During my recent mission trip to the Czech Republic, I kept a journal. The format I will use for these posts is to share (and edited version of) my journal entry, then provide commentary on it. Here is entry #2.
Sunday 8/11/13 – 8:45 AM – Last night we saw many of my old Czech friends. This place feels like home. It’s so different this time from the first time I came here two years ago. I spoke with someone from Strakonice (the next town over from Pisek, about 30 minutes away by car, about 25,000 people, and that does not have a church), and he told me how meaningful it is for the Czechs when people they know come back after their first trip because it validates that the experiences we’ve had are real. It shows we are really invested and it shows Christ’s love. This place does feel like home, but I’m not fully sure what to do with that.
Last night at the leadership meeting, we had worship and we sang Always. It was so powerful. I felt that we were proclaiming this ground for God (right in the shadow of the building that was used as the Communist headquarters). I strongly felt that Gary Gowler (a servant of Christ who came many, many times on mission to the Czech and passed away in April) was with us during worship. I saw this shaft of light coming down into the center of the worship circle, and that this light was powerfully being projected out through the windows and walls and into Pisek. We were proclaiming that God is here in this land, and that this is God’s land.
My thoughts on this entry – God really put Strakonice on my heart on this trip. For my friends in the US, imagine living in a town with 25,000 people, and having no active church in the town. It’s so easy for these folks to go through a week without seeing another Christian (unless they are intentional about seeing and knowing them), and how discouraging it would be to know so few Christians and to be living in what is essentially a completely secular society. Might the great commission (what believers call the command of Jesus that you need to talk about him to those you come into contact with) seem like a chore with no end in sight? How can you be expected to be stopping every person you meet to tell them about Jesus, because when so few people know him, you can’t even step out of your house without needing to tell everyone about him? Wouldn’t it be easy to start to wonder if you matter to God? How can you matter to God you feel like society and the culture beats you down because of your faith? Now imagine that God sends a team of 20+ people from another continent over to you, with the primary job of the mission to encourage you in your faith. Almost half of these folks have come here before and have answered God’s call to come here two, three, or even twelve times. God wanted to use us so that these believers would know that God loves them and has not forgotten them. So often, the Old Testament talks about “God remembering” his people, and I believe that us coming to the Czech is a tangible manifestation of God remembering his people in the Czech.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Czech journal entry #1
During my recent mission trip to the Czech Republic, I kept a journal. The format I will use for these posts is to share (and edited version of) my journal entry, then provide commentary on it. Here is entry #1
Thursday 8/8/13 – 7PM (Chicago time)
I am on the plane and we are ready to leave. I am quite excited. In the airport, I met Kayla. She is on our flight, and is going on mission by herself to Central Asia for 5 months. At the airport, she ran into someone she went to high school with from Kentucky. They are both on our flight to London. God is already making divine connections on this trip. Kayla is also nervous about flying by herself, and she now knows many more people on the plane. It looks like I am getting two seats to myself, so hopefully I will be able to get some sleep on the plane. I am really excited to see what God will do on this trip!
My thoughts on this entry – God was making divine connections already on this trip What a great way to start. I was very moved that Kayla, who had to be no more than 22, and just up and went to serve in central Asia by herself (the country she was serving in was classified for the safety of everyone) for 5 months in a culture that doesn’t treat women the way we do in the US. God made sure that I met her to fully prepare my heart for those in the Czech who so willingly serve for the sake of the gospel.
Prayer was a central focus of this trip. We prayed as a team before leaving the Christ Community Church, we did a prayer walk on our layover at Heathrow, we did a prayer walk in Pisek with selected scripture readings (putting on the armor of God at the Pisek castle/old fort wall, reading about our fullness in Christ in front of Jesus on the oldest bridge in Central Europe, and praying for Elim Church, our local ministry partner), we prayed for people after service at Elim Church the first Sunday we were there, and we did a prayer walk when we arrived at camp. Prayer was a central focus in our preparation for the trip and this modeled how prayer just kept springing up at camp.
Thursday 8/8/13 – 7PM (Chicago time)
I am on the plane and we are ready to leave. I am quite excited. In the airport, I met Kayla. She is on our flight, and is going on mission by herself to Central Asia for 5 months. At the airport, she ran into someone she went to high school with from Kentucky. They are both on our flight to London. God is already making divine connections on this trip. Kayla is also nervous about flying by herself, and she now knows many more people on the plane. It looks like I am getting two seats to myself, so hopefully I will be able to get some sleep on the plane. I am really excited to see what God will do on this trip!
My thoughts on this entry – God was making divine connections already on this trip What a great way to start. I was very moved that Kayla, who had to be no more than 22, and just up and went to serve in central Asia by herself (the country she was serving in was classified for the safety of everyone) for 5 months in a culture that doesn’t treat women the way we do in the US. God made sure that I met her to fully prepare my heart for those in the Czech who so willingly serve for the sake of the gospel.
Prayer was a central focus of this trip. We prayed as a team before leaving the Christ Community Church, we did a prayer walk on our layover at Heathrow, we did a prayer walk in Pisek with selected scripture readings (putting on the armor of God at the Pisek castle/old fort wall, reading about our fullness in Christ in front of Jesus on the oldest bridge in Central Europe, and praying for Elim Church, our local ministry partner), we prayed for people after service at Elim Church the first Sunday we were there, and we did a prayer walk when we arrived at camp. Prayer was a central focus in our preparation for the trip and this modeled how prayer just kept springing up at camp.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Does prayer improve your health?
