The Scriptures under the Testimony
This document accompanies the video Et nytt liv med Jesus — Maria Lavelle (Norwegian). Maria's quotations are faithful English renderings of her own Norwegian words; every Bible passage is given in full from the WEB. The retelling below is a summarized rendering of the conversation — the full, unabridged testimony is in the video itself.
This is not an answer to anything — it is a foundation under something. Maria's story needs no correction; it needs only what it points to itself: the Scripture that carried every step. Here the testimony is laid beside the Word, joint by joint — for every turn of this story, from the hospital night to Berlin, was written down centuries before it happened.
The home and the foundation
She grew up with parents who believed in Jesus — "so I got some of the basics in quite early," she says. No drama, just a foundation lying there, waiting to be needed. Paul described exactly that inheritance in Timothy:
Second Timothy 3:15, WEBFrom infancy, you have known the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus.
The night her body failed
Just before she turned eleven, she woke up one day and felt something was wrong. The fever would not lift; it only grew worse. Finally the doctors found three large tumors on her liver. They could not operate. Samples were sent as far as the Karolinska Institute — no one had an answer. Her parents were told to prepare for the worst. And one evening, alone in the hospital, she felt her body struggling to keep going: breathing heavy, a heart that nearly stopped and then pounded, the edges of her vision going dark. She thought: if I close my eyes now, I will probably die. The psalmist has stood in exactly that place:
Psalms 73:26, WEBMy flesh and my heart fails, But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
The morning with heaven in the room
But the next morning she woke. The room was different — an atmosphere she had never felt there before. First she thought she must have arrived in heaven; but she still had pain, and no one is sick in heaven. Then the eleven-year-old drew a conclusion theologians could envy: "If I have not come to heaven, then something from heaven must have come here." The psalmist knew what — and who — encamps around the small:
Psalms 34:7, WEBThe angel of Yahweh encamps round about those who fear him, And delivers them.
The door
And in the same moment she got an impulse: turn on the TV. She had not done that once during the whole stay. A Christian children's program was on, and they were saying that Jesus wants to help us — but he does not force his way in; we must let him all the way in. She understood she had a choice to make:
I need to be rescued by Jesus, and he does not force his way in. Then I must let him all the way in. And that is what I did.— Maria Lavelle, Et nytt liv med Jesus
The children's program was quoting — without her knowing it — a sentence Jesus himself spoke to a church that had shut him out:
Revelation 3:20, WEBBehold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with me.
Embraced
What happened when she opened, she describes like this:
In that moment it was exactly as if I was embraced by the most real, intense, safe love I had ever experienced.— Maria Lavelle, Et nytt liv med Jesus
And then she says something that ought to be impossible for a dying eleven-year-old: if she did not survive, she would only get more of this fellowship and this safety with Jesus Christ. So she did not need to be afraid of anything. Paul spent a lifetime learning that sentence:
Philippians 1:21, WEBFor to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
The Bible and the ballpoint pen
No one on the program had said she must start reading the Bible. The hunger came by itself. She called her father and stammered out that she apparently needed a Bible; the hospital unhooked her from the lines and gave her one hour's leave, and they drove out and bought one. For the next weeks she sat alone in her room with a multi-colored ballpoint pen, underlining — while the test results worsened, the tumors grew and the blood values climbed. And there, in Isaiah 53, the eleven-year-old found for herself the verse she needed:
Isaiah 53:5, WEBBut he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought our peace was on him; and by his wounds we are healed.
The grandmother who would not give up
The healing had not come yet. But at home her grandmother prayed and prayed and prayed — and when the burden grew too heavy to carry alone, she began praying that others would join her. Jesus told a whole parable just to say that this is exactly how it is done:
Luke 18:1, WEBHe also spoke a parable to them that they must always pray, and not give up,
Luke 18:7, WEBWon't God avenge his chosen ones, who are crying out to him day and night, and yet he exercises patience with them?
