Forgive me—it’s been two weeks since my last post. But the story I have for you today should help make up for the absence. I read about it today in Florida’s First Coast News.
Ten years ago, while trying to get to sleep one night, Marilyn Fowler heard a voice. It was the voice of her late mother, Charlotte. The voice told Marilyn to write the story of their family, which was first torn apart by the Great Depression and then went through periods of poverty and even homelessness.
“All the memories kept coming back to me,” Marilyn told the paper. “I rolled out of bed and I said, ‘Mom, I’ll write your story, now leave me alone.’”
Marilyn began writing about her family’s troubled history and her own tumultuous life, which involved her and her mother moving throughout the country in a constant search for stability. Like the time they found themselves destitute and without a place to live, dependent on an aunt in Deland, Florida to take them in.
Marilyn finished her memoir, Silent Echoes, and didn’t hear the voice again. For a little while.
But a few years ago, Marilyn heard her mother’s voice once more, this time, urging her to get the book out there. Marilyn didn’t know the first thing about publishing a book. A friend of Marilyn’s recommended a book editor friend, Carol O’Dell, who had recently moved to the area and was teaching at a local university. Marilyn brought the book to her.
As Carol read, she was transfixed by Marilyn’s story. Especially the part about living with the aunt in Deland, Florida. The names, the places…they matched with the only details Carol knew about her biological family, which had put her up for adoption at age 4.
Marilyn’s aunt was Carol’s mother. Marilyn and Carol were cousins. Marilyn’s book connected Carol with the family she thought she had lost forever.
“No one could have orchestrated this; it would have been too complicated for mere mortals,” Carol told the paper.
Marilyn’s book, Silent Echoes, is available at Barnes and Noble.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard a story about a mysterious voice helping someone in need. Our newsletter subscribers read one a few weeks ago, by Jan Holte of Sait Peter, Minnesota. And one of my favorites was told to me by a young boy, seventh-grader Cole Presley, about the voice that helped him save his grandfather from a raging bull.
Have you ever had a voice urge you to do something…a voice you recognized and trusted? And did following that urge lead you to something unexpected and wonderful?
