God is faithful!

I have to end this year with a testimony of God's faithfulness.

I hope it will serve as an encouragement to all those who pray for their children to enter into the Kingdom of God. This year our eldest son Rodney (22 years) came to the end of himself and opened up his heart to find out that His Heavenly Father had been on the look-out for him all the time!

Does this remind you of the story of the Prodigal Son.... when he came to the end of himself and sat with the pigs to get something to eat, only then he decided to return to his father.
It is a story of many broken lives - something has to bring us to our knees to be desperate enough to open our hearts to the Love of the Father, which was shown to us when Jesus died on the Cross to bring us back to God. God's arms are still open wide today.

When Rodney was four, we moved from Holland to the Mission fields in the South of France never ever knowing that it would be a sacrifice of such enormous proportions for all of us. We had two other sons at the time, David, who has Down Syndrome and goes to a special school where he is loved, and Joël who is now 18. Michaël was born in France. We knew little about the culture, the coldness of local folk against 'strangers', not to mention the hostility against Christianity.
Rodney had a hard time at school, as did our other children, because he was different, because we, as a family believed in a living God.
But when he was a teenager and went to college he vowed never to be bullied again. 'God' was the reason he was bullied so now he did everything against God to be accepted. If we would have known how far he went we would have been worried sick. Somehow we were spared.

He left home when he was 17, but never seemed to succeed in life, how desperately he wanted to be independent, to have a family of his own, to have a reasonable job and just live his life. But it never went that way. He went down the wrong path and ended up in total darkness, depressed with no way out.

In the mean time, although our other two boys didn't have an easy time at school, they chose to follow Jesus when they were 16 and are still serious, God fearing boys today. But Rodney was different.....

We have prayed for years and years for God to touch his heart. It has been a long road and we suffered seeing him as he was. At times we were so terribly discouraged....it took so long.

We may think that our prayers brought our son back to God but it was the witness of the Holy Spirit that spoke deep in his heart and the awesome faithfulness of God that touched him in his time of need. The seed of the Word of God that was planted in his heart from his infant years never ever left him.

He has a way to go, but TODAY he is a transformed young man with a smile on his face and a goal in life!

Just recently he was asked this question: "What is your image of an ideal father?

This is what Rodney wrote:  I have always known that I have the ideal father, its only now that I know God that I truly realize that I see the image of my Heavenly Father in my natural father because the only thing that my natural father wants is to be like his Heavenly Father!

I don't think that a father could receive a bigger compliment than that!

We thank God that we are united as a whole family today and our shared passion is to be there where we can serve Him in His Projects for this world.

Have a very Happy New Year and thank you to everyone who has been so kind to visit my blog and leave me some love - I live quite isolated so this makes such a huge difference to me. Being creative brings so much extra joy into my world and through it to have contact with ladies throughout the world is such a blessing!