SACRAMENTO BEE
TWIN CITIES CHRISTIAN

FROM THE SACRAMENTO BEE 1997

SINGER-STORYTELLER OFFERS COMFORT,
INSPIRATION TO OTHERS IN NEED
by Laura Jensen Walker

When Sally Klein O’Connor was 8 years old, a dog bit her in the face.

It took 100 stitches to sew her torn face back together. And when she returned to school, the kids all called her "scarface."

"A scarface is ugly," O Connor said.

But it was not the scar on her face that made her ugly—it was also the way she became, she said.

"I was ugly. I knew how to speak ugly, I knew how to dress ugly. I knew how to act ugly. It was a real safe place to be," she said.

It would be nearly 20 years before O’Connor—formerly a blues singer in Los Angeles nightclubs—left that "safe" place of ugliness and began to heal.

She credits God for her healing and now sings for him.

O’Connor, 40, brought her healing ministry—Improbable People Ministries—recently to Sacramento, where I was privileged to see her in concert at First Covenant Church.

A singer-songwriter-storyteller, O’Connor’s bluesy-folk style is reminiscent of that of Joan Baez and Harry Chapin, with an occasional whisper of Amy Grant tossed in.

O’Connor’s husband, Michael—a former Sacramentan who graduated from Foothill high School and used to do stand-up comedy at Laughs Unlimited—is a poet who writes the lyrics to the songs, while Sally writes the music.

The couple have two daughters, Dusty, 8, and Bonnie, 3, who often travel with them on the road.

O’Connor captivated the crowd with her powerful alto voice. She sang songs such as "I Was There" and "Bury Your Heart in Wounded Me."

"He was clearly out of focus, as I nursed a watered gin
I could tell he’d known some sorrow by the way he drank mine in
And he told me I was beautiful.
I’d been waitin’ for that line
I half-wished he would hit the road. And half-wished he were mine.
Hungry for something to fill me up, some kind of guarantee
If you’ve got a love that can set me free
Won’t you bury your heart in wounded me..."
"Some of us have broken hearts; others have other scars," O’Connor said, easily segueing from singing to storytelling to the crowd of more than 300.

"As I look in the Scripture, it says each of us are made in the image of the most high God... we’re made in the image of that beauty, but we settle for so much less," she said. "We settle for the lies."

O’Connor then recounted a trip she’d recently made to Remuda Ranch, a Christian facility for people with anorexia and bulimia in Wickenburg, Ariz., where she talked to women who weigh as little as 60 to 70 pounds. One woman is 5 feet 11 inches and weighs 78 pounds.

"What I appreciate most about that place is there’s no room for game playing," she said. "They know why they’re there... if they can’t get well in that place, they may never get well— they may not continue to live.

It is a lie that has stolen life from them. It is a lie that makes them see a distortion when they look in the mirror—that tells them that a calorie is something to be feared like a lion...

"Yet so often we settle for conforming ourselves to something less than that glorious truth (of being made in the image of God)," O’Connor added.

"We settle for lies. Like ‘stupid’ or ‘geek’ or ‘I wish you’d never been born’... she said. "We wrap our lives around these comments, these names, and conform ourselves to this lie. But Jesus calls us— called me different names, like ‘beloved’ and ‘daughter.’"

The singer-storyteller then segued into Scripture.

"The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor... to comfort all who mourn... to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes." (Isaiah 61:1-3)

"God does use the broken, the beaten and the hurting," she said.

That’s why O’Connor has trekked to Remuda every other month for the past two years.

As she launched into another song, she leaned her head back and shut her eyes in radiant abandonment to the music and to her God. As she did, her long dark hair fell away from her face, exposing the scar from that long-ago wound.

And many in the audience wept.

In a later interview, O’Connor said her scar has been "a touchstone for people to get in touch with those places where they were greatly wounded... and (it shows) how God can redeem those things. Nothing’s beyond his ability to touch and redeem."

Reprinted from Sacramento Bee, November 13, 1997

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FROM THE TWIN CITIES CHRISTIAN 1992

GOD CALLS
IMPROBABLE PEOPLE
FOR IMPOSSIBLE TASKS
Story and photo by Lis Trouten

Does God speak love? Ask Sally Klein O’Connor. Does God talk baseball? Ask her husband Michael.

Jesus got through to Sally with the writings of C.S. Lewis. He got through to Michael in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, when the New York Mets "rose up from the ashes" in the extra inning to hold back victory from the Red Sox.

Sally was raised in a traditional Jewish home and considered herself somewhere between agnostic and atheist. Michael, from an Irish Catholic family, thought that Jesus’ life of morality and love was a bit much for him—not that he was so wild, but a man has his limits.

Michael met Sally in a class for beginning songwriters, held in her home town of Los Angeles. He drove down from Sacramento for the class, the first on either of them had taken. Each was hoping to launch a successful show business career.

"We fell in love with each other’s songs," Sally says. After a while, they realized they loved more than just the songs.