There is mounting evidence that leading an active prayer life improves your health. Below are some links to articles that scientists are discovering.
From the Telegraph, one of the largest papers in the UK.
From the Washington Times
From the Huffington Post
From US News & World Report
There does seem to be a clear link between an active religious life and better health.
From the Telegraph, one of the largest papers in the UK.
From the Washington Times
From the Huffington Post
From US News & World Report
There does seem to be a clear link between an active religious life and better health.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
How does someone follow God - The long delayed “Part II”
Apologies for the long delay since my last post. I knew what this subject matter would entail, and as such, it took a long time to write it and get it right.
Feel free to read part 1 first (http://eclecticdavidcory.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-does-someone-follow-god-part-1.html)
So, in 2011 I went on a mission trip to the Czech Republic. I felt God inside of me during this time more intensely that at other times in my life. It was clear that he was working inside of me and directing my path while I was there.
One of the things that some of us had the opportunity to do was to submit stories relating to our walk in Christianity, and how we’ve seen God show up in life. Each night at camp, two stories were able to be told during “talk show”, a nightly event where we had entertainment mixed with some of the bigger issues of life. This is a critical venue in Czech, the second most atheistic country in the world so that they can hear dialog like this with God being a part of the narrative. The story I submitted was similar to the blog post I made here a couple of years ago (http://eclecticdavidcory.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent-journey.html).
So, during the first night of the talk show, Gary and Lorna Gowler were speaking about the incredible circumstances around their son’s medical history. That’s when I started to get a really strong feeling within me that was telling me that the story I submitted wasn’t the story I was supposed to be sharing – that I needed to share the story that Ginny and I had traveled. Now, if I shared this story, I’d really be giving a portion of myself. This would not be easy to retell, as it involved easily the most difficult portion of my life. And yet, I almost instantly knew that I had to tell this, as God was prodding me to do it.
Being at the camp, and with a non-satellite cell phone, I could not call my wife to make sure it was OK that I shared this journey of ours. The camp didn’t have Wi-Fi, so I couldn’t easily get a message to her either. And yet, I knew that I needed to stop asking why I shouldn’t tell this story, rather that I needed to trust God and go in the direction he was leading me. So, after talk show on that Tuesday night, I went back to my room and started writing out this new testimony. I think I got it to a place where I was happy with it by about 1:30 in the morning that night.
Now, people generally didn’t know if they were being selected to have their testimony selected until the day of the talk show, so I had no idea if this new testimony would be shared. The following morning, I found Joel, the pastor who ran the talk show, and let him know that the testimony I had written ahead of time I had just replaced as I felt God was leading me to want to tell something different, and I gave him a 30 second view of what it was about.
I was selected to give my testimony on Thursday night. The theme of the night was personal struggle. Linda from our team went first, and it was very apparent that God was with those in attendance and with her that night. Joel asked a general introductory question, and Linda went straight through telling her testimony, uninterrupted, for thirty minutes. It was a riveting and very inspiring talk. My testimony would be the last activity of the night. I had been hoping to have a video of this so that a link could be provided, but it appears that this isn’t in the cards. So, below I’m going to share (to the best of my memory) what I shared that night.
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It’s Sunday, February 7, 2010 and my wife and I sit down to do what we do every year on that day, watch the Super Bowl as a family. That game featured one of the most memorable plays in Super Bowl history, where the Saints opened the second half by recovering an onside kick. Unfortunately, my wife has no memory of that play or anything that happened at any point that day. The following day, I asked her the most important question I’ve ever asked her in my life.
The second most important question I’ve asked her in my life was “will you marry me” on February 10, 1998. We had been dating on again and off again for years, and had finally got our relationship to where it was time to take the next step. We had a church wedding in February 1999. The church portion didn’t matter to me at the time, as I was not a Christian. It was important to Ginny, so we were married in the church she grew up in. I had nothing against being married in a church, so long as we were able to have a party afterwards. That’s where I was at spiritually at the time.
This set a tone in our marriage for the first eight years. My wife, being a Christian, wanted to find a church home that she could worship at and be connected to God. Certainly, it would help our marriage if we did this together. And yet, I had absolutely no desire to do any of this. My “church” was the National Football League and I saw no need to attend a religious service. I could believe in an afterlife without needing to attend a religious service, so this is something that my wife would need to do on her own.
And that was the story of our marriage for the first eight years. There was one period where we attended Willow Creek for about a month together, but other than that, I never attended a church regularly in my life, and this was something that Ginny would need to do without the support of her husband. And yet, Ginny was always encouraging me to attend church with her. What kind of a husband has their wife asking them for 2 hours a week and isn’t willing to give that to her? The answer to that question is not an answer I am proud of.
After eight years of marriage, we moved back to Elgin, the city where my wife grew up, and were ready to start a family. In the fall of 2006, for the first time in my life, I started to attend a church regularly. We were expecting our first child in the winter, and I knew that I missed out on something by not being involved in church when I grew up. Again, what did it say about who I was that I was willing to do something for a daughter that I hadn’t met yet, that I was unwilling to do for my wife? Interestingly, in the back of my mind, I think that I thought that if I attended church and appeared to go through the motions, and with my wife doing more than going through the motions, that somehow my daughter would magically not go through the motions, she would believe because it would be what she knew.
