One Heart at a Time Read online

  One Heart at a Time

  Copyright © 2018 by Big Shoes Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, please contact RosettaBooks at [email protected], or by mail at 125 Park Ave., 25th Floor, New York, NY 10017.

  First edition published 2018 by RosettaBooks

  Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  Cover photo by Brandon Hill

  Interior design by Alexia Garaventa

  Scripture quotes taken from the New International Version.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947059

  ISBN-13 (print): 978-1-9481-2216-0

  ISBN-13 (epub): 978-1-9481-2215-3

  www.RosettaBooks.com

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  1. A Heart Restored

  2. A Heart Beckoned

  3. A Determined Heart

  4. An Obedient Heart

  5. A Heart That Serves

  6. A Heart That Is Free

  7. An Empowered Heart

  8. A Wounded Heart

  9. A Heart Redeemed

  10. A Heart That Embraces

  11. A Connected Heart

  12. A Heart That Endures

  13. A Strengthened Heart

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Gallery

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  My name is Delilah. I have had a lot of last names, and I have a lot of nicknames, but most people just know me as Delilah. You may recognize the name from my nighttime syndicated radio show where I take calls and emails from listeners and help them work out their issues. That would make sense, as I’ve been on the air more than forty years.

  Playing your song requests and dispensing three-minute snippets of advice on my radio show is just a small part of my day. I also founded a nonprofit organization called Point Hope to help others in need. In the past fourteen years I’ve been back and forth to Ghana, West Africa, over thirty times, at least twice a year, helping refugees, the elderly, disabled, and vulnerable local population gain access to things we take for granted, like food, clean water, and health care. I’ve got thirteen kids, young children to adults, ten of whom are adopted. I’ve got grandkids to love on, farm animals to care for, and acres and acres of gardens to tend to. I’ll admit, sometimes I grapple with my own on-air advice to “slow down and love someone.”

  It is true, though. All of us need to slow down and step into another pair of shoes—perhaps the shoes of a person we disagree with. We need more love and understanding right now. People are being divided and pitted against one another. Images of rioting and unrest fill our TVs and computer screens, and we no longer bat an eye when they do, which is a whole other problem unto itself.

  “A house divided will not long stand.” We are a house divided. We are fighting against our brothers and sisters. Instead of building bridges of understanding, we are building walls of division.

  Never before in the history of our world have we needed love more than we do today. We have amazing technology that allows us to connect to each other in an instant, and yet people are more lonely and isolated than ever before—which also makes it easier to engage in the vitriolic discourse that divides us further. It’s easier to engage in mean-spirited warfare when you can hide behind an online profile.

  The growth of the overall disconnectedness or abject loneliness of people during the last two decades has taken on a life of its own. I hear it from callers all the time. Older folks who miss their adult children or grandchildren. I hear it from young people who feel like they don’t have any friends at their school or anyone they can trust. I hear it from young, exhausted single moms trying to make it on their own, and from married men and women who feel completely isolated from their spouses. Almost every person I’ve talked to who ever attempted suicide (and I talk to hundreds of these survivors each year) says the same thing: they felt utterly and completely alone, unable to bear the weight of the sadness from their depression and isolation.

  When I travel to developing nations and see small, unfurnished huts, maybe twelve feet in diameter, that are home to half a dozen people, or see houses where families have lived in the same neighborhood for generations, I suspect they are not nearly as lonely as we are in our modern, developed culture.

  Our world is in trouble on so many fronts, and it’s hard to be up against forces so enormous and powerful when you are one person, one heart, trying to effect change. Sometimes I feel like a tiny mouse facing down a rhinoceros.

  So how do we change the world? The answer: one heart at a time. I’ll start by sharing my heart with you.

  By sharing my personal stories and what I’ve learned in my experiences, the positive and the negative, my hope is you’ll start to see the miracles in your life, recognize divine promptings, consider your purpose, follow with prayerful obedience, open yourself to serve others, and let go of things that burden you—all so you may find peace in this harsh existence.

  When your life comes into harmony with the Lord’s plan for you, and people around you start to notice the change, guess what? They’ll want to know what you know. So you’ll share your stories, too, soften hearts, open eyes, and change the world with me, one heart at a time.

  CHAPTER 1:

  A HEART RESTORED

  I believe in miracles. The everyday natural wonders of creation that go unnoticed more often than not. Miracles like a fat, grubby caterpillar climbing a slender branch, decimating the existing vegetation, wrapping itself in layers of thread it creates from its little body, sleeping for a few weeks, and after chewing its way out of the bed sack, emerging a breathtaking winged thing. As a butterfly, it then takes flight and travels for thousands of miles to a destination it has never seen. How the heck do they know to fly thousands of miles to Mexico?

  I also believe in big miracles. Moses parting the Red Sea, the blind seeing again, and even breath coming back into a lifeless body—the type of miracles you mostly only hear or read about. I wasn’t raised or taught to believe in them, per se. My mom sent us to Bible camp just to get us out of the house in the long summer months, not because she or Dad believed in what we were being taught (while we made decoupage plaques of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus from playing cards). I believe in big miracles because I witnessed one when I was a child, and it is burned in my mind forever.

