I heard of Alice through the Christian community in our city. Recently we became friends on Facebook. I noticed Alice wrote these beautiful posts about her love for God and what he was teaching her. So, I commented and said, “Alice you should start a blog!” Well, Alice hasn’t agreed to start her own blog yet, but she has a beautiful way of sharing Jesus with others through her lovely writing.
I messaged Alice and asked her if she’d like to be featured in our Inspiring Women series, and in the end, we talked over the phone. Alice’s story could be spread out through about twenty more of these posts, she has been through so much, yet she keeps praising Jesus. I am truly honoured to be featuring this incredible lady who never gives up hoping or on her dear Saviour!
*If Alice’s post doesn’t look laid out properly, just know that everything that could go possibly wrong to prevent this post from being published, did go wrong. Alice sent it to me, with it looking beautiful, then it all fell apart. I tried twice to format it properly with no success. So I’m going to hit “Publish” and hope for the best!
Life With Alice
A Little About Me
When I was just a little girl, a toddler of three years old, my mother leads me to Jesus. It was at her knee that I prayed and trusted in Jesus as my Saviour. For 60 years I have loved and followed Jesus. I cannot remember ever not loving Him. For many years I just thought that was normal. My parents were pastors, teachers and missionaries. I was surrounded by Jesus-loving people. Oh, I knew others did not believe, but I just thought it was because they didn’t want to.
Rick and I met in Bible College (nick-named Bridal College by some, lol), married and began our 41 years of marriage together. He was teaching at Bible College, I was a stay-at-home wife and mother, enjoying our life together. But somehow things began to unravel in circumstances and relationships. I was stunned. How could this be happening?!
I thought that if I loved God…followed Him with love and obeyed Him..that everything in my life would be peachy!
Without realizing it, I began to question everything I believed. My God-in-the-box-of-my-own-making was not living up to my expectations! I wondered, even that if I had been raised in a different culture, with a different world-view, if I would even believe in Jesus!
A few years passed but during that time as I dug into the Word of God and prayed fierce, earnest, honest prayers, God began to show me that in trying to figure Him out, I had lost sight of Who He really is! GOD!
I began to love God for Who He is, and not Who I make Him out to be.
God allowed the unravelling to open my faith-eyes and clear my spiritual vision.
A few years after that, with four children in tow, we left to minister among people who do not know the joy of our living, loving, Saviour and God, Jesus Christ.
My heart was no longer wavering in doubt and disbelief due to difficult emotional trauma and circumstances.
Now God was able to shine out of our lives in love and truth.
Our new friends wondered about the personal relationship that we had with our God.
What?! No list of prayers or beads?
What?! God is a personal Being Who loves me?!
What?! God wants me to come live with Him so much that He sent Jesus to die for me?!
 
Yes…amazing. My God is God above all gods. It is a joy to share the joy of knowing Him!
My life’s verse chosen at graduation from Bible College began to come alive to me:
“That I may know Him…” Philippians 3:10.
God continues to “shake” me up at times to keep my faith fresh and firmly entrenched in the truth of Who He really is. And I am grateful. The “knowing” is worth the pains of the “growing.”
Like many other women in their sixties, I am part of the “sandwich” generation. Our children are grown, but we are busier than ever caring for grandchildren and elderly parents. But I am so grateful to be able to!
For ten years God let me live out my childhood vision and dream of loving and serving Him in missions.
Telling others who have never heard before about Jesus! Then seizures I had experienced years before, returned with a vengeance, and we had to return home. We were empty nesters, unemployed, exhausted and had no idea where we would live. However, God provided a home (and still is, PTL). My husband has work he enjoys. Ten years later, I am seizure free. (For two years, this month, PTL). And God has let us participate in the lives of our three grandchildren who live nearby and provided FaceTime to communicate with the other seven! Woohoo! PTL!
These days we help care for our young grandchild, Liam Joel, whom many of you have prayed for. Over the last four years, he has had three and a half years of chemo to combat high-risk Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.
To be seizure-free and able to help and regularly care for my grandson has been a great privilege and joy.
It is not a journey that anyone wants, but we have seen God’s faithfulness to him and his family through the years of trauma and the uncertainty of this life. I am grateful to be able to care for him and love on him in his oh-so-hard and not-so-hard, days. We will not know the why of it here in this life, but in this too, there has been a greater “knowing” in the “growing” and leaning on God. To hear Liam Joel say, “I love You, Jesus,” when he prays, is definitely a joy.
During our years away, my Mama, recently widowed then, had breast cancer and drove herself to and from Sudbury for treatments.
How I longed to help her! Well, now she is 90 and definitely needs help.
God has given her a place to live just a 15-minute walk away from where we live. It is a joy to help this godly woman who is my dear Mama and also the one who lead me to Jesus!
There are some tough pain days and days of uncertainty. God continues to bless her with a sound mind, and she chooses to live her days in gratefulness to God and continues to share Jesus with others. I hope I can be just like my mother when I grow up!
Yes, life hasn’t gotten any easier, but then, maybe it’s not supposed to. Maybe, just maybe, God is giving me my heart’s desire and growing me into a greater knowledge of Him.
My Dreams
There are things I would still really like to do. I would love to write a book to encourage pre-teen children in their faith. It has been on the back-burner of my brain for about ten years now!
I would love to travel and to spend more time with my children and grandchildren who live far away from us.
Moments With God
But those are all things that are in the hands of God. The days are flying by and each day is full of its own needs, blessings and trials.
Mostly, I want to come to the end of each day with gratefulness. I want to hear Jesus say to me at the end of life’s day:
“Well done good and faithful servant. Enter into the Joy of your Lord”.
That’s what I really want.
So, I guess, it’s still going to be “growing into knowing” my God and Saviour more and more each day. And that’s what I’ve wanted for most of my life. The ways He chooses to grow me are not always pleasant, but some of the things I had to do to help my children grow up weren’t always pleasant for them either! Real love is sacrificial and costly. It cost Jesus His life to show His love for me. He loved me to death, literally. And I am so grateful and want to love Him in return.
The rest of that verse in Philippians 3:10 kind of spells it out:
“That I may know Him,
And the power of His resurrection
And the fellowship of His sufferings…”
If you start from the bottom and work up, you see that Jesus suffered, was raised to life so that we might know the love of the Father. Jesus is our Pattern. We cannot truly know God without being purified in suffering. Suffering gets our eyes off of us and onto Him. It removes the glaze of self and gives clarity to our gaze of Him. Then we really know Him. Know and Grow.
We laugh at this quote from the movie Princess Bride, “Life IS pain, Princess.” And that is pretty much true. But, someone else once said, “Don’t waste the pain.” That is what I am endeavouring to do. Praise in the Pain. And to keep “growing in the knowing” of my God.
Let the pain He allows, do its work of purifying and perfecting me, for the Glory of God.
Alice’s story is one of someone who is truly relying on God, day by day. Read about a woman who had a tremendous fear of God and how he proved to her he was a loving Heavenly Father instead of a cruel God: My Story of Love, Grace and Truth
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