Spreading Her WIngs - Val's Story, Chapter 7

 Last April, I started sharing stories of my daughter Val's young life. It turns out that now is the time to jump back into it. And today's topic sure does tie in with my last post. As usaul, that's not because I have it together; that's God at work.   

In July 2002, I packed up Nick, Val, and one of her friends, and drove us and our old pop-up camper to Lifest Christian Music Festival in Oshkosh.

I had never heard of it until a flyer arrived in the mail earlier that year, addressed to Nicholas. He was excited and seemed to know all about it, even said he had some friends who were going.

It didn’t take long for Val to become equally excited. It would be three nights and four days of Christian music and speakers on several different stages, with food vendors, lines for the showers, and safe partying late into the night.

The dream of every teenager and pre-teen.

I never imagined how it would change our lives. 

 Val and I continued attending the event for the next several years, with an ever-growing number of girls in tow. The rest of the year, she was involved in a puppet ministry and the youth group at our church, as well as the youth group at another church in town. When she started high school, she joined the drama department and acted in three plays a year. She was busy and seemed to have discovered her place in the world.

While at Lifest in 2005 we both learned of – at different times – a mission trip planned for the following year to Kenya, Africa. It was something I had dreamed about doing as a kid, but by then I felt I was too old for an adventure like that.

Val had her heart set on the trip from the moment she heard about it. She had gone on a mission trip to Mexico earlier that summer and felt called to spread her wings even further. It took a little convincing and a few phone calls to the people in charge of the trip for me to decide.

We were both going to go.

Those two weeks turned out to indeed be the trip of a lifetime. I struggled with being so far out of my comfort zone, but Val’s star shone brightly. She embraced everything about Kenya – the food, the culture, the people we traveled with, the people we met there. She vowed she’d return one day.

The only cloud in her life was that her boyfriend had broken up with her the night before we left. When she wasn’t busy with the kids on the trip or doing work for someone, she would withdraw and break down in tears. Her emotions were a constant roller coaster.

And it didn’t improve when we got home.

I finally took her to the clinic to get her started on an antidepressant and look into counseling. I became so worried about her that I slept on the floor outside her bedroom door at night.

Until the evening she came out of her room and said she had talked to her church’s youth pastor on the phone and told her she was thinking about hurting herself. The young woman was responsible for contacting the authorities, so the police were on the way to our house to check on my daughter. 

They took her to the police station to wait for a county social worker to arrive to talk to her. My husband and I followed in our car.

After what felt like hours, we took Val back home. She promised she wouldn’t harm herself, and I promised I’d take her back to the clinic in the morning.