Ginny and I started getting involved in the church. I find it humorous looking back that one thing that I did was act in church skits. They had a propensity to cast me in the role of Jesus for these skits (finding a willing male in his ‘30’s with long hair I think was qualifier enough). Ironically, I’d be doing the skits for a church who knew these stories, and it was my first exposure to them. Nothing was ever explained in the skit, certainly not to me, about what the true meaning of them was, as “everyone” knew the stories and significance.
Within only a month or two, Ginny and I were selected to be in charge of the outreach committee, which is an important post in a church that had mainly been doing “church for the churched”. This still makes me chuckle, and I now know that God put me through this for a reason (training a non-Christian on how to talk to non-Christians and lead a campaign for Christ is really funny when you stop to think about it). We built up over a two year period to a big launch date in the fall of 2008, where we were hoping to be able to have new folks begin to attend regularly. Even though I was co-chair of this committee, I was approaching it like I would a business marketing campaign. As such, I wasn’t regularly asking for God’s assistance to bless the campaign, reach his desired outcome, etc. because this would be a “waste” of my time.
Ginny and I knew something was wrong as we were nearing the culmination of the campaign. Our goal was to call 20,000 households in the Elgin area. We did not achieve that goal, but we did call 12,800 households, which is still a heck of an amount to call in a 4 week period. I personally did the most calling, with 865 calls. In addition to that, I was tabulating the results at the end of the night of who was called, etc. There were racist events that happened with individual members of the congregation during this campaign. Let me be clear, the church was not a racist organization, and the leadership of the church did not have any tolerance for racism, but there were multiple events during this campaign that showed racism at its worst.
The first event I noticed when I was checking in the call sheets at the end of the night, I noticed that the words “no English” were written at the top of the page with a line down the page. This should mean that all twenty of the households on the page were called and that none of them spoke in English (pages were alphabetically by last name, so let’s say that the last name on all 20 entries on the page were Rodriguez). Certainly, when I called households and the initial greeting was in Spanish, there would be cause to write “no English” next to an individual name. But to write it on an entire page as a blanket statement? Someone is stating that a household with Melissa Rodriguez as the contact point doesn’t speak any English? I found that very hard to believe. Sure enough, I called Melissa and heard the phone was answered in English, not Spanish. Could this campaign be something that God wanted if racism was so clearly playing a role? I didn’t think so. Of course, it all makes sense in retrospect. If a non-Christian is leading the campaign to bring God’s message to people without a church home, it didn’t have God’s power on it and as such, one should expect it not to reach the desired outcome.
There was another incident of racism that happened at the party that was to thank all the volunteers about a week before the launch date. People were sharing stories of the campaign and specifically of the people who made phone calls. One woman stated “I got so tired of calling houses and having them pick up the phone and say hola”. Now, I made 865 calls and not once did I call anyone in the Elgin area and have them pick up the phone and say hola. I called more than my share of Spanish speaking households as I would go out of my way to take the Rodriguez pages after seeing that someone else may say they were called without calling them. When I called a household where the greeting was in Spanish, they said bueno. This means that the person who complained about “hola” either lied about making any calls to a Spanish household or didn’t listen even once to the person on the other end of the phone. It was damning. Certainly, both Ginny and I felt that this is not where we were supposed to be (for my Christian friends, keep in mind that God lead me away from this church while I was a non-believer – never underestimate how God can be leading someone who has yet to recognize God for who he is). Obviously, this was much tougher for Ginny than me, as it’s the church she grew up in.
There were some positives that I noticed from my two years of attending church. One was that weekly rhythm that you get from attending each week. It sets your week up in a way that can’t be described to someone who hasn’t regularly attended a church before. It gave me exposure to bible stories. I had started to read the bible. And certainly, except for the culmination of the campaign, I recognized the value of going to church as a whole family. During the campaign, we would know that the call was not going to end with the chance that they would be coming to our church when they started being overtly positive upon hearing why we were calling. The reason is obvious. These people already had a church home and were ecstatic that someone was calling them to tell them of the good news. By far, the church that had the most attendees respond in this way was Christ Community Church. So, in January of 2009, Ginny and I started attending Christ Community Church.
For Ginny, having grown up in Methodist churches her whole life, CCC was just different. But she was very willing to go with me to CCC because I still wanted to go to church. She knew that I was still in the investigation stage of figuring out what God, Jesus, and Christianity were all about after attending the other church for two years.
So, after only two months of attendance and after our first meeting at a couple’s group, I gave my life to Christ in March 2009. This was a path that my wife gently led me on for 12+ years. Never being overt, but with a gradual softening. She was the key figure in securing that my eternal destiny has been assured, and I can’t put into words how grateful I am for this. I believe that I owe her everything.
Things were different after I gave my life to Christ. One example is that I used to do numerology and put a lot of stock in what these results would say. There certainly seemed to be a correlation between what a numerology reading would say and the results to people. When I did a reading I’d hit on some big truths for people about 80% of the time. But now that I was a Christian, I felt almost no desire to consult the numbers for anything. The reason was simple – let’s suppose that God put numerology here and that numerology readings are an echo of what has, is, and will be happening. Why would I consult an echo of God, when I now have the Holy Spirit alive in me and can consult directly with God himself. It just seems like a waste of time now.
