I have experienced first-hand the transforming, healing, and delivering power of the pure Word of God.  As an infant (9 months old), my life and world and family were shattered when members of the extended family decided it was appropriate to commit my parents to a mental hospital for evaluation (the reasons why still elude me—the shame and stigma of it was so intense that I have had difficulty obtaining any clear information from those who might know—and most of them are dead now, including my parents).  My five older siblings and I were committed to an orphanage where we were separated and further traumatized.  I had no concept of the big picture—that this was happening to my whole family.  Still not weaned, I drew the conclusion from my experience of it that my family had discovered something in me that was so repugnant that they were compelled to throw me out.
     I was cast into an alien and hostile world, and it left deep wounds that would remain open and raw for decades after, even though all conscious memory of the cause was inaccessible to me.  I learned later (the orphanage personnel had told my father and he told me in my mid-teens) that I had cried inconsolably for a solid week, and nothing would quiet me—they even tried spanking me—but what I cried for was my familiar people to come to me, and they never did.  Of course, I did stop crying at some point, by hardening myself against it.  I avoided intimacy of any kind, and, as a child was actively fearful of strangers and situations where I might be the center of focus—I was frequently sick to my stomach when it came time to perform in school programs and so on; my fear of being somehow unmasked and utterly rejected again was deep and profound.  I would rather be alone than with people, who had such power to cause pain.
     My parents were released months before we were allowed to go home.  They proceeded to move away from the community that they and their families had lived in their whole lives—a huge rupture in the tight-knit nature of prior relationships.  My father, who had been practicing organic farming and had the reputation of being the best farmer in the county, was forced to abandon the farming that he loved and to take on a series of town jobs.  My mother took work in the orphanage kitchen to be close to her children again, though she was not permitted to interact with any of us.  Our family was finally reunited a little over a year after the event, but I never felt truly part of anything, including my family, from that point on.  I carried a lot of damage that would skew my perception of myself, the world and my place in it, God and other people, for decades after.  I walked in the conviction that I was simply born defective and rejected—a fugitive in the earth!
      As an adolescent, I became delinquent and defiant, and no one could understand why (I came from a family that was well-educated, honest, hard-working and responsible)—least of all me! At levels below consciousness, of course, what else could be expected of someone as rejected as I ‘knew’ myself to be? I seemed incapable of acceptable behavior, and the older I got, the worse I got. In high school, I reached a point where I saw no future whatsoever in the world as I knew it. Even though I tested well and my teachers and school counselors urged me on to success and achievement (“You have so much potential, Hope, you could succeed at anything you chose to pursue!”), I saw nothing to be desired in all that was held out to me. Material prosperity and social success never attracted me, and all potential careers seemed to dead-end at that watering hole. I had already seen the hypocrisy of Christians and church (to my own satisfaction) and counted that as another dead end. Life in this world seemed to me to be someone’s very cruel idea of a joke and I turned to lawless rebellion—alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, and all that attend that self-destructive course. When I finally met a man I thought was my true love and he became violent and abusive toward me, it was more than I could bear, and I attempted to kill myself. Two days later, however, I woke up (no one knew of my attempt and no one called 911) and my first thought was: “God did this—He must have a reason.” That conviction kept me from any more suicide attempts. Even though the despair and temptation to it would stretch out for years to come, I was always held back by the possibility that there was a purpose in it all and God might not spare me another time.
