My testimony is centered on a penny.
A penny is a special symbol of God's great love and provision for me throughout all the years of my life.
I was born an only child in a small rural community in Iowa. I was raised in a Christian family and church was an important part of my life. After high school I attended the University of Iowa for a year. Away from home and security, I questioned everything in my life. I transferred to Immanuel Hospital School of Nursing in Omaha, Nebraska. There I became involved in Campus Crusade and one thought kept bothering me. I could not name a specific date when I had accepted Christ as my Savior. Jesus had always been a part of my life. I had been baptized as an infant but at that time I felt the need to be baptized as an adult as a public commitment that Christ was indeed my personal Savior.
I graduated from nurses training as an R.N. and married a young man who was attending Bible College. I watched as God changed him from one who stuttered and flunked out of the University of Nebraska into a gifted Bible scholar and a great preacher with the gift of administration. We had three beautiful daughters together.
Then fourteen years into my marriage, my world shattered! My husband began having an affair and two difficult years later, I found myself divorced with three little girls. I felt like a pair of old shoes worn, used, and then discarded for a different pair.
Due to nursing layoffs in Omaha at the time, I could not get a nursing job and I worked for minimum wage in a daycare. I got food stamps to feed my daughters but I was getting notices that my electricity was about to be shut off because I could not pay the bill which would mean no heat during a cold Nebraska winter.
I went for a walk late one night and I cried out to God telling Him that I just could not go on. I had made such a mess of my life and I needed Him to take control of my life. My Heavenly Father is so good! There on the sidewalk in front of me was a penny. God assured me that I did not need to worry because He loved me so much and He would take care of me and provide for my family. He was just waiting for me to ask and so I sat back and watched as God provided. During the next several weeks I received $20, $50, $100 – over $2000 in all – in the mail from Christian people who responded to the Lord’s leading when He put it on their hearts to send me money. I didn’t need to ask for even a penny! God also provided me a good paying nursing job, a house to live in, and a wonderful church family to support me as He healed my brokenness.
My first husband died within a year of the divorce from a brain abscess. As I stood by his hospital bed and watched the color fade from his face after the ventilator was turned off, tears fell down my face. I was freed from all my hurt, anger, and fears. I knew then my husband was not coming back and God had other plans for my life.
As I look back on that period in my life, I am reminded of the “Footprints” poem. When the days of my life were the darkest, there was only one set of footprints in the sand. God had picked me up and carried me through.
For almost two years I prayed that God would bring a special man into my life to be my husband and a father for my daughters. I asked Him to do this before I turned forty and in God’s perfect time, just weeks before I turned forty, He send Bob. That was in 1988.
God has been so good to me and so faithful in providing all my needs. My life verse is
Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.”
My hope for all eternity is in my Heavenly Father who sent me a penny from Heaven when my world was shattered and my life was broken!
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