On Sunday mornings when Barbara Lay cares for the preschoolers at Taylor Road Baptist Church in Montgomery and teaches them about Jesus, she thinks about what happened in her life 30 years ago: The church took care of her children when they needed it most.
At that time Lay regularly went to work with a black eye or busted lip, thinking that was normal.
“Everyone in my life, they fought — my uncles, my parents, my grandparents,” she remembered. “I thought it was normal for couples to fight physically.”
But one day Lay — a registered nurse — realized her patients were getting uncomfortable with her wounds. And around that same time she saw a sign with a number to call for help getting out of a violent situation.
“It made me realize it wasn’t normal,” Lay said. “So I called. My children were little then — my youngest wasn’t a year old yet.”
She told her husband they were going to the store and put the children in the car, leaving everything behind, including diapers and milk. She drove two hours to a shelter in Montgomery in the middle of a tropical storm.
“When we got there we were soaking wet, and my kids were looking so pitiful,” Lay recalled. “They said, ‘Mommy, are we going to stay here?’ and I said yes. And they said, ‘Have we left our daddy?’ And I said yes. And they said, ‘Yay!’”
That eased her mind a little about the decision she’d made, along with what was on TV that night at the shelter — O.J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco chase. Lay felt like it was confirmation she had gotten out just in time, before something worse happened.
Showing up
But she still felt uneasy and didn’t know what to do next. That’s when Taylor Road Baptist Church showed up.
“These wonderful people came and talked with me and my children,” Lay remembered. “They asked me about Mother’s Day Out and said, ‘We will watch your kids for you while you go out and try to get life started again.’
“While I did whatever I needed to do, like look for a job or housing, they would take the kids to the movies, the zoo or fishing.”
And while the children were there, they learned about Jesus too.
“They were ministering to them, because they would come back and tell me things they had said,” Lay related. “I thought, ‘My kids are reading the Bible; I’m going to open up the Bible and see what I see.’”
She opened it to Colossians 3:19 and read, “Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.” That was the last confirmation she needed that she had done the right thing.
So she and her children restarted their life in Montgomery.
Over the next few decades, she would occasionally pass the Taylor Road Baptist sign and think about the kindness they had shown her and her children when they were at their lowest.
One day in 2021, after being involved in other churches off and on over the years, Lay decided to “see if these people were as nice as they were then.”
‘Home’
She found they were. She prayed to receive Christ and was baptized at Taylor Road. And she remembers the oldest deacon in the church coming up to her, shaking her hand and saying, “Welcome home.”
“Nobody had ever said those words to me in my life,” Lay recalled. “Tears just started to well up and leap out of my eyes. I’ve been at home ever since.”
She started serving as a greeter right away, welcoming people into the church like she had been welcomed. And while she did, she kept looking at the children’s booth near the door and realized no one was ever standing at it.
So one day Lay dusted it off and started standing there herself, welcoming people to the children’s ministry.
Now, a year after her baptism, everyone knows Lay and her passion for Jesus and love for children — and the children’s ministry director asked if she would lead the preschool worship ministry.
Pastor Daniel Atkins called it “a miraculous story.”
“You don’t know when or how God is going to use the seeds that are planted now — sometimes it might take 30 years,” he said.
And Lay is constantly planting more seed. Her new husband, whom she married in 2019, also has come to faith in Jesus recently, and she shares her love of Christ with preschoolers every week.
“We call our preschool worship the Praise Garden, and I just want to spread the seed around,” Lay said, noting that on Sundays she acts out Bible stories and uses her own drawings to communicate with the kids.
“I want to let people know who God is.”
As for the church that’s now her home, she said, “Thirty years after they served me and my children, I get the blessing of serving their children. It’s amazing to me.”
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