Additionally, I believe that Ginny was able to lead me to Christ only because Ginny completely accepted me for who I was first. She did not come into the marriage with an agenda to get me to become a different person in marriage. Such hidden motives do not build an environment of trust that is essential for a marriage to work. While she obviously would have liked me to become a Christian, she had to completely accept who I was as a non-Christian. Thus, the paradox that only with her total acceptance of me as a non-Christian was the groundwork set for me to become a Christian
So, as Ginny and I were attending Christ Community Church (CCC), we were expecting our second child. The ultrasound revealed a problem with the pregnancy. The umbilical cord was connected at an unusual spot on the placenta. As such, there was no Wharton’s jelly protecting the cord at the connection to the placenta. There was no problem for the pregnancy at that time, but if Ginny went into labor there would be a major risk that the cord would rupture with death of the baby in childbirth as a significantly possible outcome. It was a scary proposition. Ginny and I sought extensive prayer for this. We knew a number people were praying for us. After church at CCC, there are prayer councilors there and we sought them out after service each week and they prayed for us each week. Six months into the pregnancy, we had another ultrasound taken and the connection to the placenta had moved to a more traditional spot, and this connection was inside Wharton’s jelly, so the cord was now protected. We can’t explain how this happened, but were thankful that it did. Ginny and I still went to the prayer councilors after service each week to pray for the health of the baby, because we thought that a sign of obedience would be continuing to ask for God’s intervention when all appeared well, as we did not want to take God’s remedy for the situation to be taken for granted. In retrospect, I wish we’d had a few of these prayers also touch on the health of Ginny as well.
On August 19th, Ginny starts going into labor. She did this at a picnic that my company was doing. Ginny, having had a c-section for the first pregnancy (and we were having this child by c-section again due to the dangers of a natural child birth after having had a c-section) and did not recognize the signs of being in labor. She was in labor for at least 5 hours before I convinced her that she was in labor and that her contractions were now less than five minutes apart. I shudder to think what would have happened had God not given his protection to Adelaide by moving the cord to a protected area.
At the hospital, the baby was coming. The hospital tried slowing the delivery down as they needed to do a c-section. Eventually, they bring Ginny into the delivery area and I’m with her. All of a sudden, I see blood everywhere on the floor and things are not going well. The baby had started coming down the birth canal and got stuck – her head was too big to fit through. They could not get the baby out, and the baby was stuck in the canal. At points in the delivery, they are literally lifting my wife off the table with the force of trying to get the baby out. They start paging for more doctors to come up to the operating area. I’m scared out of my mind and am in the most intensive prayer of my life “Please let Ginny and the baby be OK”, rapid fire, over and over again. Ginny later told me that she was just praying for the health of the baby at this time – again something that was indicative of things to come. After what seemed like an eternity, the baby came free, was out, and all was well. In this picture, taken shortly after Adelaide was born, you can see a deep line down the side of her face. That’s where it was stuck into Ginny’s pelvis.
This was such a hard pregnancy and it took a lot out of us, but clearly there was something more than the standard going on with Ginny. Before she left the hospital, when her OBGYN came in at one point, Ginny broke down in tears for no apparent reason. Her OB gave her a prescription for mild anti-depressants. Three months later in November, at a check up from the c-section to make sure that everything was healing correctly, her doctor doubled the dosage of the anti-depressants. I knew things were off, as I was doing all night time feedings after 2AM. Ginny would go for five or more days without showering because she spent all of her energy on her kids. Ginny just wasn’t well, and it was more than what happened on our first pregnancy.
So, on Friday, February 5, at our church small group meeting, it was so apparent that Ginny was not doing well as another wife told Ginny that she would call in sick for a day next week and take the kids for a day so Ginny could get a day off. February 7 was the Super Bowl, and Ginny was so far out of her normal state of mind that she has no memory of anything on that day.
On Monday, February 8, I asked my wife the most significant question of our lives. I had just arrived home from work at 6:30 and Ginny had just gotten home after running errands with the kids. We were eating dinner and Ginny clearly was not herself. We sat down to dinner, and I asked the question that only following God’s Holy Spirit could I have asked. The question was “Are you suicidal”? I mean, who does that over dinner? You don’t just sit down to dinner and say “Dinner smells great, pass the peas, and are you suicidal?” I am utterly convinced that I would not have had to courage to ask this question myself. Fortunately, now being a Christian for 11 months, I was not on my own. While not having the courage to ask the question myself, I could ask the question when God’s Holy Spirit inside of me encouraged me to ask the question.
Ginny’s answer was “no, but I was thinking that the kids would be better off with (her sister) Amy.” I have later learned that if someone is to take action on suicidal thoughts, the vast majority do so within an hour of first having the thought. God put this question on me within half an hour of Ginny having the thought. I am truly in awe of the power of following God in your life when I reflect on this.
That night, I put the kids to bed and the following morning, I call Ginny’s OBGYN office who had prescribed the anti-depressant medication. They tell me in no uncertain terms that I am to take her to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elgin. I’m a bit floored by the seriousness of this, as we sometimes don’t realize where things really are as we are in the middle of them. I call Ginny’s mom, who had recently retired, and tell her what’s going on and ask her if she can take the kids so that we can do what we need to do.
