By society's standards, she wasn't much. Mentally unstable and physically ill much of the time, getting worse rather than better over the past few years, Marie seemingly had nothing to offer anyone. Yet I say "seemingly." For one conversation, ranging perhaps for an hour, maybe two, her life and mine intersected.

She had a great gift. And she offered it to me.

Late November 1987. It had been three weeks since my wife left me. I was going through that private hell the lover left behind always goes through, the hell with overtones of soap opera. The story? Mundane: she wanted something different than what she had and was now in the process of finding it. What could I do but wait for her to know herself, to write me in or out of her story? The pain of rejection, the fear of what was going to happen were like the coming winter. Inescapable.

I walked outside our community's four-story brick Malden home, alone with my reflections. The wire-link fence around the cemented surface of our large yard echoed with running children, adults returning from work, and street people going in and out of the lobby. Cold air tore at my face, but perversely, I walked further out into the November chill. Still, my mind's tundra was far icier than Chicago's.

"Hi, Jon," said a familiar guttural voice. I turned. A raggedy knit cap atop a mannish, almost impish, face. Thick eyebrows, short gray hair sticking out every which way. Old, ripped shoes, her swollen, varicose-veined feet bulging out the sides. It was my friend Marie.

This street woman's dirty appearance and olfactory ambiance often bordered on the repulsive. Yet I liked her. I was drawn to her eccentric sort of joy, her eyes smiling even when her lips frowned. She also was a great storyteller, and I love stories.

We had met in one of those forgettable encounters, a Jesus person coming down from third floor stops to chat with a street person sipping hot java. I talked to her some dozen times there in the entrance of Jesus People USA's "Friendly Towers," heard her tales with a mixture of empathy and artistic pleasure. On the other hand, the stories about her terrible childhood of abuse somewhere out west, and her own predictably messed-up marriage and personal disintegration failed to completely pierce the barrier of skepticism erected as my interior armor.

But back then I'd been a happily married Christian man with two cute babies. ("There's two things I'll never do: commit suicide or get divorced." What na+ive+te+ had led me to coin that Trottism?) Now I was living on the edge of my own San Andreas Fault, wondering when I'd fall in. And here was Marie looking into my face and asking the one question I absolutely didn't feel like answering. "How's the wife and kids?"

Her breath streamed out into the evening air, now lit by streetlamps. I took, exhaled a breath of my own. And I told her how things were.

Marie's eyes reflected a simple concern, a gentle mix of sorrow and desire to comfort. Her puffy, roughened hand brushed back a stray strand of gray hair. "How can that be?" she asked herself. "How can that be?" she asked me. "I just saw you with her. You looked so happy. . . ."

I had no response to that, or to her twice-asked question. Yet I found myself vulnerable to her caring; who was the street person, who was the Jesus person? And as she began talking, began ministering to me, I found myself listening to her in eager expectancy.

I had my breakdown and they took my kids away. I tried to do better, but I couldn't. I had a second breakdown. And you know, Jon, when they put me in that station wagon to take me to the mental institution, it was winter. I stared out the car window as the empty dirt fields passed by. I felt nothing but despair.

The cold November seeped into my bones. Marie's face, chapped by the wind, glowed a Christmas red.

I decided I'd deal with it as best I could. And you know, I knew if I couldn't cope, I could do away with myself. There was always that. I'd already tried it a few times. But I'd never been in so much blackness as this.

Yes, Marie. The blackness that you / I sense is just beyond the small fire of faith, always reaching for us. Waiting for the fire to go out.

At the institution, I got my therapy, but the doctors didn't find much to encourage me with. And after the treatments, I'd go out into a lobby area for patients. There was this big window, looking out into the fields behind the building. The first day I was there, I saw the trees out there, gray and stripped of leaves. And you know, Jon, those trees were me. Dead, ugly, and useless.

Months passed. And one day, after another treatment, I finally decided to end it all. I told God I was sorry, but that I couldn't help it. Everything was black. Even the weather the day before had been miserable, freezing rain and gloomy overcast skies. And I walked toward the lobby, wanting just to be alone. I was going to end it that evening.

Something in the other room was glowing.

There were these lights moving, shifting and changing. Rainbows and sparkling diamonds! And I walked to the window, because the window was where they were coming from.

The storm was over, and the sun was out. The trees, those gray, ugly trees, were transformed. They were covered with ice crystal, every last trunk and branch and twig. The sun through those branches and twigs made them shine like a million prisms. The breeze touched the trees and shimmering, shaking shards of light flew everywhere. Even on me! It was so beautiful, Jon!

And as I looked at those trees, I knew I was looking at myself. I heard God whisper to me, "Marie, to yourself you're just one of those gray, barren trees. But to me you're dressed in crystal and diamonds and light."

And then I knew I could make it. I just love that part in the Bible that says, "I will never leave you or forsake you," because you know, Jon, He never did. Not even in the times of despair. Not ever.