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Tonya
Nervously, Tonya stepped behind the pulpit. “Thank you, Rachel, for leading the singing, and thank you, Fiona, for that beautiful music.” She cleared her throat. “And thank you all for singing. You sounded like a choir of angels.” She smoothed out the already smooth paper in front of her. “As you all know, I am not a pastor. Not even close. But Cathy asked me to share my testimony today, and God has made it clear to me that I should never argue with Cathy.”
A polite laugh rippled through the small congregation.
“I am so sad to share that my divorce became final this week.” She let out a long breath. That had been easier to say than she’d thought it would be. “I never thought I would be a divorced woman, and sometimes that still feels like a huge failure.” She shrugged. “Maybe it is. Either way, God has not given up on me.
“I never wanted to be in a difficult marriage. I never wanted to be betrayed by my husband. And I never wanted to be a divorced woman. But I’m not as regretful about all of that as you might think.
“You see, I was a busy pastor’s wife. I was serving God fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, but I hardly knew him. I was simply going through the motions. I didn’t know it at the time, but I didn’t try to spend time with God, I didn’t spend much time talking to him—except when I was late getting somewhere and I didn’t have enough gas. And I didn’t ever thank him for anything. I was too busy, always out of breath.” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed.
“Looking back, I don’t even recognize myself. When things fell apart, I prayed that God would put them back together. And he hasn’t done that in the way that I would’ve planned. Some people might look at me and think that he hasn’t put it back together at all, but they would be wrong.
“I am closer to God than I have ever been. I have such peace and such joy. And my daughter is closer to God than she has ever been.” She looked at Jason DeGrave, sitting beside Emma. “And others have come to fall in love with Jesus because of the messiness I’ve been through.
“So here’s what I want to tell you. If things don’t seem like they’re going right in your life, that might be a good thing. They might not be going your way. You might be going through horrible, embarrassing things that you didn’t think were supposed to happen. And maybe they weren’t supposed to happen. But that doesn’t mean that God isn’t going to use them, and it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be okay.
“I know for a fact that the opposite is true. You are going to be okay. Because we don’t need our jobs or our reputations or our homes or even our marriages to be whole. We just need God.”
She smiled broadly. “We just need God.”