Now, I have a dilemma. How in the heck am I going to get Ginny to St. Joseph’s Hospital, and the emergency room no less? I know that I am risking my marriage in how I approach this situation, and again am in prayer for the answer. I could try to bring her to the hospital without her knowing where we were going, but this clearly wasn’t the right approach. While it might get her to the hospital, doing this would have set a tone that she can’t trust me at a time when this can’t be something that she can question. No, I had to convince her to go with me, willingly, to St. Joseph’s. I don’t fully remember how I did this, which I take as a sign that God was leading my actions and I merely had the courage to follow where God was leading me.
I had let Ginny sleep in, knowing that she always does better when she can sleep later. I had called in from work. Ginny comes down at around 10:30 and after letting her wake up for a few minutes, I tell her that the doctor’s office said I needed to take her to St. Joseph’s. Ginny, being from Elgin, knew the significance of this hospital in Elgin, as there are multiple hospitals in Elgin, but St. Joseph’s has a specialty in mental illness. She later told me that the only reason she agreed to go was that if I was telling her that I needed to take her there, she knew it had to be serious enough to go.
So, we go to St. Joseph’s, and it’s pretty serious. They are considering if they should have her inpatient for 24 hours a day, our have her in outpatient where she is at the hospital from 8 to 5 every weekday. They recommend outpatient only because they didn’t want to fully remove her from the day to day of having two little ones at home – thinking that removing her from our kids would create an unhealthy situation when she did come out of the program.
And that was our life for a while. Over the first year and a half (until I went to the Czech), things continued to get slowly, progressively better. Adelaide’s first birthday was such a milestone for us. We had her baptized at this time and picked two Godparents that we likely would not have selected a year earlier. Even though we still had a big hill to climb, we were able to pause and celebrate that God has led us out of the depths of the valley.
I don’t know how this would have turned out had I not followed Ginny’s long lead and become a Christian a year earlier. Being a Christian doesn’t magically make life’s problems go away. However, it does mean that you never have to go through any of life’s problems alone. I was forced to lean on God so much during this time just to get through each day. I don’t think I would have had the strength to step in here without following God’s lead. But, there is much poetry in knowing that my wife led me to accept the truth of Jesus Christ, securing my place in the afterlife, and by doing so, she was then able to follow God’s lead through me to secure her place in the here and now.
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It was clear to me that this was the right story to tell in the Czech. What I loved the most is now that I had put myself out there in this way, people were free to come up to me because they had all seen into my soul in a way that most people don’t talk about in a day to day. The story resonated for a number of reasons, but one way is that those in attendance who were not believers in Jesus had an adult they could talk to who could understand being in a position where they may not know him (I had not forgotten my first 35 years of life not knowing Jesus). My story was a real one – there was no “and we lived happily ever after” moment, because each day is a new day with challenges, and those challenges don’t magically go away. Ginny still takes medication for depression and utilizes the skills she learned in therapy. Another aspect that it touches on is a Christian marrying a non-Christian. In the Czech Republic, the second most atheistic country in the world, the community of believers is small. As such, some Christians will inevitably find a mate outside of the Christian community. I’m so glad that I was able to share this with the people of the Czech Republic, and I am strongly considering going back this year.
Feel free to read part 1 first (http://eclecticdavidcory.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-does-someone-follow-god-part-1.html)
So, in 2011 I went on a mission trip to the Czech Republic. I felt God inside of me during this time more intensely that at other times in my life. It was clear that he was working inside of me and directing my path while I was there.
One of the things that some of us had the opportunity to do was to submit stories relating to our walk in Christianity, and how we’ve seen God show up in life. Each night at camp, two stories were able to be told during “talk show”, a nightly event where we had entertainment mixed with some of the bigger issues of life. This is a critical venue in Czech, the second most atheistic country in the world so that they can hear dialog like this with God being a part of the narrative. The story I submitted was similar to the blog post I made here a couple of years ago (http://eclecticdavidcory.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent-journey.html).
So, during the first night of the talk show, Gary and Lorna Gowler were speaking about the incredible circumstances around their son’s medical history. That’s when I started to get a really strong feeling within me that was telling me that the story I submitted wasn’t the story I was supposed to be sharing – that I needed to share the story that Ginny and I had traveled. Now, if I shared this story, I’d really be giving a portion of myself. This would not be easy to retell, as it involved easily the most difficult portion of my life. And yet, I almost instantly knew that I had to tell this, as God was prodding me to do it.
Being at the camp, and with a non-satellite cell phone, I could not call my wife to make sure it was OK that I shared this journey of ours. The camp didn’t have Wi-Fi, so I couldn’t easily get a message to her either. And yet, I knew that I needed to stop asking why I shouldn’t tell this story, rather that I needed to trust God and go in the direction he was leading me. So, after talk show on that Tuesday night, I went back to my room and started writing out this new testimony. I think I got it to a place where I was happy with it by about 1:30 in the morning that night.
Now, people generally didn’t know if they were being selected to have their testimony selected until the day of the talk show, so I had no idea if this new testimony would be shared. The following morning, I found Joel, the pastor who ran the talk show, and let him know that the testimony I had written ahead of time I had just replaced as I felt God was leading me to want to tell something different, and I gave him a 30 second view of what it was about.
