She’s beautiful, she’s wildly successful, she’s a motivational speaker and she has an amazing story to tell. That’s how Dr Stella Potgieter introduced the guest speaker at Melville Methodist Church’s Spring Hat Tea on 30 August.
Mrs South Africa 2014 finalist Lorna Greyling was there to tell her intriguing life story, and it had a visible impact on the tea-attendees.
“I wasn’t always sorted out, glamorous, smiling and friendly,” Greyling started.
“About 10 years ago, I was a severely depressed woman. When you grow up as a little girl you have an idea of how life should be – the prince and the princess marry each other and live happily ever after. At some stage, the picture of how my life was supposed to be didn’t look like I had imagined it. My baby daughter was always crying, I hadn’t slept for practically a year, and my husband Nick was working in Africa and was rarely home. I was in a terrible downward spiral, I got involved with the wrong friends, with drugs.”
Greyling said it reached a point where she couldn’t take it anymore, where she couldn’t find happiness.
“I was sitting in my room one day with a gun against my head, in this pit of depression. And as I pulled the trigger, I heard a trigger, I heard a voice. The voice said to me, ‘Ask me’. I just knew God was there.”
Greyling said she had a vision of Jesus, and in that moment her depression evaporated, and she put the gun down. It was then time to start walking the road to recovery and self-acceptance.
And she did it. But life was not finished testing Lorna and her family.
“You know, life has that funny way of happening,” she said.
“I don’t believe that God punishes one, I just believe that we live in a sinful world and sometimes bad things happen. Four years ago, my husband Nick was kidnapped in Nigeria. He was held hostage, severely beaten, and many of those who were kidnapped alongside him were killed. You’re seeing a miracle before you, Nick was delivered back to me, safe and sound.”
Greyling tells the full story of her husband’s kidnapping in her new book, Kidnapped.
Recently, Greyling entered the Mrs South Africa pageant.
“A friend told me to enter and at first I thought, Mrs South Africa, what is that?” she laughed.
“But people kept crossing my path telling me to enter, telling me that they felt I should participate.”
She finally gave in and entered the competition.
“The other finalists were all so beautiful and young-looking, but I kept telling myself I was in the contest for a purpose, that I was going to win this,” she said.
“I didn’t. I lost, I came dead-last. But you know what, people identify so much more with someone who lost than they identify with someone high above them who won. Finally, things started to make sense, and I understood why I had to have entered that pageant. I could empower women and people by showing them that those who had lost could still stand proud. I’ve reached more people this way than I could have ever reached if I was Mrs South Africa.”
And Greyling certainly reached the beautifully behatted congregations gathered in the Melville Methodist Church to listen to her.
