Making the Outside Match What’s Inside

Sermon for Sunday, June 14, 2015
Third Sunday after Pentecost
I Samuel 15:34 -16:13

“The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance,
but the Lord looks on the heart.”

In 1976, 19 year-old Susan Lefevre was arrested in suburban Michigan for doing heroin.  She didn’t sell.  She had no previous convictions.  “I thought I was experimenting.  I was trying things out,” she said, “what… everybody was doing.”  Her attorney recommended that she plead “guilty” to hopefully receive only probation.  Instead, the judge sentenced her to ten to twenty years in prison!  After 14 months in prison and feeling suicidal, Susan decided to escape.  Susan scaled a 20-foot fence, dashed through the woods and met her grandfather, who was waiting in his Oldsmobile Cutlass.  Her grandparents gave her several hundred dollars in cash and sent her on a bus out west, where somewhere west of the Rockies she became Marie.  She eventually met the man who became her husband and with whom she had three children.  Her name was now Marie Walsh, and she lived in beautiful home in a cul-de-sac in Southern California.  But in 2008 – twenty two years later – a detective posing as a lawn-care worker asked her to come outside, wondering if, in taking care of the neighbor’s trees, he had mistakenly cut branches from one of hers.  “Are you Susan Lefevre?” he asked.  She admitted that she was, was arrested and taken back to Michigan to prison, where after 13 months the parole board released her.

Susan, and her husband and three now-grown children, were interviewed on Oprah about what her double life was like.  She kept in touch with her parents.  She was frank with her husband about drugs in her past.  But she never let herself get comfortable, and she never anybody the whole story.  “So I had these two worlds,” she said.  “This terrible, terrible, destructive world, corrupting world of this prison and then this idyllic world,” she says. “When [the detective] showed me these pictures and said, ‘Susan LeFevre,’ it was like I knew that finally they had collided.”