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A knock in time
Janet Watson

(Annular solar eclipse; photo by Bruce Muller, Scotland, 31 May 2003)

It was the Autumn of 1991, a Saturday night, about 10.40.  My son Jon had just rang me to tell me that he couldn’t get a lift home from his work about seven miles away in Brigg.

Jon worked in a residential home for people with learning difficulties.  He was twenty at the time.

My eldest son Chris lived down in Newbury, in Berks.

I had my daughter Lena, who was fifteen, at home, but she was staying the night with friends.

So I sat alone in a dark house when Jon’s call came.  He explained that no matter how hard he had tried, he couldn’t get a lift home, and that there were no taxis available.

The world crowded in on me and I knew I had just passed breaking point.

I had been banging my face against the wall and only eating toast once or twice a week for a long time.

All I did was sit and try and rock my deep-rooted pain out of me.  I did not want to know my children who were and still are the centre of my being.

For the next few minutes my whole miserable life came into focus—my father’s wanderings when I was growing up, the many times he had left my mum and his children—was it five or six?

In my desire to be loved, my need to belong to someone, I went through three disastrous marriages; one was fraught with jealousy and betrayal, the other with physical pain and abuse, while the third involved my children in circumstances still too painful to speak of.

As I sat there my fourth marriage had just ended because my husband wouldn’t pay bills and took my wages from working at William Booth House in Hull off me, leaving me begging him for a pair of shoes, for my only pair had holes in the soles.  It wasn’t the drink or horses that possessed him, but his insatiable addiction to the gambling allure of the one-armed bandits.

I had just left Hull and returned to my family in Scunthorpe. Foolishly I turned to a man twelve years younger than me, a man I met at work. I didn’t know at the time I met him that he had served time in prison and would be back there within a year.

How could I stop this?  How could this cycle of misery, of giving my all and getting nothing in return, be broken?

It was at that moment I decided to take my life.

My son had an air pistol in the drawer in the kitchen and I decided it was as good a way as any.  I walked into the kitchen with the sole purpose of taking my life. I was determined nothing would stop me! I loaded the gun and put it into my mouth.

At that moment there was a knock at the door.

How stupid of someone to knock! It was 11 o’ clock at night and the house was in pitch darkness—and there was a gun in my mouth.  What a time to knock!

After switching on the Hall light I opened the front door.  A young man, between 25 and 35, stood there.  He asked me if I knew of a family that lived down the road.

After telling him I had just moved in and didn’t know anybody, he asked me to go to the gate with him to give him directions back into the town centre.  I gave him these and he looked down at what I presumed was his watch and said goodnight.

As I watched him walk down the street I thought, why my house? There were plenty of my neighbours who were still up, their houses all ablaze with lights on.

And as I watched him he suddenly evaporated into nothing!

I went back in and looked at the clock—just gone eleven—and I thought, “Somebody doesn’t want me to do this.”  But I was resolved and went back into the kitchen—I had made up my mind and was on a mission of self-annihilation!

I don’t know how long I stood there, but the next thing I knew Jon was knocking at the door and the gun was in my hand.  When I let him in he explained to me that a man had come up to him at two minutes past eleven and said, “You’re wanted at home!”  The man had accompanied Jon and it took them seven minutes to get home. When I opened the door only Jon was there.

Jon saw the pistol and guessed what I was trying to do. He wasn’t happy, to say the least! I stormed up the stairs and, in my arrogance, shouted to God: “All right, God! If you want me, fetch me!”

Eventually, he did—praise the Lord! 

Janet Watson
Hull, May 2003

Now published in

This work is in effect a sequel to Touched by God: Testimonies of Christian Power, which brought together seven inspirational stories of God’s supernatural intervention in the lives of Christian believers—testimonies that presented extra-biblical proof of God’s divine power and love in the lives of Christian believers.