Raising Lazarus: A True Story of God’S Miracles

By Darlene Marcusson

Is a true story of Gods miraculous love and power and how he gave a community the gift of grace. If you want to be amazed and have your faith affirmed, join the journey as God raises Lazarus.

I wrote this book because God impressed upon me how important it was to share this true story of miracles. I know its true because I lived every day of it. Since giving my life to Christ at the age of 15, I have been on a journey with Jesus. I have strayed off the path often, he never has. Each time I got back to doing it his way, he was ready to trust me with a new assignment. Every ministry opportunity has taught me important lessons that helped me on the journey leading up to Lazarus House. God stands ready to raise Lazarus every day. Be open to His power and love in your life, and see what miracles will happen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512774528

Darlene Marcusson

An “ordinary” woman believed God for “extraordinary” things--and the result is the many men, women, and children living on the margins whose lives have been impacted by Lazarus House. I was humbled to read this story and challenged once again to “believe God” for the impossible and the improbable. You will be too. Neta Jackson Author, The Yada Yada Prayer Group and House of Hope novels www.daveneta.com

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

AND SO IT BEGINS

God had been hunting and haunting me for months. Something’s coming—be ready was all that he told me. I was forty-seven years old and had no idea what the something was. I knew it was God who was speaking to me because he had been speaking to me since I first gave my life to him when I was fifteen years old.

I was born in Chicago and placed in the nursery connected to Augustana Hospital. Nursery was a nice word for the orphanage. Had I not been white and apparently healthy, I wonder what would have happened to me. But because I was the right color and didn’t appear to have any overt physical defects, I was placed with a family who lived on the southwest side of the city.

I don’t know when or how my parents told me I was adopted, but they did a good job because I don’t remember ever not knowing. When kids in the neighborhood teased me, it didn’t really bother me because my being adopted was as much a fact of life as my hair color or address.

As a child growing up, our neighborhood was populated primarily by people of Eastern European ethnicity. As I began to approach my teens, the neighborhood began to shift to a decidedly Hispanic population. That didn’t bother me at all; however, my Spanish wasn’t very good, so I had trouble communicating. My parents solved the problem by sending me to a school on the other side of the city and by shopping at stores where English was still the spoken language.

As a child, I always wondered why I wasn’t taken out of the orphanage and put someplace where there were ponies and swimming pools. Especially as racial tensions mounted and riots broke out in my neighborhood, I wondered why I couldn’t live in a place where people took vacations to Disneyland and had garden parties around their pool.

My life didn’t include Disneyland, but it did include long bus rides through the worst neighborhoods in the city to get to my school. My fellow passengers spoke and acted differently, and I found their cultures and languages interesting. My parents weren’t very accepting of other cultures or races, and so I wasn’t encouraged to make friendships with people of other races or cultures. I thought that was silly, and that feeling crossed over to something much stronger with the civil rights movement.

Dr. Martin Luther King lived about a mile from my house that summer while he was in Chicago. Though there were riots in our neighborhoods during which shopping areas were burned, I felt strongly that the civil rights movement was a cause for which I should take a stand, especially after I gave my life to Christ.

My fifteenth birthday was not a happy day. I had been excused from my high school on the south side of the city the previous semester, along with most of the students who attended that school and lived in neighborhoods that weren’t very nice. Consequently, I was attending a new school on the North Side. Since my birthday is in September, and school had just started, I really didn’t know anyone, and no one at school knew it was my birthday. My mother was in the hospital, which was a very common occurrence because of her severe diabetes. My sister (we were not blood related but were raised together as sisters) was no longer living at home due to her elopement a few months prior. She was young and did the best she could, but her abrupt departure left my family in a shambles. My father had retreated behind his newspaper—the safest place for someone who didn’t want to deal with feelings.

That morning I got up to go to school, and my father said not a word to me—not unusual for him. I came home on the bus after school and cooked supper, which was something I had done often since I was about nine. My father came home from work and ate supper, again without a word. I had one friend left in the neighborhood, as most of the white people had moved away. I went to her house, and her family remembered it was my birthday. They didn’t have a card or a cake, but they did wish me a happy birthday—something no one else had done all day. I stayed at her house until around ten o’clock that evening.

When I got home, my father started yelling at me, asking where I had been and why I came home so late. I yelled back—I was a tough kid, and you had to be to survive my neighborhood and my family. I told him that I was at my friend’s house and that at least they remembered it was my birthday. It was then that he said the thing that hurt the most: Well, I remembered it was your birthday. I had to get my head around the fact that he hadn’t forgotten; he just didn’t care.

