My Wife Zsuzsa - Part 5

 

On Sunday morning, we went to Regency Baptist Church with the whole family. This was her very first time in a Baptist church. She still wasn't a believer, but she really enjoyed the service and said that she liked it a lot better than Catholic church. After the service, we grabbed a couple of sandwiches from Togo's and headed to the American river for a picnic lunch and an afternoon by the riverside. I sought to impress her by swimming across the river and then swinging high in the air and doing tricks on a rope swing. She sought to impress me by climbing to the top of a tree. We talked all afternoon and then headed back to church for the 6:00pm evening service.

At the end of the evening service was the invitation/altar call. With everyone's heads bowed and eyes closed, the pastor ask for anyone who was not saved to raise their hand. Zsuzsa raised her hand. A lady named Carolee Hemphill then approached her and asked if she could show her the Gospel. She agreed and they walked to the front of the building where Mrs. Hemphill went through the Gospel with her yet again. When she got to the end, she wanted her to pray and ask Jesus to saved her, but Zsuzsa declined. She said that she had already heard all of this from Steve repeatedly, but that she still wasn't quite ready to believe it.

After church, we headed to the Round Table pizza I worked at for dinner and met a couple of my friends there. Then we drove up to Auburn to look at the stars (most of the stars are not visible in a big city like Sacramento). I told her about how there were bears and mountain lions up there, which seemed to make her nervous. After building up her fear, I decided to jump out and scare her with a loud roar. She jumped away, shrieked, and buried her face in her hands trembling. For about 10 minutes, I tried to apologize and console her, but she would not look at me, take her face out of her hands, or say a word. I literally thought I had driven her insane (once my dad had told me a story about about how  some kids dropped a grasshopper down the back of another kid and how it made the kid lose his mind - that story was going through my mind at this moment). I was thinking to myself, "What will I tell her family?"

It turned out that the joke was on me! She was of course scared when I jumped out at her, but she only pretended for 10 minutes to have lost her mind in order to punish me, and because she liked listening to me pleading with her that everything was okay. We had a pretty good laugh about it in the end.

We got back to the house that night, and I went to my room with a heavy heart. I had really become fond of Zsuzsa, and I was sad that she still wasn't saved. I got on my knees and wept, praying to God that she would get saved. Little did I know that at the exact moment my tears were flowing as I prayed for her, she was upstairs in her room, asking Jesus Christ to save her.

To be continued...