I was selected to give my testimony on Thursday night. The theme of the night was personal struggle. Linda from our team went first, and it was very apparent that God was with those in attendance and with her that night. Joel asked a general introductory question, and Linda went straight through telling her testimony, uninterrupted, for thirty minutes. It was a riveting and very inspiring talk. My testimony would be the last activity of the night. I had been hoping to have a video of this so that a link could be provided, but it appears that this isn’t in the cards. So, below I’m going to share (to the best of my memory) what I shared that night.
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It’s Sunday, February 7, 2010 and my wife and I sit down to do what we do every year on that day, watch the Super Bowl as a family. That game featured one of the most memorable plays in Super Bowl history, where the Saints opened the second half by recovering an onside kick. Unfortunately, my wife has no memory of that play or anything that happened at any point that day. The following day, I asked her the most important question I’ve ever asked her in my life.
The second most important question I’ve asked her in my life was “will you marry me” on February 10, 1998. We had been dating on again and off again for years, and had finally got our relationship to where it was time to take the next step. We had a church wedding in February 1999. The church portion didn’t matter to me at the time, as I was not a Christian. It was important to Ginny, so we were married in the church she grew up in. I had nothing against being married in a church, so long as we were able to have a party afterwards. That’s where I was at spiritually at the time.
This set a tone in our marriage for the first eight years. My wife, being a Christian, wanted to find a church home that she could worship at and be connected to God. Certainly, it would help our marriage if we did this together. And yet, I had absolutely no desire to do any of this. My “church” was the National Football League and I saw no need to attend a religious service. I could believe in an afterlife without needing to attend a religious service, so this is something that my wife would need to do on her own.
And that was the story of our marriage for the first eight years. There was one period where we attended Willow Creek for about a month together, but other than that, I never attended a church regularly in my life, and this was something that Ginny would need to do without the support of her husband. And yet, Ginny was always encouraging me to attend church with her. What kind of a husband has their wife asking them for 2 hours a week and isn’t willing to give that to her? The answer to that question is not an answer I am proud of.
After eight years of marriage, we moved back to Elgin, the city where my wife grew up, and were ready to start a family. In the fall of 2006, for the first time in my life, I started to attend a church regularly. We were expecting our first child in the winter, and I knew that I missed out on something by not being involved in church when I grew up. Again, what did it say about who I was that I was willing to do something for a daughter that I hadn’t met yet, that I was unwilling to do for my wife? Interestingly, in the back of my mind, I think that I thought that if I attended church and appeared to go through the motions, and with my wife doing more than going through the motions, that somehow my daughter would magically not go through the motions, she would believe because it would be what she knew.
Ginny and I started getting involved in the church. I find it humorous looking back that one thing that I did was act in church skits. They had a propensity to cast me in the role of Jesus for these skits (finding a willing male in his ‘30’s with long hair I think was qualifier enough). Ironically, I’d be doing the skits for a church who knew these stories, and it was my first exposure to them. Nothing was ever explained in the skit, certainly not to me, about what the true meaning of them was, as “everyone” knew the stories and significance.
Within only a month or two, Ginny and I were selected to be in charge of the outreach committee, which is an important post in a church that had mainly been doing “church for the churched”. This still makes me chuckle, and I now know that God put me through this for a reason (training a non-Christian on how to talk to non-Christians and lead a campaign for Christ is really funny when you stop to think about it). We built up over a two year period to a big launch date in the fall of 2008, where we were hoping to be able to have new folks begin to attend regularly. Even though I was co-chair of this committee, I was approaching it like I would a business marketing campaign. As such, I wasn’t regularly asking for God’s assistance to bless the campaign, reach his desired outcome, etc. because this would be a “waste” of my time.
Ginny and I knew something was wrong as we were nearing the culmination of the campaign. Our goal was to call 20,000 households in the Elgin area. We did not achieve that goal, but we did call 12,800 households, which is still a heck of an amount to call in a 4 week period. I personally did the most calling, with 865 calls. In addition to that, I was tabulating the results at the end of the night of who was called, etc. There were racist events that happened with individual members of the congregation during this campaign. Let me be clear, the church was not a racist organization, and the leadership of the church did not have any tolerance for racism, but there were multiple events during this campaign that showed racism at its worst.
The first event I noticed when I was checking in the call sheets at the end of the night, I noticed that the words “no English” were written at the top of the page with a line down the page. This should mean that all twenty of the households on the page were called and that none of them spoke in English (pages were alphabetically by last name, so let’s say that the last name on all 20 entries on the page were Rodriguez). Certainly, when I called households and the initial greeting was in Spanish, there would be cause to write “no English” next to an individual name. But to write it on an entire page as a blanket statement? Someone is stating that a household with Melissa Rodriguez as the contact point doesn’t speak any English? I found that very hard to believe. Sure enough, I called Melissa and heard the phone was answered in English, not Spanish. Could this campaign be something that God wanted if racism was so clearly playing a role? I didn’t think so. Of course, it all makes sense in retrospect. If a non-Christian is leading the campaign to bring God’s message to people without a church home, it didn’t have God’s power on it and as such, one should expect it not to reach the desired outcome.
