Category: Book Reviews

Just who is this inspired writer we met in the last post? Checking on the internet, I quickly deducted the Wikipedia versions of Wendy Cunningham as the Lead Economist in World Bank’s Human Capital Project the past 20 years, OR of a Manhattan Construction Company were neither the Wendy I met through Plain Values. So, I searched Plain Values and WC, and we connected. The following 700 words are a five minute read offer worthy further understanding. All for our good & His glory!

“What a joy it’s been walking down memory lane with y’all. But don’t forget, these past two months account for years of my life. It’s easy to share my testimony with a pretty little bow on it, but I have to stress again before we continue that this season was all uphill. Evangelizing is tough business, and I’m wildly stubborn. It’s unlikely we’ll see Kingdom fruit from simple conversations. We must be willing to weather the storm and go the distance. After all, it’s souls we’re talking about. But be encouraged; it’s worth the fight.

I’m so grateful my husband never gave up. I pray you won’t either.

It’s strange to think back to a time when I wasn’t a believer. Now, every part of my life is informed by the One who sits at the center; the One who I once denied existed. And really, that’s what it came down to in the end. Denial. It’s not that I couldn’t believe in the possibility of a Creator. Surely, anyone can entertain the idea of God. It’s that I didn’t want to believe.

Believing changes things.

For some, the Good News is not entirely good. At least not at first. In my case, the existence of a God who required a move from me meant that I would have to swallow my pride—and after years of arguing against a deity, there was a lot to gulp down. It also meant I’d been wrong; my entire life was built on a lie. I’d have to go back and rethink everything I thought I knew for sure. That’s daunting.

Believing in God meant there was a line I’d have to cross—the line of salvation. Although it meant great things for my eternity, it might mean terrible things for those I loved who’d be left on the other side of the divide. How could I make them understand? Would they still accept me? Could I lose them in eternity and in the here and now? And what about those I loved who had already passed away? What did all this mean for them? It was a lot to consider.

Perhaps the hardest part was realizing how much would have to change if God was real. The way I dressed, the things I said, the movies I watched, and the friends I kept were all up for re-evaluation. If God existed, what would be required of me? Surely I’d be accountable. I’d have to look at everything through a new lens, one that seemed very foggy and intimidating.

Yes, believing would most certainly change everything. Denial was, and remained the way to go.

But you know what else changes everything? Two little pink lines on a pregnancy test!

A year after we started dating, Tom did what you’re absolutely not allowed to do if you’re a Christian. He married an atheist. As a parent, I have been very honest with my children in approaching this conversation. Of course, my desire aligns with God’s in that I pray my kids do not end up unequally yoked. But I have told them what I will tell you: Tom’s act of what you could view as “disobedience” was perhaps the single biggest blessing of my life.

He led me to Jesus!

Is any of this connecting with you and your spiritual journey?

Wendy Cunningham is wife to Tom and home school mom to three amazing gifts from God. In addition to that calling, she is an entrepreneur and author. Her book What If You’re Wrong?, blog, and devotionals can be found at gainingmyperspective.com. She is also host of the podcast Gaining My Perspective. Wendy loves Jesus and inspiring people to step into their calling—whatever that might look like in this season. When she’s not working, writing, traveling, or podcasting, she can be found homesteading and chasing kids and cows on her farm in Middle Tennessee.

NEXT UP: I’m still waiting…

Today’s Part II continues on and concludes what we began yesterday. Tomorrow we will continue in the vein the author of “Go Now,” Wendell Martin so vividly described for us as “waiting on the Lord” in his chapter 40 titled “Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death” wherein Daisy and Wendell and their family discovered God’s incredible love for them in new ways and deeper levels that they would have never understood without going through the events (new normals?) they did since Daisy’s stroke four years ago.

Looking back, they clearly saw God’s loving kindness erupting about them in the darkest hours of their lives. Rather than dwelling on the consuming chaos, they chose instead to “wait on the Lord” seeing God’s love and kindness overflowing into their lives, and did not dwell on those aspects of life that were temporarily lost.

Continuing on from Part I:

As I entered the room, the Bible verses the pastor had given me came rushing back to my memory. The Holy Spirit came powerfully, bringing them to life in a way that confirmed in my heart that God was with us, in complete control, and that we were caught up in a mystery of His unfolding destiny for our lives. With what might have been divine inspiration, I told the children to stand at each corner of her bed, I began to tell the story from Mark 2, emphasizing about how hard it had been for the paralyzed man and his friends to get to Jesus.

          “That’s how I feel right now,” I explained to my children. “I know Jesus can heal your mother, but I feel so far and void of faith for her healing right now. So, let’s just imagine that we are people in the Bible story, struggling to get to Jesus. Imagine that we are on top of the roof of the house.” I paused to give time for the picture to be formed in their minds. “Now, imagine that we are tearing off the roof.”

