are putting out the call to hire a team leader and patrollers to search the streets of Windsor for winter 2015/2016 and hopefully for the duration of time homelessness exists in Windsor.
We still have some of the first coats worn by our patrollers! We will need to order more, but it touched my heart to once again hold the vivid orange colour with our Street Help logo!
We are also asking for a van. Perhaps a car dealership will provide one in exchange for a tax receipt?!
With an orange coat of paint and our logo it will be easy to transport sleeping bags and other warm items – it will save a lot of footwork for our patrollers who in the past had to go back to the centre for the things to then meet back up with the person in need.
It would be nice to also have a big thermos – like those Tim Horton’s rents out – to keep full of hot cocoa! That cup’pa warm is a blessing.
I recall the childhood memory of the toboggan hill and the building with the fireplace where they served free cocoa. I remember how the warmth of paper cup felt so good to my little cold, cold fingers.
© Zora Zebic 2015