  My home state is known for its long rainy season. Inland Oregon is a dry desert environment, but the coastal region is a big, green sponge that never really dries out. Out of this sponge grow some of the tallest trees in the world, the Douglas firs and the great sequoias, the famous redwoods that ten men holding hands could not encompass. When I was a toddler, we lived on a farm surrounded by fields that walked right up to the edge of the great forests, but did not step a foot in. The forests met the fields where there was a stream connecting the two, inhabited by frogs, salamanders, tadpoles, and crawdads that I caught on every occasion.

  Before catch and release became a popular style of fishing, my brother Matt and I did that nearly every day with the creatures we caught. The stream was home to a breed of salamander known as water doggies, or Oregon rough-skinned newts, their official name. They look like tiny brown lab puppies, with long tails. Adorably cute, their big eyes would stare back at me just like a dog’s, and their skin is both soft and rough at the same time. They were fun to catch and handle and watch as they curled up in the palm of my chubby hand. Their undersides are orange, and it’s this bright underside that makes them famous. Their skin contains a poison called tetrodotoxin, or TTX, that
, if consumed, will kill you. It is ten thousand times more toxic than a shot of cyanide. I don’t remember worrying about this fact as a kid, but I suppose it’s one of the reasons Mom made us wash our hands before dinner.

  Spring had morphed into a sweet, mild summer and my parents were cleaning out the basement of our rental house. My job, at five years old, was to sweep the cement floor and carry the rubbish to the top of the basement stairs and dump it in the burning barrel. As I reached my chubby hands into the mesh drain guard in the cement floor, I found a dead water doggie. I pulled it out and held its cute face close to my own. Its eyes were closed, its body shriveled to about a third of its normal size. It was as hard as a rock and curled in the shape of a C. It had crawled into the drain, gotten stuck in the mesh grate, and dried out when the winter rains stopped. I showed it to Mom, who told me to throw it away and wash my hands. Dad didn’t even look up from his project but echoed the same instructions.

  I remember praying—I have no idea where I learned to pray, but I did—then I set the dehydrated water doggie on the ledge of cement at the top of the stairs. I simply asked God to make it live again. I was so sad that it had shriveled up, and I was determined to put it back in the creek next to the house. I went and got a pail, put a couple inches of water in the bottom, carried it back to the cement, and dropped the water doggie in. The memory of what happened in the next ten minutes is burned in my mind forever, as I watched the hardened creature begin to relax out of its curved shape and start to move. I screamed and jumped and screamed some more. My parents thought I had gotten hurt, I was making so much noise, and both came bounding up the cement stairs to see why I was so loud. There in the bottom of the bucket was a wiggling, moving, eyes-opened water doggie…

  Okay, maybe not as impressive as a stone being rolled away from a tomb, but to me it was proof positive that A) God listened to my prayers and B) He could bring things back to life.

  I put the salamander back in the creek, and then I started to pray for animals constantly. Living on a farm gave me ample opportunity to do so. I prayed when Mom took the hatchet to the chicken coop that we wouldn’t have fried chicken and gravy for dinner. I prayed when a calf was born too early that it would survive. When my dog Dusty got hit by a motorcycle, I prayed that she would live despite her broken back. Sadly, we had chicken and gravy at least once a week, and I missed a week of school from crying too much when Dusty died.

  But on one other occasion, my prayers were answered. A small barn owl had crashed into my grandma’s front window and was lying on the ground. I prayed it was just stunned, knocked out from the impact, but after an hour or more of my praying and coaxing, the bird was still lifeless and had turned cold in my hands. Grandma and I thought it was so beautiful, she decided to give it to our neighbor who was a taxidermist. We put it in a coffee can and stuck it in the pantry freezer. Later, needing room for some baked goods, she took the owl in the coffee can out and set it on top of the chest freezer. About an hour later, I heard a noise in the pantry and went to see what it was. The coffee can had fallen off the freezer and was moving on the floor. When I picked it up, I heard a noise inside and was so startled I dropped it again. Then I grabbed the can and ran to Grandma, who peeked inside to find the owl quite alive. We released it back in the barn, and after about half an hour of stumbling, falling, and getting back up, the owl spread its wings and flew.

  My world shattered a year ago on October 2, 2017. That night, my beautiful son, Zachariah Miguel Rene-Ortega, the last child I carried in my womb and gave birth to, chose to leave us. He was just eighteen years old. These have been the hardest months of my life, and that of my family. I miss him every minute and hour of every day. Despite the heartache and grief, I praise God for the life I live. I know that God is looking after us, and that, along with the love and understanding of family, friends, and so many others has kept me going.

  Right now, our hearts are big and raw and sore from the absence of him, and my memories block out the reality of most days bringing choking sobs every night. It is breath by breath, step by step, that I move through the days without my Zack Attack. We speak openly of Zack, of missing him like we do, and how his heart impacted all of our lives. He, like his brother Sammy, are in the arms of our Savior—of that I am sure. But I cannot help but want them here, in my arms. These arms that ache to hold them, to stroke their hair, to make their favorite foods.