There was another incident of racism that happened at the party that was to thank all the volunteers about a week before the launch date. People were sharing stories of the campaign and specifically of the people who made phone calls. One woman stated “I got so tired of calling houses and having them pick up the phone and say hola”. Now, I made 865 calls and not once did I call anyone in the Elgin area and have them pick up the phone and say hola. I called more than my share of Spanish speaking households as I would go out of my way to take the Rodriguez pages after seeing that someone else may say they were called without calling them. When I called a household where the greeting was in Spanish, they said bueno. This means that the person who complained about “hola” either lied about making any calls to a Spanish household or didn’t listen even once to the person on the other end of the phone. It was damning. Certainly, both Ginny and I felt that this is not where we were supposed to be (for my Christian friends, keep in mind that God lead me away from this church while I was a non-believer – never underestimate how God can be leading someone who has yet to recognize God for who he is). Obviously, this was much tougher for Ginny than me, as it’s the church she grew up in.
There were some positives that I noticed from my two years of attending church. One was that weekly rhythm that you get from attending each week. It sets your week up in a way that can’t be described to someone who hasn’t regularly attended a church before. It gave me exposure to bible stories. I had started to read the bible. And certainly, except for the culmination of the campaign, I recognized the value of going to church as a whole family. During the campaign, we would know that the call was not going to end with the chance that they would be coming to our church when they started being overtly positive upon hearing why we were calling. The reason is obvious. These people already had a church home and were ecstatic that someone was calling them to tell them of the good news. By far, the church that had the most attendees respond in this way was Christ Community Church. So, in January of 2009, Ginny and I started attending Christ Community Church.
For Ginny, having grown up in Methodist churches her whole life, CCC was just different. But she was very willing to go with me to CCC because I still wanted to go to church. She knew that I was still in the investigation stage of figuring out what God, Jesus, and Christianity were all about after attending the other church for two years.
So, after only two months of attendance and after our first meeting at a couple’s group, I gave my life to Christ in March 2009. This was a path that my wife gently led me on for 12+ years. Never being overt, but with a gradual softening. She was the key figure in securing that my eternal destiny has been assured, and I can’t put into words how grateful I am for this. I believe that I owe her everything.
Things were different after I gave my life to Christ. One example is that I used to do numerology and put a lot of stock in what these results would say. There certainly seemed to be a correlation between what a numerology reading would say and the results to people. When I did a reading I’d hit on some big truths for people about 80% of the time. But now that I was a Christian, I felt almost no desire to consult the numbers for anything. The reason was simple – let’s suppose that God put numerology here and that numerology readings are an echo of what has, is, and will be happening. Why would I consult an echo of God, when I now have the Holy Spirit alive in me and can consult directly with God himself. It just seems like a waste of time now.
Additionally, I believe that Ginny was able to lead me to Christ only because Ginny completely accepted me for who I was first. She did not come into the marriage with an agenda to get me to become a different person in marriage. Such hidden motives do not build an environment of trust that is essential for a marriage to work. While she obviously would have liked me to become a Christian, she had to completely accept who I was as a non-Christian. Thus, the paradox that only with her total acceptance of me as a non-Christian was the groundwork set for me to become a Christian
So, as Ginny and I were attending Christ Community Church (CCC), we were expecting our second child. The ultrasound revealed a problem with the pregnancy. The umbilical cord was connected at an unusual spot on the placenta. As such, there was no Wharton’s jelly protecting the cord at the connection to the placenta. There was no problem for the pregnancy at that time, but if Ginny went into labor there would be a major risk that the cord would rupture with death of the baby in childbirth as a significantly possible outcome. It was a scary proposition. Ginny and I sought extensive prayer for this. We knew a number people were praying for us. After church at CCC, there are prayer councilors there and we sought them out after service each week and they prayed for us each week. Six months into the pregnancy, we had another ultrasound taken and the connection to the placenta had moved to a more traditional spot, and this connection was inside Wharton’s jelly, so the cord was now protected. We can’t explain how this happened, but were thankful that it did. Ginny and I still went to the prayer councilors after service each week to pray for the health of the baby, because we thought that a sign of obedience would be continuing to ask for God’s intervention when all appeared well, as we did not want to take God’s remedy for the situation to be taken for granted. In retrospect, I wish we’d had a few of these prayers also touch on the health of Ginny as well.
On August 19th, Ginny starts going into labor. She did this at a picnic that my company was doing. Ginny, having had a c-section for the first pregnancy (and we were having this child by c-section again due to the dangers of a natural child birth after having had a c-section) and did not recognize the signs of being in labor. She was in labor for at least 5 hours before I convinced her that she was in labor and that her contractions were now less than five minutes apart. I shudder to think what would have happened had God not given his protection to Adelaide by moving the cord to a protected area.
At the hospital, the baby was coming. The hospital tried slowing the delivery down as they needed to do a c-section. Eventually, they bring Ginny into the delivery area and I’m with her. All of a sudden, I see blood everywhere on the floor and things are not going well. The baby had started coming down the birth canal and got stuck – her head was too big to fit through. They could not get the baby out, and the baby was stuck in the canal. At points in the delivery, they are literally lifting my wife off the table with the force of trying to get the baby out. They start paging for more doctors to come up to the operating area. I’m scared out of my mind and am in the most intensive prayer of my life “Please let Ginny and the baby be OK”, rapid fire, over and over again. Ginny later told me that she was just praying for the health of the baby at this time – again something that was indicative of things to come. After what seemed like an eternity, the baby came free, was out, and all was well. In this picture, taken shortly after Adelaide was born, you can see a deep line down the side of her face. That’s where it was stuck into Ginny’s pelvis.
