Interview with Lynette

Q: First of all, you talked in the beginning about sponsoring Indian children and missionaries. I don’t know if everyone is familiar with that. What is sponsoring Indian children and missionaries?

A: The organization Gospel for Asia had children that you could sponsor. You pay $30/$35 a month, and you can pay for their schooling, healthcare, food, clothing, everything they need. To support native missionaries, you pay $30 a month, and you’re supporting (with a few other people) a missionary so that they can go and preach the gospel without needing to be at home working in order to go. 

Q: I remember you saying one time that you were asking God for more jobs so you could get more money and support more people. Am I remembering that right?

A: Yes. When I was 13, I was reading a book by K.P. Yohanan, the president of Gospel for Asia, and it was explaining the church in India and the American church. I prayed that night, “Lord, I can’t pack up and go to India. I’m only 13. But if you will give me a job, I will work and I will pay so that somebody else can proclaim the gospel where it’s most needed.” The next day someone called and said, “Hey, do you want a babysitting job?” So I started babysitting and I started sponsoring that missionary that week. About 6-9 months later, I asked the Lord, “Would you please expand the work that you’re doing? Can you give me another job?” And someone called and offered me another babysitting job. That continued until I had three missionaries and five children. I never went and asked anybody for work. I asked the Lord when I felt a stirring to do more. The Lord always gave me a job. Usually it was babysitting. But then I got involved with cleaning, dog sitting, and doing produce. It was ridiculous. I would pay hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars a year, and yet the money just kept coming. There was always a surplus. 

At such a young age, I didn’t have a credit card. I would have my dad pay, and I would give him the money. He would always warn me, “Lynette, you have to provide for yourself. You have to look to the future. There are going to be bills some day that you’re going to need to pay.” I hated it, because I wanted to honor my dad, and I wanted to respect him. At the same time, I desperately wanted to give more to furthering the Gospel. Later, my dad said that it was a great encouragement to him to see the Lord provide lavishly when someone gives generously. At that age, leaving the house, I still had a nice amount of money. All the money that came in and all the money that I put out, the Lord blessed richly. He was just dumping money. My teenage years were spent working, and I loved it, because I knew that I wasn’t only helping the people in front of me, but I was helping to expand the kingdom in India.

Q: What city in India did you go to?

A: We went to Barasat, Kolkata. Kolkata is the ghetto of India, and Barasat is the ghetto of Kolkata, so in essence we were in the ghetto of the ghetto. It’s known as poor man’s city. We were in a very rough part of town. We would tell the people on the street that we were from Barasat, and they were like, “Oh no, not Barasat!” Khali, one of the most powerful gods of India, resides there. It’s known as the throneroom of Satan. There was this huge statue of her. She was six or nine feet, I don’t remember how tall she was. She had six arms, and she had the wickedest face. Her tongue was sticking out, and she’s holding cut off heads with blood dripping from them. She’s known to drink the blood of those who don’t sacrifice to her. Many people near this area would sacrifice their babies to appease her, hoping that they would get blessings and have a good life. It was a very, very dark place. 

Q: On January 13, 2013, when you went over, how old would you have been at that point?

A: I had just turned 18 the December right before. My class was still in high school, but I had graduated a semester early by homeschooling. I felt like I was fighting to go there. When people from the organization found out I was raised in a Mennonite background, they’d say, “We don’t think you’re radical enough to do this.” They also thought I was a little too young, even though I had just made the age requirement. 

Q: What about your family? Were you supported by your family in going?

A: My sister Laura knew that I was ready for this, and she really encouraged me. My parents, too, they said, “If this is what God is asking you to do then we have a peace with it.” My mom even said she could sense a difference in me and said, “You’re not even here anymore.” My heart had already moved on, and she knew that this was from the Lord and He was calling me elsewhere. They were supportive of me.

Q: Do you have any stories about the dangerous animals in Calcutta, like the cobras?

A: We actually had a cobra that lived at that home in the sewage, in the trenches right beside the road. They said that he’d been there for eight years. He never really lashed out or attacked anyone. He would stretch the whole way across the road. He was about seven or eight feet long. One day he was sleeping with his head stuck in the rock, and I went up and touched him. I just wanted to be able to say I had touched a cobra. Also, we would be riding down the road on the truck, and we would see cobras off to the side wrestling over each other. Monkeys over there were as common as our squirrels.

