Stormie Omartian

Stormie Omartian is known worldwide for her books about prayer and for her conference speaking. She has inspired millions of people through her writing and speaking but many don't know that in the seventies and early eighties, this remarkable woman was also involved in making music with her husband Michael Omartian.

I have to confess that I have wanted to interview her for a very long time so in April during a trip to Nashville, where she lives, we were able to meet up. However the conversation that you're about to read very nearly didn't happen! Arriving at my hotel, Stormie has the wrong room number for my suite and while I'm upstairs waiting for her arrival, she is downstairs trying to puzzle things out.

The woman I meet isn't at all like I imagined. My album sleeves from the seventies have her captured in young womanhood with long dark hair. But Stormie (like myself it has to be observed) is now blonde but it's immediately apparent that the years have been kind to her. We sit to talk and she kindly presents me with a bag of her books. It is immediately clear why Stormie has become so popular. Her down to earth conversation and candid sharing are compelling and over the next hour we talk about her experiences, her ministry and a remarkable life.

Mike: I was thinking earlier on about how to describe you because you've been a singer but I guess now you're an author and a conference speaker. Is that the best way of describing it?

Stormie: Yes absolutely, that is the best way. I'm first a writer then a speaker the two go together; and you have to be able to do both really. If you're a speaker you really need to write about what you're speaking; if you're a writer then you need to go out and speak about what you're writing about. You can't have one without the other.

Mike: So let's go back a bit then. I want to find out a bit about you. I don't really know that much about your own story. Whereabouts were you raised?

Stormie: I was raised in Nebraska and I was isolated on a ranch there and my Mother was mentally ill, and my Dad was gone a lot trying to work this ranch, which was a lot of work. Actually I was born in Nebraska, raised just over the border in Wyoming. The ranch was just the other side of the Nebraska/Wyoming line. So I spent much of my early childhood locked in a closet. That's where my mentally ill mother was able to deal with me. She was very verbally abusive and physically abusive with the closet so I was locked in the closet much of my early childhood. That was what did the most damage to me. So I grew up always isolated until I was nine years old and we moved to California. Then I wasn't isolated any more. In that time I only had one friend in the first nine years and that was just the person who knew my name at school. No one ever came to my house and I never went to theirs or anything like that. In California I wasn't isolated anymore, but my mother just got progressively worse and I grew up with such feelings of anxiety and fear and depression, hopelessness; futility, all those kinds of feelings.

So as a result of that early childhood I grew up with a lot of fear and anxiety and depression and hopelessness and futility and anger and all those kinds of negative emotions. By the time I was grown up in my late teens and early twenties I was still locked in a closet emotionally, even though I wasn't physically. I wasn't locked in a closet after we moved to California, in fact I wasn't locked in a closet after I was about seven years old. And so having those horrible feelings, I got into all kinds of things trying to get rid of the pain. I tried drugs and alcohol and eastern religions and occult practises and things like that. I had unhealthy relationships, just anything that I thought would give me some relief from the pain I felt and from the hopelessness I felt, and the futility I felt about my life. And everything I did just led closer to death. I got deeper and deeper in a pit. There would be a temporary relief and then I would just be deeper into depression and deeper into anxiety. I finally ended up feeling suicidal. I didn't want to live with the pain anymore and I didn't know what else to do. I'd tried everything. Nothing worked at all. I'd given up and I was trying to collect enough sleeping pills to take to really do the job. I didn't have a prescription for them so I had to get them from other people.

Mike: So what happened?

Stormie: A friend came to visit me during the week I was collecting those pills. I'd been working with her on television in Hollywood as a singer, a dancer, an actress a comedy skit things. One of the singers I was working with came and said I can see you're not doing well. She could tell I was really depressed and she knew me for a long time. She said why don't you come with me and meet my pastor? And I didn't want to go! I wasn't interested in it. She'd talked about her faith before and I wasn't interested in that. My Mother talked about things like that and I didn't want anything to do with it. And she said, well what have you got to lose. With a quick look at my life I could see that I had nothing at that point to lose. And so I thought, OK I'll just do it for her.

And I went to meet her pastor. He met us for lunch at a popular restaurant in the valley on the other side of Hollywood and he talked to me about Jesus. He talked to me about how God had a purpose for my life and that I had a destiny, that if I received the Lord, He would send His Holy Spirit to live inside of me and change me from the inside out. And I could begin to move into what God had for me; which was a great purpose. I never heard anything like that before. That really intrigued me completely.

