United States of America
My story begins with the time when I faced hopelessness, true hopelessness, for the first time in my life.
I lost a son when I was 58 years old. I did not question God because I believe in His sovereignty. But there were his children to consider. Their mother was very unstable. I was so scared for them.
Erin, my son, wasn’t with their mother, and the relationship was pretty tumultuous. I had invited him to move back home with his dad and I, to get on his feet. He desperately wanted to get custody of the children. Well, after nine months of living in Savannah, he was hit by a car. His children were adopted by their mother‘s first cousin.
I thought we had a good relationship, and I went to visit once. All was well for a few months, and then the new mom stopped speaking to me and would not let the girls speak to me anymore. I lost it. All I ever wanted to be was a mom and grandmother. I questioned God,” Why am I here? I have no purpose. No legacy.” Yes, I had other two other sons and other grandchildren, but I’ve been so invested in the girls.
My other grandchildren were well and that’s another story. I ended up in an inpatient mental hospital and 12 weeks of outpatient services. Even with the therapy, I was sad. I was lost for about two years. I retired early, hoping to heal.
There is a series of God leading me to new places, and I am now free indeed. I live in His light. No more darkness. I have a new job, I so enjoy. I’m a little tired, but I love it. I love that at age 65, I found work that I feel gives me purpose.
Amanda W.
United States of America
God has brought me through a storm. He has shown me His glory in so many ways. After 20 years of marriage, two beautiful boys, and what felt like it was a great life, I was faced with the infidelity of my husband.
My life was turned upside down. The carpet was pulled out from under me. There was no longer any sense or direction or purpose. At times I thought it didn’t even matter if I lived or died. I was hopeless. Lost.
I was blessed to be attending a church at that time where many were ready and willing to come alongside me and walk with me through the storm. They spoke about how God was working in my life and how He was going to get me through this. They told me my life would be glorious again. They were so sure of this that I had to believe them!
I came to understand they had the joy of the Lord. Gradually, as I prayed, and cried out to the Lord, I started to see and experience that Joy. Small things at first, flowers started to be beautiful again.
I was seeking Him and was showing me His goodness. He constantly put people in my path that uplifted me and helped move forward and heal.
Slowly, what was in the dark came into the light. The log was removed from my eye, and I felt transformed.
A part of my journey and healing occurred in my Divorce Care community. Now, and probably as long as I’m alive on this earth, I am able to pay forward with facilitating Divorce Care in my current church. This allows me to come alongside others in their storms, witness to others about God‘s goodness, cry with them, and give them hope that they too will have a better life ahead. God is working.
Eva Sherman
United States of America
Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful in his time.”
This scripture has come true for me. I worked with my husband as an assistant pastor for 22 years. For five of those years I carried the ministry as he battled cancer, at his end of his life on earth. He was healed twice in this journey and this third hit was the hardest. Caring for him and the church was something that seemed overwhelming and impossible. Daily, I assigned the angels to minister to my mate and to myself. I cried out for someone to reach out to you as we had lived in Savannah for two decades, ministering and loving people.
May 17, 2022, my husband, Apostle Greg Van Gorp, received his reward to heaven. The battle was so painful that I was rejoicing that he was finally pain-free.
Three years later, as I was continually pastoring and serving my church, God brought me a man that loves working for the church. He has the gift of ministry of helps. We met doing an outreach for a worldwide evangelist Tommie Zito, winning souls at Forsyth Park.
This marriage has been so beautiful, peaceful and loving. Something I’ve never experienced before. I am amazed at the joy that has filled me as together we do outreach. I never thought I could, or would love another man. I had been married 35 years and have four children with three grandchildren upon Greg‘s death. Could I really love again? Could I enjoy marriage to another?
God calmed my fears with this statement, “Donna, when you look at a rose, do you concentrate on the thorns that could hurt you, or the smell and beauty of the rose?” I said,” Lord, I look at the beauty”. “Do likewise”, He said.
Father God caused me to see that fear had no place in my future. I am to trust in the beauty God had set before me. He gave me new beginnings. This was huge to me.
I am so thankful for the Spirit of God who teaches us so gently.
Donna M Van Gorp, Chervenak
United States of America
I don’t think I have ever truly known absolute forgiveness. My head has known it, and a corner of my heart has known it. But full forgiveness?
Only recently, I have truly experienced this – complete forgiveness.
With this comes respect for differences, acceptance of who the other person is, and an overwhelming, pure love. God’s kind of love.
During my 27 years with Craig (my ex, who was laid to rest 1 year ago), we deeply hurt each other, and we ended our 25-year marriage many years ago. In time, we could say we forgave one another, yet never sat around the same tables. We had minimal connection and only concerning our challenged daughter, Candice.
I truly thought I had forgiven, as there have been no ugly feelings in my heart for many years now. I only wished him well, and I felt the same from him.
Yet, at his death, being fully excluded from it in his last days and burial, I had to accept from a distance that he was gone. As I sat in the car at the hospital, waiting for my girls as they visited him those final days of his life, I felt anger rise, and had to sit with God amongst my many questions. But those are lessons learned for another day.
Processing the grief and loss these months since January, the Holy Spirit this past month has gently tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “There are still a few roots of unforgiveness in your heart.”
