I chatted with Bonita this morning and we were sharing about my health. I may need to just take the year off to recuperate. I promise her that I will see a doctor and go for my blood test next week before I decide if I need to leave my job for a while to fully rest.
Then she updated me about news of Pastor Steve Elliot. He was the pastor of the church I attended in Calgary while I was studying there. His wife was equally dynamic and the two of them are just so human. Pastor Steve wears a copper bangle on his left wrist and he has a temper which he constantly kept under control. He told us as a congregation that he was not the best husband until he got to know the Lord. He married a pastor's daughter who turned her back on the God she grew up with. But both turned back to God and pastor Steve went to bible school to become a pastor. Lives can turn around when we fully surrender to God. I feel so good remembering these people.
Bonita told me that Pastor Steve's son is now a missionary in Indonesia. And I searched him out on google and got into his blog. Then I search of Ben's sister and found her. Rachel is married to a pastor Curtis. Both have a dynamic voice and they are now recording artists. Both are serving in North Carolina. She became a surrogate mother for her finally found oldest brother Mark (Steve and Marilyn gave him up for adoption after Mark was born because they were young and unwed). She gave her brother and sister-in-law a set of twins. Such great Love! She was sharing at the First Alliance church in Kentucky (where Pastor Steve now pastor) and she was sharing about knowing Jesus.
Marilyn shared that God does not want us to be broken. He wants us to have an abundant life. We need healing and bring back what we have lost so that our souls be whole. I will take the baby steps to find those broken pieces and reclaim my life. I want to be able to shine for Him and live for Him. Unless I do that, I am living in vain.
I read the blog entries and they encouraged me.
Pastor Steve's church at Lexington: http://www.faclex.com/mos/Contact_Us/task,view/contact_id,1/
Curtis Mulder's blog: http://harmdizzle.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-04-26T18%3A58%3A00-04%3A00&max-results=7
And I will end this entry with a section from Curtis' blog:
".... In Frederick Buechners book, A Room Called Remember he paints a compelling argument for how our brokenness here is actually evidence of wholeness. One would not exist without the other. Sorrow is always a part of joy's testimony.
"Our very brokenness here speaks of wholeness and holiness. The emptiness we carry around inside us through the dust whispers like a seashell of the great sea that it belongs to and that belongs to it." … "There is deliverance … and Christians are people who through such now-and-then, here-and-there visions as they've had, through Christ, have been delivered just enough to know that there's more where that came from, and whose experience of the little deliverance that has already happened inside themselves and whose faith in the deliverance still to happen is what sees them through the night." [Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember]
