OAKDALE – “It all started two years ago last February,” says Vicki Booth, a member at First Baptist Oakdale and a clerk at Wal-Mart.
OAKDALE – “It all started two years ago last February,” says Vicki
Booth, a member at First Baptist Oakdale and a clerk at Wal-Mart.
But really it started when she was 13, Booth acknowledges. That’s when
at a GA conference in Texas she told God, “Whatever You want to do with
my life, You can have it.”
She thought it would be what then was known as ‘foreign missions’ –
perhaps as a missionary in Africa. But instead God used teenage
rebellion, the kidnapping of her child, Vietnam War, betrayal by her
best friend and more, so that today she speaks “with authority,” Booth
says.
She works at Wal-Mart, and uses that as her primary point of impact,
though leaders at First Oakdale credit Booth with instigating the
church’s upcoming city-wide Mother-Daughter Incredible Love conference,
which will deal with sexual purity in a town where even 10-year-olds
get pregnant, and which will involve both blacks and whites in a town
where there haven’t been many joint efforts.
But to start two years ago last February, Booth felt strangely
compelled to chaperone teens on a church-sponsored ski trip to Winter
Park, Calif., and to take her husband Don with her. He came down with a
severe case of altitude sickness and was hospitalized near death in
Denver. She joined him (leaving the teens in the care of other
chaperones) and stayed at a no-cost guest house.
“There was a blizzard – I had never seen so much snow – and I was
reading a book about a girl who ran away from home, and all that
happened to her, and the Lord said to me then, ‘I want you to open a
house like this, for runaways,’” Booth said.
But financial reversals followed the couple’s return home to Richland
Hills, in Metro Dallas, and by October 2004 the Booths had moved to
Oakdale, where they could live with her sister until they found a place
of their own.
A deli manager at a Wal-Mart, Booth was able to arrange a transfer to a
Wal-Mart in Pineville. Within a couple of weeks, two of her employees
had a question for her: “Miss Vicki, are you a Christian?” They had
become Christians from reading the Left Behind series, and didn’t know
what to do next, they explained.
“They formed a little Bible study group, about six of them,” Booth
said. “They’d ask me, ‘We want to study about ‘this’. Do you have
anything on it?’”
The women she’s ministered to at the Pineville and Oakdale Wal-Marts
are struggling with an incredible array of hurts, Booth said: a
handicapped child, drug-addicted son, recovering from alcoholism,
marriage in a shambles, child out of wedlock and pregnant again,
21-year-old mother with a seriously ill child, another with a husband
who beats her regularly, and one whose son was killed in a traffic
accident.
“Most of all, I assure them that God loves them,” Booth said. “It
didn’t matter what they was going through. If they trust in Him, no
matter what happens, they’ll get through it.
“How do I know that? Throughout my life, the Lord has put me in
situations so that now I speak with authority. No matter what you’re
going through, if you put yourself in His hands, you can get through
it.”
She still believes God wants her to open a home for runaways, Booth
said, and that somehow, the Incredible Love conference is going to play
a part in it.
The concept started when she attended a “Women of Action” conference in
Oakdale. She was the only white woman; they asked her to speak.
“I asked the Lord what to say, and told them about the vision He had
given me for the home for runaways, and about healing the division in
Oakdale.”
She told her Sunday school class at First Oakdale about the conference
the next Sunday. One of the class also was a member of the church’s
missions committee.
“The missions committee agreed we needed to do something to heal the
hurts in the Oakdale community,” Booth said. “It stayed there for
awhile.”
First Oakdale began studying Purpose Driven Life in January 2005, and after it, a six-week Mission Outreach study.
“That’s when the idea of a conference started materializing,” Booth said. “It just kept growing.”
Incredible Love, set for Sept. 9, is to include a style show and a
nationally-known abstinence speaker, but an empty box might be the most
moving element of the day. Attendees are to write down whatever they
want to give to God (and be done with), put it in the box, and put the
box on the altar as the song ‘Alabaster Box’ is being performed.
“The Lord has put all this together,” Booth said.
Read the Message next week for more on the Incredible Love conference.