The Sunday
The grandmother sent word to the congregation: now we must pray. And that Sunday something happened that did not usually happen. A presence of God came over the assembly; people were on their knees crying out to Jesus that the girl in the hospital must live and not die. Someone called a sister in America — and without knowing anything about the Sunday meeting, exactly the same thing happened there: a supernatural presence, strangers on their knees for a girl from Haugesund none of them had met. Maria sums it up with the expertise of her old profession:
As a former film director I know how difficult it is to direct a large crowd to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. So here it is clear that it was the best director of them all who had laid that task on them.— Maria Lavelle, Et nytt liv med Jesus
This is what it looked like when the church prayed for one person in the book of Acts — and Jesus himself explained why the presence comes when they gather:
Acts 12:5, WEBPeter therefore was kept in the prison, but constant prayer was made by the assembly to God for him.
Matthew 18:20, WEBFor where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.
From Friday to Sunday
Friday's tests were the worst ever. Then came Monday's ultrasound: a strange facial expression, whispering colleagues, one who leaves the room. Her father raises his voice and asks what has happened. The answer: "They are gone." Three tumors, vanished between a Friday and a Sunday — the Sunday two congregations on either side of the Atlantic were on their knees. The blood values nearly normal. The surgical procedure found only scar tissue: something had been there, and it was there no longer. And the chief physician who had once told her parents to prepare for the worst now sat with tears in his eyes and said:
Maria, we have no reason to keep you here at the hospital any longer. You have become well.— The chief physician, retold by Maria, Et nytt liv med Jesus
The psalmist wrote the discharge note three thousand years earlier:
Psalms 107:20, WEBHe sends his word, and heals them, And delivers them from their graves.
And there is one more girl in this story — in the Gospel of Mark. She was twelve. The crowd had been told to weep, for there was nothing more to be done. Jesus thought otherwise:
Mark 5:41-42, WEBTaking the child by the hand, he said to her, "Talitha cumi;" which means, being interpreted, "Girl, I tell you, get up." Immediately the girl rose up, and walked, for she was twelve years old. They were amazed with great amazement.
The door she let close
The years passed, and doors opened into film and media — all the way to Hollywood. But when the Jesus-plan and the career-plan pointed in different directions, she let that door stay closed. She says it plainly; Paul said it in the language of accounting:
Philippians 3:7-8, WEBHowever, what things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ. Yes most assuredly, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them nothing but refuse, that I may gain Christ
Berlin
Berlin was supposed to be the smart career move — Europe's film capital. "But it turned out God had entirely other plans there." She was led to people trapped in darkness — among them a friend from her student years, whose apartment was full of occult objects: someone truly seeking the truth who had found everything else along the way. Maria got to tell her what she herself had learned in the hospital room: that there is a rescue, and the rescuer's name is Jesus — but we must let him in. The friend gave him her whole life there and then. And later that evening, over the dinner menu, Maria looked up into "eyes that simply radiated love and peace." The commission she was standing in without knowing it, Paul received in plain words:
Acts 26:17-18, WEBdelivering you from the people, and from the Gentiles, to whom I send you, to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive remission of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in me.'
And the transformation she saw across the menu has its own verse:
When Jesus is let in, it changes the whole person from the inside out.— Maria Lavelle, Et nytt liv med Jesus
Second Corinthians 5:17, WEBTherefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.
The call
Then comes her call, to you who are watching — and notice that she herself says she is only repeating what is written:
Jesus has made it so simple: if we make that decision and then confess it with our mouth, as it says in the Bible, then we shall be saved.— Maria Lavelle, Et nytt liv med Jesus
It is the letter to the Romans, almost verbatim:
Romans 10:9-10, WEBthat if you will confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart, one believes unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
"Then we do not need a whole heap of religion and rituals," she adds — only this: that the punishment Jesus took is allowed to count for you. It is the verse she underlined as an eleven-year-old, and it still carries: the punishment that brought our peace was on him. And then she draws two lanes and asks you to put on the turn signal. Jesus drew the same map:
Matthew 7:13-14, WEB"Enter in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter in by it. How narrow is the gate, and restricted is the way that leads to life! Few are those who find it.
The goal
The reason she sits on that sofa telling this at all, she says at the end, is to see every single one again in heaven. That is not a dream she invented. It is an appointment with an address:
John 14:2-3, WEBIn my Father's house are many mansions. If it weren't so, I would have told you. I am going to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will receive you to myself; that where I am, you may be there also.
If you have just made the choice she invited you to, the next step is already written — it stands in the same sentence as faith: believe, and be baptized. I have written a book on what it means to be born again, and one that walks through every baptism in the New Testament: Født På Ny — in Norwegian · Believe and Be Baptized. Come and see.
