Gaynor was in her 30s when the Lord drew her back to Himself. At that time, she was riding high on I Will Survive, her disco hit in the days of vinyl records. The song was originally produced as a B-side recording designed to take a back seat. But it soared.
“When I read the lyrics, I was thinking about the fact that I’d just had surgery on my spine and I was actually standing there recording in a back brace and hoping that I would survive the surgery,” she told Baptist Press. “I was thinking about the fact that my mother had only passed away a few years prior, and I was hoping to survive all of that, and survive not only her death, but survive keeping intact her memory and the things that she taught me about life. Those were the things that the song was about to me, at that point.”
Her mother Quinnie Mae Proctor had been Gaynor’s compass when the performer was baptized as a teenager at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Newark. But Gaynor had lost her way when God drew her back to Himself at the house party she hosted in 1984.
“That’s when I really changed my life, and about a year later I found a baptismal certificate that I had completely forgotten about. When I found it, all of these memories came rushing back, about how when I was 16 years old, I’d told my mother I wanted to be baptized, I wanted to give my life to the Lord.
“And I did that. I was baptized and then I forgot about it,” Gaynor said. Her mother died in 1970.
“She was my rock. I lost my moral compass and completely forgot about the Lord, but praise God, He never forgot about me,” Gaynor said. “And I believe that at that at that party, whatever might have gone on, He just said to the enemy, ‘Not this one. This one’s mine.’”
This article originally appeared at Baptist Press.