Q: Why wouldn’t people kill the cobras?

A: Cobras are one of the sacred animals. You can’t kill cobras. The cobras would be under water in the rice paddies killing them. But you can’t kill the cobras, just like you can’t kill the rats that eat their food. India would not be a poverty-stricken country if they did not have all these sacred animals that they’re not allowed to kill. With reincarnation, they think that these rats could be their ancestors. I heard it said that if you take a train car from Los Angeles to New York and fill it with grain, that’s how much food the rats eat each year. So, it’s a ton of food. They wouldn’t be in the state that they’re in if they didn’t have wrong beliefs.

They also had baboons, the crazy ones with the fangs and the bare butts. They were as big as a ten year old child. We were there when they would come, and everybody would freak out and run into the house, because they will grab little kids and run away with them. They said that one of these baboons could rip your face off. Everytime we would see a new creature, we would look at them [the Indians] and see how they responded. Scorpions didn’t really phase them, so we wouldn’t really be alarmed to have them in the house. 

Q: You talk about the darkness there in Calcutta. What did demonic activity or oppression look like in general there in Calcutta? You talk about sickness. Were there other things that the team was facing that you were pretty sure was opposition of the enemy?

A: The majority of us saw demons. There were a few girls on the team that didn’t see any at all. But we could all feel them. We lived in the same house as a witch doctor. She lived in the next apartment over. We had to go through her house to get to the rooftop. Every day, a couple times a day, she would start worshiping her gods. She would be banging pots and ringing bells and making ghost noises and whooping really obnoxiously. Anytime that would happen, we would be in different rooms doing our own Bible times or whatever, and there would just be this darkness, this heaviness that would settle over our house. We would all just come together into one room and start praying, and you could feel the heaviness and darkness lift out of the room.  It just made the Gospels seem so real when it talks about light and dark. It just felt like I was living in the Gospels for those few months I was over there. It all made sense. That stuff you read in the Gospels about a demon-possessed person might make you say, “That’s kinda crazy.” But it was our daily life.

Q: How did that episode with the dreams stop?

A: There were a few more scenarios than the ones I listed. There were seven total. It kept going and going and going, and then at the end, I opened my eyes and by that point I was done. I was not going to close my eyes again. I opened my eyes and there were just dark figures all crouching around, looking at me, and then I heard, “We’re trying to kill you and it’s not working.” In that moment, when I heard it and I saw it, it was (it’s hard to put it into words) very dark and heavy. It was horrifying, but then afterwards, it was just such a relief.  They can touch my body, but they cannot take my life. The encouragement and the worship that came out of that experience was immense. I don’t often tell that story to people, but when I do people say, “Oh my goodness, you must have been so scared?!” But they’re missing the point. I experienced it and there was an end to it. It couldn’t last forever. It was so limited. 

Q: What is it that limits that? Why do you think that they can only act in a certain way and can’t go beyond that?

A: Greater is He that is in us. God holds the power of my life. I had to think of Job a lot. He can hand over the body, and the body is just a tent that can be thrown out. But the soul is the Lord’s, and he will determine when it is my time to go. Even that experience is for God’s glory, for me to see and witness a small piece of the demonic realm, but yet worship the Lord all the more because of it. When I came back to the states, there was a lot that I had to work through. There were a lot of times when I would go back to that deathbed experience in my mind, and I wouldn’t have the peace that I had in the moment. And I had to remind myself of God’s faithfulness. He gives it when it’s needed. If I’m going to try to relive the past, there’s not going to be the grace that was there. I need to rest in God’s provision and daily bread for today, and not camp out in the past, where He doesn’t have me. 

Q: So how long in your sickness journey did death feel like a strong possibility? Or maybe it was several times throughout that it was like, okay, I really could die here? 

A: There’s a time in the ER in Michigan that was pretty serious. They didn’t understand what was going on, I had kidney failure, but they were pumping me full of narcotics, and basically, I was having a drug overdose. My oxygen sats were going down into the 80s. My respiratory was being suppressed. They had to intubate me because they didn’t want to lose me when they put me under. So they intubated me and then did emergency surgery to get out the stone. I was going in and out of consciousness before the surgery, and they seemed pretty worked up. They were trying not to lose me there. A friend of mine was woken up that night and felt like she had to pray for me. She prayed me right through surgery, not knowing that anything was going on. 