      I continued in my confusion and darkness, though, stubbornly returning to the Jekyll/Hyde man I had believed to be my one true love, and doing all in my power to please him so he would find me pleasing. He was a ways beyond me in lawlessness, and I admired that in him and went on to commit petty crimes and my first felony—stealing my brother’s car which was his pride and joy. As in everything I did, I had no malicious intent, but one thing led to another and before I knew it we were in Mexico and out of money and had to sell the car—and, of course, I could never go back home after having done that. We ran to Alaska, and it was there that God began to make Himself known to me. It was there that I felt the need to read the Bible and my Jekyll/Hyde man stole one for me, and God began to speak to me from it (appropriately, His first quickening of the Word to me was a sure promise of judgment, from Revelation 2:20-23). This and that also led me to meet a woman who was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and she impressed me with her ability to quote from all over the Bible—previously, I had only seen Christians quoting a little bit from the book of John. Since I wanted to know what the whole Bible said, I was attracted to her. In the course of our conversation, God called me actively into partnership with Him with another verse: Revelation 12:9—an assurance from Him to me that He was quite as indignant over the mess the world was in and the miseries of our lives here as I was—but He knew who was really responsible (the Devil), and, in due time, intended to destroy that enemy. I attended the Memorial that spring and was moved deeply by the call of God to follow Him and to serve Him.
      I began reading Proverbs, and, believe me, there was plenty of conviction in those chapters for such a one as I! God made a few things happen, and I ended up calling home—talking to my brother and finding out that he had been compelled to put a warrant out for my arrest (the insurance company wouldn’t pay otherwise). I decided it was time to go straight, and determined to go home and turn myself in.
      My first conviction put me on probation, with the requirement that I pay full restitution to the insurance company. I was not required to pay restitution to my brother, the victim of my thoughtless selfishness—and it was many years, even after his death, before I realized fully how destructive my willfulness had been to him…and now there is no way to try to make it up to him. Even though there is forgiveness, there are long-lived consequences of all sin. During my probation, I was occupied with trying to read the Bible from front to back, the same way you would read any book—I made some contact with Jehovah’s Witnesses and began to study with them. I found their rejection of all other Christian churches agreeable, and their zeal for the Bible was also very agreeable—I went on to become very active in their works, while continuing to read the Bible according to my own plan of at least three chapters daily, whenever possible.
      It was a little over a year later that my private reading began to bring me upon statements that put me at odds with the powers-that-be who disseminate the beliefs of all Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I quit going to the meetings. Unable conscientiously to agree with all that was taught, I could no longer conscientiously attend. This left me without any fellowship, at all, because I wasn’t an unbeliever, I wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, and I wasn’t a church-going Christian. So I valiantly pressed on with my private study of the Bible and made some more amazing bad choices—picking up again the abusive relationship I had thus far been avoiding going back to, and ending up, at some point after the first probation was completed, with another felony conviction. This time, if you can believe it, I wanted to go to prison—my man had been there and was headed back, and I felt shut out of his life by the fact that I had not had this experience. I believed my place was with him, and I wanted to share everything he tasted—plus, I really could not do what was asked of me in order to get a second probation and restitution, even though there was a willingness to do that for me; but that story is too long to go into here (I’m supposedly writing a brief bio, not a book!)—so I went to prison.
      It was in prison that I began to truly take charge of my life (by the grace of God, who has suffered so much from me and loved me faithfully and unchangingly through all of it, quietly drawing me to the place of obedience that would be my deliverance and peace—hallelujah!). I decided, after another despairing act of shaving my head had made me the subject of prison scuttlebutt: “Is she crazy?” (this was before it became cool to shave your head), that perhaps I was crazy—after all, everybody said my mother was! Maybe that was the reason I seemed to have absolutely no ability to do right and follow a straight course, and could give no guarantee of what I might or might not do at any given moment. So I insisted that the prison psychologist send me to the regional mental hospital to see if I was or was not truly crazy—and that was where heart change began to occur at a level that would finally affect my conduct for good.
      Coming from prison, they had to put me in the maximum security ward, and when those metal doors (about a foot thick, it seemed, as they opened them to let me in) clanged shut behind me, I was plunged into fresh despair at what I had gone and done now! Sure, I had gotten myself in there, but how would I get back out? I didn’t end up being there very long—but long enough to realize that God Himself expected me to live my life as a productive citizen—honest, responsible and law-abiding. Too long I had scorned living the dull life of paying bills and making an honest living while I fancied myself a free spirit and mooched and sponged off of others who were willing to put their necks under that yoke. Too long I had despised the very life that God requires His children to live, believing it to be a perpetuation of the status quo which I also despised and refused to participate in if I could help it. (I had begun to formulate this attitude when my 9th grade advisor tried to convince me to take typing so I could grow up to be a good secretary and I refused on principle: a woman should have other options for employment! and I proceeded to dream of being a Black Panther or some other type of revolutionary, until disillusionment was fully upon me.) So, while in prison, I took typing as an independent study course and found out it was actually fun to teach my fingers this skill—my first concrete step toward my own full rehabilitation; a process which God has actively and independently facilitated in me as I have devoted myself to the study and application of His Word.