As we sat together, digging, listening, and conversing, I saw it. Saw it in my humor, “Well now, Craigy, you wouldn’t sit at a meal table with our girls and me, well – in heaven I’ll just build my house right next to yours!” Really – humor? Or grief with a touch of latent anger? The more I pondered and let the Holy Spirit unveil my deepest roots, it all surfaced.
“Lord, heal me. I forgive him. Forgive me for harboring, judging his actions, how we did life differently.”
As the raw honesty rolled down my cheeks, room was made for the healing salve from Jesus who made healing possible. We cried together as He showed me how He loved us both as we each did life differently from one another. It was all good with Him. We loved and valued different things, but our hearts were for Him.
A warmth flooded my soul. A weight I didn’t know I carried fled from my being. A lightness enveloped me. AND I felt this warmth of pure love fill Craig’s space in my heart. I saw myself running to him in heaven, embracing him. Now I know the lightness of forgiveness. The purity of it.
No judgement. Acceptance of the other person. Just as they are. Only wanting good for them. No jokes needed. No anger, irritation.
Quiet. Peace. Love.
The gift of God’s Grace for each of us, waiting for us to allow Him to reveal the heart, to release, to fully forgive.
Then we move forward in strength, receiving joy, with thanks for each day of life.
True freedom lies in absolute forgiveness.
Emra
United States of America
Meant to Be
I lost count of the pregnancy tests when the count exceeded my age… that was around the time that the anxious anticipation which buoyed my first years of hoping turned into desperation and masochism. I knew the outcome, but a plastic stick offered irrefutable evidence.
For seven years, we tried to start a family. After two years of marriage, my husband and I decided to pursue adoption through foster care. As we started the paperwork, Glenn wrote that “fostering felt like a natural extension of our work as educators.” I loved that explanation, and I clung to it like a lifeline until the reality of our circumstance broke it. We fostered our son with the intention of adoption for nine months before he was removed and eventually returned to his biological parents. I wish I had prepared myself for the grief that is inextricably tangled within the foster care system and within adoption itself.
It took time, but we eventually re-routed. Instead of adoption, I submitted my body to the fluorescent lights, prescription hormones, and a thousand other IVF indignities sheathed by an ill-fitting hospital gown. It is frightening how quickly indecencies are normalized when longing becomes desperation… Yet, I paid for it over and over again. Thousands of dollars paid to defile what I once held as sacred. Any romanticized notions of life’s conception were shed with the undergarments that I neatly folded and hid beneath my purse. Six failed mock trials, and I still could not hold my dreams.
When the fifth mock cycle failed because of a precipitous drop in my iron levels, I started to cave inward. I lost trust in my body, and I eventually lost trust in my mind and my God.
We spent our spring break that year exploring the coastline between Savannah and Myrtle Beach, and we happened to stop in Beaufort one afternoon. As we walked along the waterfront, I started to cry. I told Glenn that it felt like we had stumbled upon yet another “not right now”– a beautiful place for a potential someday that would never come. Glenn encouraged me to look into teaching jobs.
Two weeks later, I received a job offer at a coveted school in Beaufort. The day after receiving the offer, I had an appointment with my fertility specialist. When the nurse retrieved me from the waiting room, she congratulated me on my pregnancy, and told me that the doctor would be with me momentarily for the ultrasound. I was confused. The doctors had recommended embryo adoption, and we had scheduled and rescheduled the embryo transfer multiple times because of the pandemic, my anemia, getting Covid, and failed mock cycles. I politely tried correcting the nurse who was adamant that she looked at my chart and the bloodwork indicated I was in fact pregnant.
After several awkward minutes of waiting, she came back and apologized profusely for looking at someone else’s chart– I was correct about the purpose for my visit… a blood draw before the prescription of daily hormone injections to replace the oral hormones I had been taking.
Driving home from the appointment, I made the call to accept the teaching position in Beaufort.
While the move from Virginia to South Carolina was abrupt, I was the one who invited this interruption to our plans, rather than being told by doctors or betrayed by my body. With the sale of our home in Virginia, we put aside the money necessary for private adoption. I busied myself for months with the move and then with the home study. The work provided a welcome distraction from my cavernous grief… until I ran out of tasks, and we were told that it could be two years before we were selected by a birth mom.
The precipice of hope crumbled beneath me. Vicious lies echoed as my mind sought to rationalize my grief, rather than feel it. God must know that I would inevitably fail as a mother. God must see something ugly in me. I must be unfit to parent a child. I must be unfit to be around children. The lies spiraled into crippling anxiety. I started having multiple panic attacks each day, and I struggled to leave the house. I took a leave of absence from work.
For nearly three months, I relied on the borrowed faith of my husband and the inherited faith from my parents, as they took turns combatting the lies with the truth of their love for me. After a ten-week leave from work, I was able to return to my classroom. God made himself evident in His provision of grace and understanding through people who barely knew me.
The worship leader at our church invited me to join her in singing praise, and I encountered the love of Christ in dozens of refrains and harmonies. God met with me over and over and over again, as I prayed and processed my grief and my unmet desire to be a mom.
As I started sharing my experience and the ongoing ache more openly, I could feel the prayers of others shifting the ground within and under me.
On a Thursday morning in June, my husband’s phone rang.
Seven days later, I held my daughter for the first time.
Suddenly the ache and grief were transformed by the beauty of the promise that this is what God intended– I was made to be Espy Grace’s mother, and she was always meant to be mine.
Austen