It went in cycles. Fifteen months sick, and then I’d be healthy for about three months, and then six months sick , and then healthy for two months, nine months sick and healthy for a few weeks, and slowly it got smaller and smaller, until there were years of just never having any remissions at all.

The doctors just constantly weren’t sure what was going on. There were years in there where it felt like, “I’m not going to make it long.” And I was just waiting to die, and especially toward the end, where I felt like everything was shutting down. I had gone to new depths that I hadn’t experienced before.  

I used to wish it would be cancer so that I could just fight it and be done with the sickness one way or the other. I was fine with dying, I just didn’t want the torture of no quality of life whatsoever to continue. 

Q: When Daniel married you, were you guys both in the mindset that you weren’t sure how long you were going to last?

A: I think Daniel was a little more hopeful. He knew that I was really sick, but I don’t think it was on his radar that I could die within a year. When I talk about it, he’s like, “No, no you weren’t going to die.” I think he remembers differently because he wasn’t the one living it. I was trying to grin and bear it for him. I would tell him things, like I feel like I’m dying, but I don’t think he understood that I’m actually preparing myself to die. I don’t think he would say it the same way I would, because I was trying not to be very doom and gloom. 

Q: You talk about the times of peace, overwhelming peace, in India during this time. For the years that you were here in the States, facing these illnesses, facing even death again, was it a struggle to feel that peace?

A: There were times of it, like when I was in the ER having that emergency surgery, there was deep peace then. But it wasn’t the same experience as in India. 

Q: You talk about idolizing missions and learning to rest. Would you say that was one of the hardest lessons you had to learn through all this?

A: I don’t think it was the hardest, but I came to realize really soon how depressed I was when I was sent home. I saw how much of an idol it had become. Before I had left on the trip, I was willing to be used by God in any way. I was willing to stay and attend New Tribes and I was willing to go wherever He led. I was a blank page ready to be filled. Once I went there and experienced it, I wanted that. I didn’t realize how unhealthy it was until I saw how depressed I became. I wanted to be sleeping on dirt floors, and I wanted to be eating rice with my hands. I wanted to be in poverty with the people I had been given a heart for. I didn’t want to be ministering to the wealthy. In James it says to not show favoritism. I favored the poor, and I loathed the rich. The Lord placed me in the land of wealth to show me He loves all people, and He wants the rich to be saved too.  I wouldn’t say that was the hardest lesson, but it took a good three years to surrender it and be content wherever He had me. I would think I was content, and then I would soon realize I was not again. It was about three years until I was actually invested in the people right in front of me without an overwhelming desire to be somewhere else. To just be present where God had me and to embrace that.

Q: You talk about learning to rest specifically. I know I’ve dealt with this myself. Do you feel like you almost begin to equate your own worth with what you can do for God? And if you are just not doing anything, it’s like you have to rethink everything?

A: Yeah, definitely. In the Mennonite culture, do to be is a large stumbling block. I would feel guilty lying down. It was looked down upon for us to sleep in past 8 or 9, and my body was just so depleted that I would be in bed all day sometimes feeling like such a waste. So I took on the mentality that I just have to do it. I’m sure I made my health much worse by pushing through and doing things that my body couldn’t handle. I felt worthless if I wasn’t being productive.

What does it look like to walk in obedience, to trust the Lord, and worship him in a sickbed? My purpose is to glorify God. In doing so, I trust him with my life and with my sickness and with my death. I worship him in my pain and from my exhaustion. I have to do what the Lord has given me to do. And if he has me in a place where I have to crawl to the bathroom because I can’t walk, then I crawl to the glory of God.  Glorifying God in this season may look like not entertaining thoughts of suicide because that is not what he has for me. And that is my way of glorifying God in the moment that he has. To die to my own fleshly desires of comfort and seek him yet again, even when he doesn’t feel present. Even when nobody is around, and it would be much easier to pursue other means of comfort that are ungodly. Learning how to glory in him in the state that I am. That was the biggest lesson. 

Q: That’s like whiplash, from one of the hardest places doing the hardest things to a sickbed in America, unable to do almost anything. It feels like it’s completely and totally on the opposite end of the spectrum. How is that glorifying to him? But the Lord has a way for you to glorify him there, too. 