  Both knew and loved their Father, and He knew their hearts. For whatever childhood struggles and teen angst they experienced, theirs were hearts that made a difference in this world even in the all too short time they were with us.

  One of my most endearing memories of my Zacky that illustrates what his one heart was truly like and truly capable of starts off in a mountain cabin surrounded by snow…

  I stretched out on the dull, orange shag carpet, imagining what it looked like thirty years earlier when it was new. My back was up against a worn couch, not as worn as the carpet but it had clearly seen better days. My daughters, Lonika, Shaylah, Angel, and Kristi along with our nanny, Malory, were in the kitchen, sitting around the stained wood table playing games and laughing.

  We were all sore from the day of skiing and snowboarding, and had just eaten a hearty meal of roast beef, potatoes, carrots, and onions that I put in the crock pot before heading for a day on the slopes.

  My ten-year-old son Zack was snuggled up next to me, insistent that we watch the movie Stardust, but nodding off in the first few minutes. Zack lives for our annual trip to the snow; being in the mountains and speeding down the slopes at full speed on his board was his favorite place to be. He was the first one awake in the morning, snow gear on, one of his many green beanies atop his tousled hair, board in his gloved hands.

  In all we brought seventeen of our family members and friends up to Crystal Mountain, two hours south of Seattle. I had discovered this treasure trove of a funky cabin many seasons before, and we were lucky to get it for the Christmas break and New Year’s Eve week the winter of 2009. The cabin was literally built around a massive Douglas Fir tree. The trunk of the tree was at least five feet across, and the entire cabin, all four floors, was built around its massive circumference with circular stairs wound around the pitch-encrusted bark. The first floor—usually unseen in the winter as it was buried beneath many feet of snow—is where the owners kept a separate apartment for themselves. The second story held a sauna, game room with a pool table, dart board, exercise equipment, hot tub (long defunct), and cupboards crammed with every game from chess to Yahtzee. Antique skis decorated the walls along with group photos of Olympic ski teams from decades past. The owners of the cabin were three generations of skiers.

  The third floor was where we spent all our time—a big kitchen, sunken living room, two bedrooms, and the tv room where we all piled in. Outside was a wide snow-covered deck where mountain birds, especially the friendly gray jays, would eat the leftovers we put on the railing. The owners told us to hold out seeds and stand very still. Within ten minutes they would be eating from the palms of my kids’ small hands.

  To say the cabin was antiquated, even outdated, would have been an understatement! The kitchen appliances were the same harvest gold that had been in my folks’ house, built in the 60s. The matted down shag carpeting was bright orange and the linoleum in the kitchen was a pattern I knew from my grandparents’ house. Most of the other cabins from this era that had for decades sat on the side of Crystal Mountain, known as the Gold Chair area, had been torn down. New, modern multimillion-dollar winter homes with expensive snowmobiles parked in the drifts outside now stood where shabby cabins had nestled for decades. And today, nine years later, the cabin built around the tree is long gone, only our memories remain.

  Zack drifted off to sleep, his red wind-burned face in my lap, before the flying ships appeared—their flamboyant captain played by Robert De Niro. He was sound asleep when the three witch sisters turned old and ugly. His favorite scene in Stardust is where Michele Pfeiffer, playi
ng Lamia, casts a spell to make her sagging jowls smooth out only to have her perky breasts fall.

  Our family and friends spent the night celebrating New Year’s Eve with non-alcoholic champagne, board games, and lots of laughter. We spent the next day on the slopes and on January 2, a Friday, we packed up the family van and the Escalade, along with my friend Sara’s car—her battery dead from several days of freezing temperatures—and we headed home, winding down the snowy mountainside. I’d taped my shows for the whole week so I didn’t have to worry about getting into the studio. I anticipated a relaxing weekend to unpack and rest before the kids went back to school the following Monday.

  On Saturday the phone rang and it was a girlfriend from church, letting me know that the African Children’s choir was going to perform at our church on Sunday and I should make sure to bring the kids and come. I had been working in Ghana, West Africa, for five years and had adopted two beautiful young girls from Buduburam, a refugee camp. My girlfriend knew I’d love the music and even though the choir children were from a different country, my adopted girls might like seeing other children near their age from West Africa.

  I spent Saturday unpacking the vehicles and trying to dry out ski bibs, jackets, gloves, boots, and pants. We lugged in the plastic totes we had filled with food and the coolers that had been packed with meats, eggs, milk, and cheese. The totes and coolers were pretty much empty and needed to be scrubbed and put away. You have no idea how insane it is to pack and unpack from a week’s vacation with a family the size of ours! Each child had at least two pairs of ski gloves and two or three pair of wool socks. I spent hours trying to find the matches to about thirty-six different gloves and forty or fifty different socks! Exhausted, I tumbled into bed around midnight.

  The next morning, we decided to go to the 10:30 a.m. late services. The sink was full of breakfast dishes, the living room was a makeshift laundry center for ski gear that was drying, and a week’s worth of laundered towels piled on the couch. Snowboards and sleds leaned against the side of the porch.