While Sally’s love for Michael was blooming, Jesus was inviting her to another love. A Jewish friend who also happened to be a follower of Jesus gave her a copy of "The Great Divorce", by C.S. Lewis. Sally identified with one of the characters in particular. A religious leader, he loved to argue and debate theology. But when he had the opportunity to meet God face to face, he declined, preferring his arguments.

"I was a very argumentative person," Sally explains. "I loved to debate.... I wondered if I would go and see God, or if I would argue and debate about it and then go home."

Months later another Jewish friend (also a believer in Jesus the Messiah) gave her a copy of "Mere Christianity", another book by C.S. Lewis.

"Of course there was mention of Jesus says Sally, "and yet what I felt I was getting out of it was man who really believed in values and ethics. And he reasoned it out."

What arrested her thoughts was the idea that a reasonable person could honestly believe in a Creator God and, far beyond that, a God who was concerned with her as an individual.

She closed the book and opened her heart—a crack. "I prayed, but it wasn’t really like a prayer. It was more like a banshee yelling," says Sally, whose humor comes from honesty and pain

She directed her inner scream at God. "How can You be real! And even if You are real, how could you possibly care about one person!" It was an accusation in a question, a question hard to ask because of the chance that there would be no answer.

"God answered me that night," she says. Her scream was not audible, nor was His answer. But "I woke up in the middle of the night," says Sally. "I was alone. I felt a love that was so complete.... I knew I could not manufacture that in my subconscious. I knew that it was God—not that I wanted to know it. I guess you could say I was a searcher; I certainly hadn’t planned on the truth being Jesus.

"And then the moment was over. When I got up in the morning I had to admit—if I wanted to maintain any shred of decency—there was a God. "‘The soul knows it Maker.’"

Nine months later, on the holiest Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), Sally turned to Jesus. Her attitude at that point was "OK, I believe You. Show me I’m not making a mistake here."

"I wasn’t ‘on fire’ then," she observes, but true to His promise to fan a smoldering wick, Jesus nurtured her spirit in spite of her caution.

At almost the same time, Michael asked her to marry him.

"I said yes, I said no," said Sally. She told him, "You better check this (commitment to Christ) out: I think it’s more than a hobby."

He agreed to think about Christ, but warned her that he wouldn’t make a decision only to please her. "You realize we may never get married," he said.

Michael wasn’t about to commit himself to something where he couldn’t make the grade, he had decided, or something about which he would change his mind later.

Michael and Sally remained friends. Almost two years passed. Then God chose to use the 1986 World Series to get Michael’s attention.

"It was the sixth game... New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox," says Michael. "It was in the ninth inning. The Red Sox were winning three games to two, and all they had to do was get the last three out and they would have been World Champions."

The Mets scored in the bottom of the ninth, and the game was sent into extra innings.

"In the tenth inning, the Red Sox scored a couple runs, and it looks like they’re finally going to put it away," says Michael. "In the bottom of the tenth, the first two batters were out... and all of a sudden the Mets rise from the ashes.

"Mookie Wilson hits the easiest ground ball in the world. It went right through the legs of Bill Buckner, a very good fielder."

Watching the amazing turn of events, Michael says "I felt as if the TV screen was getting closer and closer, and this whole thing was unfolding for my benefit." When the Red Sox went down in defeat he was thinking about the deciding game—the seventh game. After that game was over, the victors would be celebrated and the ones who were defeated would fade away. "Nobody remembers the losers," he says.

God used that to say to him, "Michael you’re sitting on the fence. Which side are you on?"

"I wasn’t going to jump down on the side of darkness," said Michael His decision was made.

He wrote a song that night. "So what are you gonna do/when the Series comes down to/The Seventh Game?" He gave the song to Sally the next day, and didn’t have to explain what it meant. And they were married.

"But we never thought we’d be doing this!" Sally said in a phone call from Connecticut, where she and Michael were on their concert tour before arriving in the Twin Cities June 20.

Michael and Sally now travel the country as "Improbable People," singing about what’s happening in their lives and hearts. Their trademark song, "Improbable People for Impossible Tasks," was written as they were driving up the coast to Oregon. "Michael was going to write this really serious song," Sally explains, "but we were listening to Jimmy Buffett all the way up."

That’s calypso music. And so "Improbable People" is, well, Jewish reggae. (It’s hard to explain but fun to listen to. Sally’s clear, strong voice flits through the light-hearted music with its encouraging message:

"He wants improbable people for impossible tasks
Don’t assume He hasn’t gathered all the facts
Just trust that He’ll help you through all that He asks
He wants improbable people for impossible tasks"
Michael writes most of the lyrics for Improbable People, and Sally accompanies herself on the piano as she soars and whispers and calls and laughs through the music. And their 3-year-old daughter, Dusty, listens.

The little one is figuring things out. At the LAX Airport, as they were leaving for the tour, Dusty wasn’t considering schedules or luggage, but the attitude of characters in the Walt Disney movie "101 Dalmatians". And she suddenly announced, "Cruella deVille doesn’t know Jesus."

But Dusty’s parents know Jesus, and He has a task for them—inviting people to "Come Meet the Author of Life."

reprinted from THE TWIN CITIES CHRISTIAN JUNE 25, 1992

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