My father grew up with a series of losses. He was a child during the Great Depression in the 1930s. His family owned a small grocery store, and they lost it due to the faltering economy. He doted on his younger sister, who had a heart condition. She died in his arms at school after her heart gave out when she went up a flight of stairs. His older brother died when he was in his thirties, in large part because he staunchly refused to seek medical care. When my father’s father died, my father was left to care for his mother.

When my father met and married my mother, I think he felt that this would give him a family and some security. My mother lived with her mother in a house that was purchased with the money they received from the City of Chicago when my mother’s father was gunned down by a gangster. My mother’s father was a Chicago police officer, and in the 1920s many of them were killed by gangsters. The money they received enabled them to buy a two-flat, a signature Chicago two-story building with an apartment on each floor. They lived on the first floor and rented the second floor to tenants, which assured them a monthly revenue stream.

My father met with disappointment again when he and my mother found out that it was not possible for them to have children due to my mother’s severe diabetes. Because my mother’s health was so compromised, she battled with a series of health crises, and it was heartbreaking to see someone you love suffer so. It seemed to my father that everything he loved or hoped for had been taken away, and the best way to cope with all this was to shut himself off emotionally. It hurt too much to care, so he simply wouldn’t allow himself to do that. My mother and father did the very best they could, but due to chronic illness and life disappointments, they were wounded.

The night of my fifteenth birthday, it became clear that my father could not give me what I needed from him emotionally, and he never would. To protect myself emotionally, I needed to stop expecting that he would. But how could I possibly grow up without a father’s emotional support? Then I remembered what I had been taught in Sunday school.

My parents were Christeasters, which is a term used to describe people who go to church on Christmas and Easter. However, they sent me to Sunday school when I was a little girl. I remembered what they taught me in Sunday school: that Jesus loved me no matter what. The concept of anyone loving me no matter what was very appealing, so I decided then and there that Jesus was what I needed.

All by myself in my living room in the dark, I asked Jesus into my heart—and the most amazing thing happened: he talked to me! He told me, If you want to be different, you have to do different. Now, I didn’t know what that meant, but I remembered what I had learned in Sunday school about this guy Jesus who went around helping people rather than punching them in the eye—something I was inclined to do often! So I decided I should look around for an opportunity to help someone.

There was a YWCA not too far from my house, and they had a program to help children learn how to read better. I didn’t have too many talents of which I was aware, but I could read, so I decided I should start by helping at this program. That was my beginning of being by doing.

Now, let me be clear here: we are not saved by what we do. Jesus did all that work for us on the cross, and his gift of salvation is free with no strings attached if we just believe. But as it says in the book of James, What good is it my brothers and sisters, if you claim to have faith but have no deeds? Suppose you see a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is that? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead (James 2:14–16 NIV).

My time at the YWCA was most instructive. I learned that gangs were recruiting at the site, and the social worker in charge of the program—who I thought could walk on water—had his own agenda. The leader of the street gang in charge of the neighborhood stopped me in the hallway at the YWCA and peppered me with questions one day. I was the only white person volunteering at this program, and so suspicions were raised. I had no idea who this man was or why he was asking me so many questions, but I answered them honestly, and he finally walked away. I didn’t think any more of it, and it wasn’t until much later that I learned who he was and that he had put word on the street that no one should harm me. I am probably one of the few people who was kept safe by a street gang in the 1960s. But then, of course, Jesus was my real savior, and he sent his angels to have charge over me.

After high school, I attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, commonly known as UIC. It was 1966, and the suburban kids had discovered drugs. The Students for a Democratic Society was actively recruiting on campus, telling everyone how wrong the Vietnam War was and that we needed to stop this travesty. I certainly agreed that the war was wrong, but the methods that were being advocated were even more wrong, and I felt sorry for the students who weren’t streetwise enough to understand what they were getting themselves into. My concern was confirmed a couple of years later when the students rioted during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and many students were beaten and badly hurt by police. I was outside SDS headquarters the first night of the riot and saw bloody, unconscious kids being carried in. They were too afraid to take them to a hospital because the police were staking out all the emergency rooms, so people with limited medical training were doing what they could to treat the wounded. The war was wrong, but this was not the way to make the point.

I felt increasingly uncomfortable at school, and then Jesus sent me the best gift I ever received (next to my salvation): my husband. He came wrapped up as a present on my eighteenth birthday, September 17, 1966. A high school friend was dating a man who was a few years older, but his birthday was on the same day