I saw a new reviewer's opinion out there about Cappuccino with Colossians. Check it out!

Now...today I want to do something a little different. I met Betsy in Memphis last month, and she told me an amazing story. I asked her to share it, so here goes:

My brother and I grew up going to church for most everything offered, so we had a strong sense that ‘church’ was the ‘right’ thing to do. Yet we also saw much hypocrisy, which undermined any sense that religion was valid.

When we went to college each of us began searching for answers that our church experience had failed to address. And we both turned away from God, each in our own way.

After five years going from college to college, I finally ended up at a Catholic school. I had been so impressed by the lives of some nuns that I knew. I felt they were really living out what they believed. God used this to finally bring me to my knees and begin to see that apart from Him, I really could do nothing well.

My brother tried to hold on to the church longer than I did. But after college he began his own wilderness wanderings. Because we lived far apart in those years I knew little of his personal life. Since I had become a Christian I was full of the joy and wonder a new believer has. But when I tried to share it with him, I noticed cynicism about anything relating to God.

I had married by this time, and we had one child. But as we tried to have a second child, we entered into a seven-year period of miscarriages and infertility. All these years I of course continued to pray for my bother to know Christ.

Eventually we started looking into adoption. We were living in Vienna, Austria, as my husband was pastoring an English-speaking church there. It was difficult to find an agency that would allow Americans living abroad to adopt. When we did, we had to return to the States for the home study before the papers could be finalized.

My brother fell ill to a fairly rare illness the same spring we were to return for the home study. Within two weeks almost his entire body had become paralyzed with Guillaume-Barre’. We flew back as quickly as possible to be with him. I will never forget seeing him for the first time, lying so still in his hospital bed. He had lost much weight and truly looked like a concentration camp victim. And yet there seemed a quiet confidence and joy in him I had not seen before.

As he shared with me the ‘visit’ God had made to his room, just days before, I began to see the reason for the deep changes. A mutual friend of ours from high school days, who was himself a deeply committed Christian, had come by on a Sunday morning on his way to church. He was so faithful to visit Al often, and was never reluctant to share the love of Jesus with him. On that particular morning he explained to Al that a person can come to Christ just as he is. You didn’t have to ‘have your act together’, as it were, to come.

The Spirit was moving that morning in that little room. After our friend left, Al told me that something even more amazing happened. He said, ‘A light entered the room after Ronald left. And God spoke to me, and told me that He was going to heal me.’

I was speechless… My brother was the type to make fun of people who said things like that. And yet I could tell he was deadly serious.

Several days later, when my husband joined us in the States, Al told us the direction his life had taken in the past several years. He said, with tears running down his cheeks, (tears he could not wipe himself), that over the last few years he had ‘experimented with an alternative lifestyle’. He said the doctors were beginning to think that he had AIDS. At that time (1985), AIDS was very new on the scene. I had absolutely no idea my brother was a homosexual. And I knew little about this illness. But I did know that Al had asked for God’s forgiveness. And that even in this prison of a body, Al was experiencing more freedom than he had ever known…the true freedom that comes when you know you have been forgiven.

The ‘rest of the story’ is no less amazing. I became pregnant that summer, and we were forced to cancel the adoption. I, of course, feared another miscarriage. And I was certain that Al was going to recover. But God had other plans…

On the morning of March 1, 1986, God gave us Lily Allison. And about seven hours later He took my brother, Al, home to Heaven. After all those years of praying for my brother and for another child, GOD answered…in His time, and His way.

Her birth announcement and his death notice were on the same page.

THE LORD GIVETH, AND THE LORD TAKETH.
BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD.