The Jack Miller Archive

I also admired Rose Marie as a highly effective public speaker, a person with a talent for dance and athletics. Her swimming was a work of artistic grace. When she was younger she was a much more casual person, but as she became fortyish she showed a remarkable capacity for building order wherever disorder threatened.

"In my mind Dad could do anything. He taught me to swim with skill in the Russian River north of San Francisco, and he built in the backyard of our home an attractive patio and a large and elaborate play house. Farther back in the same yard my father and mother planted a vegetable and flower garden. It was a microcosm of the German-American community, where I studied German, went to the opera, took ballet, learned to waltz and dance the polka and acted the role of a gracious, cultured hostess. It was a world of human goodness and careful morality from which the disorderly Nazi movement was ejected under Dad's
leadership."

Rose Marie’s Story: Surprised by
Grace, p. 14, 16

"Over time, the burdens overwhelmed her, and in desperation she tried to take her own life. One day when I was about thirteen years old, I was alone in the house with my mother when I smelled gas. I ran into the kitchen and saw her head in the oven. With fear gripping my heart, I turned off the gas, pulled her away from the stove, and opened all the windows. My voice shook with tears as I called my dad at his garage in San Francisco and told him to come home." from "NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH GOD" by Rose Marie Miller, Prologue

"From that day on, my dad and I never talked about what had happened, but it was our unspoken pact that we would do whatever we had to do to keep my mother in the home and keep her from taking her life. The fact that I couldn’t talk about what was happening locked up my emotions. I knew something was seriously wrong but did not know how to express my feelings." from "NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH GOD" by Rose Marie Miller
Prologue

"If you had told me years ago that I would be speaking about living in the freedom of the gospel, I would have laughed. I grew up in a family that knew very little about freedom and a lot about control. My parents were German immigrants, and the most significant aspect of our lives was the fact that my mother was a paranoid schizophrenic. She accused every visitor to our house of being a spy, so people stopped coming. When we went out to dinner, she accused other diners of spying on her. Our family became lonely and isolated, focused on keeping my mother from taking her own life. I believed in God during those years, but I wasn’t sure he was particularly concerned about our problems. I believed that Jesus came to die for sinners, but since I didn’t see myself as much of a sinner, that didn’t have much of an effect on me." from "NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH GOD" by Rose Marie Miller, Cahpter 1