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CBN.com – "I hated him very much," says Mireya, "so much that I wanted to see him dead."
Mireya Giron of Nicaragua didn’t feel that way when she married her husband, Juan José, a distinguished engineer. But little by little, her initial happiness turned into a permanent hell where the scene was always the same.
"He would walk toward the bed and take me by my hair and drag me across the room," she recalls. "Then he put me in a corner and put a gun to my head and said he was going to kill me. The next day, this man would wake up and go to work as if nothing happened. I hated him. I hated him so much."
Juan Carlos continued down the path of abuse and infidelity. You may be surprised to learn why he thought his actions were acceptable.
"I
believed that money made up for all the abuse I gave my wife," he says. "Because
I was a good provider, I felt that made me a good father and husband."
But one day Mireya had had enough.
"I was tired of all the deception. I was fed up with all the humiliation. I decided to do something about it. One morning I woke up and realized that he hadn’t come home the night before. I locked the gates and said my marriage ends here. If it doesn’t get better, it will only get worse. I’m sick of this."
Though the Girons lacked skill as marksmen, their intentions were deadly.
"Both of us felt so much hatred we really were shooting to kill," Mireya says.
But when Mireya failed to kill Juan José, she tried to find another way to end her misery.
"I started to drink, to go out and live a very wild life," she says. "The hatred turned inward and brought me even more pain. One day I decided to commit suicide."
To kill herself, Mireya took an overdose of liquor, pills, and poison. Almost immediately she suffered agonizing stomach cramps. Not wanting anyone to hear her moans, she turned up the volume on the television. Though the pain was becoming even more intense, her television program caught her attention. It was The 700 Club. A woman on the program was saying that Jesus had changed her life, that Jesus had freed her from the slavery of alcohol and drugs, that He had restored her marriage.
"I didn’t like that last part," Mireya says, "because I thought God had failed me. I thought if there was a God of love, why didn’t He hear me? So, I definitely didn’t like that. There was a telephone number below. I reached for the telephone. I remember that I started to insult the person on the phone. 'It’s hypocritical,' I said. 'What God are you talking about? The God you are talking of hasn’t done anything for me—nothing! I wont even see sunlight tomorrow.' And I hit the table."
The counselor quietly told Mireya about Jesus and prayed for her. To this day Mireya doesn’t know exactly what happened after that call, but what she saw was very clear: she saw a tunnel, and at the end, a man who told her, 'Lift up your face.'
Amazingly, she had no ill effects from the overdose or the poison.
"I opened my eyes and I saw myself. I was lying on my bed face up with my arms in this position [Mireya crosses her arms over her chest]. There was nothing wrong with me. Nothing! I wasn’t even queasy."
For Mireya, all this led to a decision.
"I knelt by my bed and I started to ask God for His forgiveness," she says. "I remember saying, 'God, forgive me. From the bottom of my heart forgive me because I tried to kill myself. Forgive me because now I know You exist.'"
By God’s grace, Mireya made a new start, leaving her alcohol and pills behind. She asked God to take away the hatred she had felt toward her husband. Then one afternoon, what seemed impossible happened! Juan José had attended a Christian meeting and returned home with an amazing request.
"I want to ask you to forgive me in the name of Jesus because I have hurt you so much," Juan told Mireya.
Today
Mireya and her husband tell others about the miracle that changed them.
"Many people who knew us thought that our marriage wouldn’t last another month," says Mireya, "but it’s been five years and seven months since then."
Adds Juan, "What I have comes from heaven. It was Jesus who gave it to me."
A caring friend will be there to pray with you in your time of need.