So he gave me three books to read, and he said go home and read these books and come back and tell me what you think of them. One was about the power of evil, which was really perfect for me because I had been studying occult practices that denied that there was any evil. They say that the only evil that exists is in your mind and if you can control your mind then you can control the evil that comes into you life. Which is really hogwash. The second book was on the power of the Holy Spirit, which was really amazing because I didn't even know anything about the Holy Spirit let alone that He had power. So that was really amazing too. The third book was the gospel of John in book form. So I went home and read those three back to back and I knew when I was reading them, that I was reading the truth. It was amazing. People were praying for me; I figured that out later. But they had to be praying me to be able to receive all that information and to know it was the truth. So I went back the following week; he asked me what I thought of the books. And I said that I know that they are truth. And it was in his office that I received the Lord. I became born again and received the Lord and just acknowledged that Jesus was the son of God, that He died and was resurrected, and I was receiving His life into my heart. I knew that the Holy Spirit was going to be dwelling in me and that was a powerful thing. So that was my beginning of my walk with the Lord.

Mike: I can imagine though that with the kind of baggage that you had in terms of the abuse as a child, that it would take quite a while as an adult for those things to be fully reconciled. I'm guessing it didn't all disappear as soon as you became a Christian?

Stormie: That is exactly right Mike. I didn't expect it to. In fact I never expected it to disappear. I just thought it was me. You know this is just the way I am - depressed, sad, miserable, lonely, all of these things. I was just hoping to find some kind of purpose and I could throw myself into that. And so I was really surprised when in that first year, I met my husband. I'd met him before in a record session, but I met him again in that church and we got married about a year later. So here I am, I finally have the Lord and I have a husband who loves me and I have financial security for the first time. I forgot to tell you that I was raised extremely poor, we were extremely poor; I mean there were times when I went to bed without any food. We didn't have food in the house. It's really frightening as a child to go to bed hungry. And then also to have rats running across my bed at night. My bed was low to the ground and rats would run across it. It's horribly frightening. So here I had financial security, which was a big deal to me. So I thought, if I have all these things why do I still have the depression. Why do I still have the anxiety and the depression really bad? When I was depressed and anxious, it was like paralysing. I'd have to just go to bed for week to try and work through it. And so my husband realised that I still had that. I had told him about it before. But I thought that getting married would solve it all but it didn't. I was so surprised that it was still there. And so he said, go to the church office because there are counsellors there who understand the word of God, understand the power of prayer and how to counsel people. So I did and spoke to one of the pastor's wives, who was especially gifted in understanding the power of God and the power of Gods word and the power of prayer. And I told her my whole story, which was amazing because I had never really told anyone my whole story ever, except for my husband. And she said go home and we'll fast for three days, She was going to fast with me which I thought was pretty amazing. And I did. She said in that time make a list of all the sins God brings to mind. Ask God to show you all the sins that need to be confessed. She said come back with this list after we do the fast. So I did that. I fasted for three days, which is really hard to do when you've gone to bed hungry as a kid. It's like it's not your first choice. I came back, and she had another pastor's wife come in and they prayed for me. I was so afraid that she was going to read my list of the sins and go, oh get her out of here. But she didn't. She didn't want to read it. She just said lift these sins up to the Lord and confess them altogether. Then she had me renounce my occult practices. I'd been in the occult but I had stopped practising. But had never really gone before the Lord and just renounced those and cut that tie. So she had me do that. Then she had me confess my unforgiveness toward my mother, and ask God to help me forgive her completely. And when I did those three things it was amazing, the Lord really spoke to me through her, through the counsellor, and said that I had been locked in a closet all my life, first physically then emotionally, but that Jesus had the keys. And He said I have those keys and I am giving those keys to you. And He said you can unlock this door and come out. And when she prayed for me to be set free from the depression and the anxiety, I just felt it all lift. It was amazing, the physical manifestation of the lifting of that. It was like a heavy wet dark blanket on me, and it just lifted off. The depression was gone and the anxiety was gone, and I felt great. I thought it would probably come back in the morning but I could just come back and be prayed for again. And surprise of surprises, it didn't come back at all. Next morning it was still gone. And the next and the next. And I never had those kind of depressions again. And that's when I realised the power of prayer.