5 Today!

5 Years ago today, I was anxiously waiting for my wife to emerge from major Cancer surgery. A radical, rare, and deadly cancer had attacked her uterus and the prospects were bleak. The whole church was praying. People around the world were praying. A pastor friend with a gift of healing had called from England minutes before they rolled Deb into surgery.

We were pleading for God for a miracle. And God answered in amazing ways. After surgery they came back and said, although it was quite "surprising" they had found "no cancer", although the diagnosis had been so clear that they had shipped tissue samples to Cancer Society.

They told us, while this is good news, don't get too excited as the cancer cells will show up in the pathology reports...after three different pathology reports of finding no cancer, they finally gave up looking. At that point they had to admit, "well maybe all that praying worked".

But they said, "Don't get too excited. This kind always comes back". Every 3 months for the first three years Deb went back to see the specialist. Finally after four years, he said, "Well perhaps this isn't going to come back".
And today is 5 years...and absolutely NO CANCER! So we praise God today on this 5th anniversary of his miracle working mercy. Jesus is Lord of my life and Lord of my wife!

An Announcement Based on a Lifetime Prayer

Do you have a few prayers you have been praying for years? The kind you know you won't see the answer to for a long, long time? Do those prayers matter? Are there some things so big that you just must keep praying for them until you see the outcome?

I just had one of those kinds of prayers answered and I must say...."How sweet it is!"; "Thank you Jesus!"

When Deb found out she was pregnant we were thrilled. We were ready for kids and our determination was to take parenting as the most serious call of our lives. We knew we must immerse our new child in faithful prayer. 

So we began before we even knew what gender our child would be. 

One of the primary prayers we prayed was: "God grant our child a godly spouse, who loves YOU and loves THEM deeply". 

When Lindsey was born and miraculously survived being "dead on arrival" and especially when we discovered we would have no more biological children, we prayed that this girl would have a divine hand upon her life.

Many evenings after Lindsey was fast asleep we would pray, "God grant our daughter a godly husband who deeply loves you and will honor our daughter." 

We, of course, did more than pray. We sat boundaries, we taught, we built relationship. As she matured we had the big "promise ring" talk in which she pledged her virginity til marriage. We had discussions about the kind of man she should marry. 

We held our breath through several "crushes". She had a couple of false starts of exploration in which we just prayed all the more. But then seemingly out of nowhere, at a point when Lindsey's heart was grieving and wondering what, if anything, was going to happen--TJ TAYLOR arrived on the scene. 

Friends at first. Deeper friends. Dating. Commitment. Then that morning in our den when TJ asked Deb and I if we would give our daughter to him in marriage. 

And there it was, the answer to a lifetime prayer...A young man (25) who highly valued our daughter and was committed to her spiritual, emotional, and physical welfare. For 25 years we had not known the name or the face of the man we were praying for...but it was his, TJ's. 

Is TJ perfect? No. But he is God's man for our daughter...prayed in with faith, drawn in by love and wisdom. We are honored to announce their engagement, their promise to marry one another and serve God's purpose for their lives in their generation. Now that's worth praying a lifetime for!!