A: Absolutely, absolutely. You think your purpose is to tell everybody about Jesus. But when you’re in a place when you can’t, when you’re in bed alone and nobody is around, it’s just you and God. It’s you and God for years, because you don’t have the breath to go and talk to people. Sometimes you don’t have the physical capacity to be out of bed. What do you do then? When it’s just you and God and you can’t do anything for him. Just being okay with the life He has you living and embracing that. You take a good long look at yourself and where you are before God, and if that’s pleasing or not. I feel like oftentimes we try to distract ourselves by making ourselves busy. When you can’t be busy or distract yourself in any way . . . hating that at first, and then embracing that. There was an intimacy with God that was birthed out of that that I hadn’t had the opportunity to experience before. 

Q: How can we show compassion and care for people who are sick while also not making every interaction be about sickness? So that they don’t feel like, “All I am is my sickness.”

A: I loved, loved, loved when people would give me a hug and say, “It’s good to see you.” They didn’t have to ask a question. They didn’t have to ask, “How are you?” Then I didn’t have to think through, “Do I lie to them? Do I tell them how I really am?” It doesn’t matter how I am. When you’re sick for years on end, it really gets to the point where that’s your normal. If you’re a healthy person and then you’re sick, and then you’re healthy again, that’s one thing. But if your sickness is your normal, you can’t dwell on it anymore. I would just say, “Fine.” I had adjusted. This is my new normal. I am managing it, and I am okay. When they told me they were happy to see me, that was the best greeting I received. Also when they would ask, “What is the Lord teaching you during this time?” Or, “How can I help you?” 

Marla Brenneman was one that came and asked, “How can I help you?” What I asked of her was to just listen. She took me out for lunch, and I just talked, and talked, and talked. (That was during a season where I had enough energy to do that). If people would come and actually ask what they can do, that is helpful. I would have asked my friends, “Could you just come sit with me? I can’t do anything, but I don’t want to be alone all day.” I didn’t want to ask, “Can you please come sit with me for an hour?” But that is what I desperately wanted. What people think somebody wants is often very different from what they actually want. 

When people are sick, others come around them and help them and bless them and check in on them, and then they get better, and they move on. But when you’re chronically ill, people do that initially. They came around. “Can we help you, can we bless you?” And they moved on, but I stayed. I stayed sick. And then I would see others, someone would break a bone, and people would gather around them and help them. And all I would think was “But I’m still sick. It’s been  years and I’m still sick, and they’re going to get better in six weeks.” I would wrestle with my heart. Somebody would miscarry a baby, and I would grieve with them. But then I would think, they could go on and have another baby. And I don’t say that lightly, because since then we did lose a baby  and that is a devastating heartache to walk through. But even having the capacity to miscarry was a gift I mourned, to have a baby that you know is with Christ in eternity. I came to a place where I was no longer sympathetic, and I hated that. Someone would get sick, and I’d just think, you're fine, you’ll get better in a week. That became my attitude for a while. The Lord really had to work on me to enter in. To mourn with those who mourn. To rejoice with those who get better and returned to their normal healthy life, even when I couldn’t. I wanted people to see me in my sickness, but then I also didn’t want it to be about the sickness. It was just very hard. I could be very hard for people to approach. There were some people who would ignore me altogether. They came and told me they were ignoring me. They said they didn’t know what to do. They wanted to enter in, but they didn’t know how. There were those who didn’t know me well. They cared about getting the news, but they didn’t care about caring for me. There were a few in the inner circle that I would let in and explain something new that was happening, and ask them if they could pray for me. There was a crowd where I would just lie to their face. “I’m fine.” To just not have to share about it yet again. Learning to love each person, and be gracious with each person was something He grew me in during this time.

I’ve learned a lot about what to do and what to say when people are grieving, but there are still times when I’m going to meet with someone, and I don’t know what to say. And I’m sure I’ll say things that hurt them. But just being with people and bringing them the truth is what speaks volumes.

Q: Lastly, tell me more about the squatty potties.

A: Squatty potties are holes in the ground. There are some fancier ones that look like a toilet, but the ones we had were just holes in the ground that you squat over. The one in our house was not functioning well, and the ten of us girls did not want to go tell our landlord about it. It had become level full. Indian plumbing is ridiculous. It goes out a little channel into the lake right at our backdoor. We had to scoop it out. We ended up using a bucket from there on out. We were pooping and peeing in a bucket and taking it out to our lake and dumping it in. My friend and I were the unlucky ones that had to scoop it out. Made great memories.