      The years that followed were very difficult and very productive, in terms of my own transformation. I was not instantly delivered of anything—I went on to marry the man who had been dream and nightmare to me, and after a period of comparative peace (freedom from abuse), I discovered I was pregnant. At that point, I began to experience emotions that I could not account for, and fears that had no basis in reality, as far as I knew—this was the beginning of the flushing up of my infant pain and wounding that God would go on to spend years healing and delivering me from. When the abuse took fresh life not long after our child’s birth, I fled and filed for divorce. During this interval, I actually had a revelation of the life that Christ had died to obtain for us, and I, for the first time began to think of myself as a Christian and looked for a church to attend. (After falling out with Jehovah’s Witnesses about six years earlier, all my fellowship was with the Word, which I diligently read from front to back, over and over again.) I remarried the same man within two years and stayed married for many years after, though we were seldom together for long, and the years were marked by heinous violations of the covenant. I believed God’s will was for me to remain faithful and expectant of true reconciliation, in spite of the abundant evidence that I was alone in that conviction and faith. I spent most of the intervening years as a single parent, choosing to homeschool (couldn’t afford Christian school and firmly believed in a Christian education), so my child would know God and His Word from the very beginning and have some foundation upon which to make informed choices and decisions in life—and, hopefully, not turn out like I had!
      All of these sketchy statements could be filled out with reams of specifics and there is so much that I haven’t even mentioned. For thirty years I have literally lived by the comfort and hope of the scriptures—utterly dependent upon God, and never disappointed in that dependence, finding Him always faithful to guide, instruct, comfort, correct and even scourge (for that, too, is necessary) by His Word—alive and powerful. For me, the Bible—the living Word of the living God—has literally been my sustenance in a waste, howling wilderness journey. Who can express it? But I found it both expressed and explained for me in the Word of God, and that Word has irrevocably transformed me. Now God has called me to share the gift, and these CDvotionals are one method of doing that. I am also back in school, pursuing a master’s degree in counseling (I have to complete the bachelor’s requirement, first, and be accepted in, of course), having also been called to give myself to helping others navigate the challenges and changes of life by the light of the everlasting Word—to pass on the wealth of treasure that God has so graciously and abundantly bestowed upon me in the course of my own devotion to Him once He had made Himself known to me.
      Hope Smith is my pseudonym for this ministry—a name adopted to protect the members of my large family who may not care to be identified with me in the disclosure of very private and painful truths, or in my enthusiasm and zeal for the God of the whole earth and His immutable Word. But my life is a testimony to the fact that God still lives, and works marvelously in the most obscure and unlikely of individuals to demonstrate His existence and power.
      We live in a world that is increasingly falling into spiritual darkness and ignorance, and it grieves me to see it. A return to the Most High is the only solution, the only hope—as it has ever been, it still is. There is nothing so useful and powerful to us as God’s Word—in its purity, in its simplicity—uncluttered by our attempts to explain it to one another. Let Him speak it to you and give you the understanding. This is how God has so wondrously wrought my transformation—as I have eaten and drunk His Word, straight from the Bible.
      I offer these CDs prayerfully to all who, like me, cannot live without Him and His exceeding great and precious promises, which give meaning and purpose to our lives, and enable us to make sense of what is, without Him and the light He gives, a truly miserable, death-dealing world. .

“Now the God of hope fill you with
all joy and peace in believing,
that you may abound in hope,
through the power of the Holy Spirit.”
(Romans 15:13)