This was such a hard pregnancy and it took a lot out of us, but clearly there was something more than the standard going on with Ginny. Before she left the hospital, when her OBGYN came in at one point, Ginny broke down in tears for no apparent reason. Her OB gave her a prescription for mild anti-depressants. Three months later in November, at a check up from the c-section to make sure that everything was healing correctly, her doctor doubled the dosage of the anti-depressants. I knew things were off, as I was doing all night time feedings after 2AM. Ginny would go for five or more days without showering because she spent all of her energy on her kids. Ginny just wasn’t well, and it was more than what happened on our first pregnancy.
So, on Friday, February 5, at our church small group meeting, it was so apparent that Ginny was not doing well as another wife told Ginny that she would call in sick for a day next week and take the kids for a day so Ginny could get a day off. February 7 was the Super Bowl, and Ginny was so far out of her normal state of mind that she has no memory of anything on that day.
On Monday, February 8, I asked my wife the most significant question of our lives. I had just arrived home from work at 6:30 and Ginny had just gotten home after running errands with the kids. We were eating dinner and Ginny clearly was not herself. We sat down to dinner, and I asked the question that only following God’s Holy Spirit could I have asked. The question was “Are you suicidal”? I mean, who does that over dinner? You don’t just sit down to dinner and say “Dinner smells great, pass the peas, and are you suicidal?” I am utterly convinced that I would not have had to courage to ask this question myself. Fortunately, now being a Christian for 11 months, I was not on my own. While not having the courage to ask the question myself, I could ask the question when God’s Holy Spirit inside of me encouraged me to ask the question.
Ginny’s answer was “no, but I was thinking that the kids would be better off with (her sister) Amy.” I have later learned that if someone is to take action on suicidal thoughts, the vast majority do so within an hour of first having the thought. God put this question on me within half an hour of Ginny having the thought. I am truly in awe of the power of following God in your life when I reflect on this.
That night, I put the kids to bed and the following morning, I call Ginny’s OBGYN office who had prescribed the anti-depressant medication. They tell me in no uncertain terms that I am to take her to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elgin. I’m a bit floored by the seriousness of this, as we sometimes don’t realize where things really are as we are in the middle of them. I call Ginny’s mom, who had recently retired, and tell her what’s going on and ask her if she can take the kids so that we can do what we need to do.
Now, I have a dilemma. How in the heck am I going to get Ginny to St. Joseph’s Hospital, and the emergency room no less? I know that I am risking my marriage in how I approach this situation, and again am in prayer for the answer. I could try to bring her to the hospital without her knowing where we were going, but this clearly wasn’t the right approach. While it might get her to the hospital, doing this would have set a tone that she can’t trust me at a time when this can’t be something that she can question. No, I had to convince her to go with me, willingly, to St. Joseph’s. I don’t fully remember how I did this, which I take as a sign that God was leading my actions and I merely had the courage to follow where God was leading me.
I had let Ginny sleep in, knowing that she always does better when she can sleep later. I had called in from work. Ginny comes down at around 10:30 and after letting her wake up for a few minutes, I tell her that the doctor’s office said I needed to take her to St. Joseph’s. Ginny, being from Elgin, knew the significance of this hospital in Elgin, as there are multiple hospitals in Elgin, but St. Joseph’s has a specialty in mental illness. She later told me that the only reason she agreed to go was that if I was telling her that I needed to take her there, she knew it had to be serious enough to go.
So, we go to St. Joseph’s, and it’s pretty serious. They are considering if they should have her inpatient for 24 hours a day, our have her in outpatient where she is at the hospital from 8 to 5 every weekday. They recommend outpatient only because they didn’t want to fully remove her from the day to day of having two little ones at home – thinking that removing her from our kids would create an unhealthy situation when she did come out of the program.
And that was our life for a while. Over the first year and a half (until I went to the Czech), things continued to get slowly, progressively better. Adelaide’s first birthday was such a milestone for us. We had her baptized at this time and picked two Godparents that we likely would not have selected a year earlier. Even though we still had a big hill to climb, we were able to pause and celebrate that God has led us out of the depths of the valley.
I don’t know how this would have turned out had I not followed Ginny’s long lead and become a Christian a year earlier. Being a Christian doesn’t magically make life’s problems go away. However, it does mean that you never have to go through any of life’s problems alone. I was forced to lean on God so much during this time just to get through each day. I don’t think I would have had the strength to step in here without following God’s lead. But, there is much poetry in knowing that my wife led me to accept the truth of Jesus Christ, securing my place in the afterlife, and by doing so, she was then able to follow God’s lead through me to secure her place in the here and now.
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It was clear to me that this was the right story to tell in the Czech. What I loved the most is now that I had put myself out there in this way, people were free to come up to me because they had all seen into my soul in a way that most people don’t talk about in a day to day. The story resonated for a number of reasons, but one way is that those in attendance who were not believers in Jesus had an adult they could talk to who could understand being in a position where they may not know him (I had not forgotten my first 35 years of life not knowing Jesus). My story was a real one – there was no “and we lived happily ever after” moment, because each day is a new day with challenges, and those challenges don’t magically go away. Ginny still takes medication for depression and utilizes the skills she learned in therapy. Another aspect that it touches on is a Christian marrying a non-Christian. In the Czech Republic, the second most atheistic country in the world, the community of believers is small. As such, some Christians will inevitably find a mate outside of the Christian community. I’m so glad that I was able to share this with the people of the Czech Republic, and I am strongly considering going back this year.
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