Next, I had them imagine that each of us had a rope to which was tied a corner of the bed. “I see Jesus down through the hole down there. Let’s lower Daisy down to Him. Can you see Him?” We actually made the motions of lowering the bed with the ropes. “Good. She is down there now in front of Jesus.”

          I felt like I was in a dream, caught between an imaginary world and reality. OK. Now, on the count of three, we’re going to let go of the ropes.”

          At that instance, the moment of letting go of the rope, something shifted in my heart. The weight of all I was carrying seemed to slide completely out of my hands, and like letting go of a rope, it fell into a tangled pile at the feet of Jesus. There was no way to get Daisy back. The release of the situation was complete, completely in Jesus’ hands.

          A wave of relief rolled off me. It came from complete surrender of what I loved and cared about the most into whatever purposes God had for our lives. Honestly, I didn’t have faith that she would be healed. But I did have faith that Daisy was in the presence of the greatest love imaginable. In fact, I was completely confident that no matter what came in the coming days, no matter if Daisy lived, died, or remained in a vegetative state for the rest of her life, which was the absolute best scenario the doctors offered me, it would come out of the depths of God’s best expression of love for us. My faith was in God’s love, and in that I found very solid footing for the days ahead.

          Needless to say from that time on, Daisy began such remarkable improvements that it kept the doctors scratching their heads in amazement. She was in intensive care for nine days before being moved to a regular hospital room. One day three weeks later, the neurologist who had first told me Daisy would die, stopped by Daisy’s room for a visit.

          “I just came by because I wanted to tell you that you are a real miracle!” By now Daisy was able to sit up up on her own, talk, eat, and had even taken a few steps.

          The next day, the same neurologist came by Daisy’s room again. “I just want to make sure you that you really understand what I told you yesterday. You are a genuine miracle! You really need to understand this!”

          While this journey has been long and extremely challenging, Daisy’s recovery has been nothing less than miraculous. Though it required three months of hospitalization and ongoing therapy, today, she gets around on her own using a rolling walker because of ongoing dizziness and limited sensation on her left side. At the same time, she  has reached her goal of playing ping pong again with her friends at the local community center. She is not in a vegetative condition as science predicted, but she cooks vegetables on the stove at our home and then eats them.

          Through all this, we have discovered God’s incredible love for us in new ways and at deeper levels that we would have never understood without going through the things we encountered during the past four years.

          Looking back, we clearly see God’s loving kindness spilling into the darkest hours of our lives. We choose to see what we want to see. We choose to see the gain of God’s love and kindness overflowing into our lives, not those things that have been temporarily lost. Some days are harder than others. That is the reality. However, never have we witnessed God’s strength in our times of weakness as we have over these past four years.

          With grateful hearts, we say with certainty and full conviction, “We know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose for them” (Romans 8:28 NLT).

NEXT UP: “While You ARE Waiting….”

…around the conference table in our church library, I witnessed Wendell Martin re-telling this experience, titled “Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” from his book Go Now: From the Innermost Parts of the Heart to the Uttermost Parts of the World 2023 Westbow Press. Pg. 417-422. Even though my three sons somewhat concurrently attended a private school with Wendell & Daisy’s three children, Lee, Jonnie & Emily, I, not surprisingly because of my “selfish drivenness” back nearly 25 years ago, was quite clueless about the eternal impact of Wendell & Daisy’s lives and ministry, both here in Wayne Co. and in Asia. Hence, I’m compelled now to share Wendell’s account of simply “waiting on the Lord”….

2019: While visiting our daughter and family in Kauai, Hawaii…

“This is the most severe case of a brain stem hemorrhage we’ve ever seen at this hospital,” the neurologist at Wilcox Hospital in Kauai, Hawaii told me. Together we stared at an image of Daisy’s brain on the computer screen. “I must tell you straight up, Mr. Martin…” And with a pause for emphasis, he said, “Your wife is going to die! In a day or two, the pontine portion of her brainstem will begin to swell, and that, in turn, will shut down the auto nervous system that controls her heartbeat and breathing, among other things. There is nothing we can do to help her. If you have family, you need to call them right away. There are some rare cases when a person has survived a stroke like this, but at best, they were in a vegetative condition the rest of their life. So, what do you want us to do? Try to keep her alive on artificial life support or …?”

          My life seemed to end with those words, pieces of it slipping through my fingers faster than I could hold on to them. Everything went gray, numb, and disconnected. It was all coming at me too fast to process.

          “Just give me a few minutes.” I said, walking away without waiting for any reply while desperately trying to stifle the wails of grief that threatened to roar up from depths of my heart.

          What was real? What was important? My world was being ravaged by a tsunami of emotions, overwhelming in a way I had never experienced before. What was real? At the moment, nothing seemed believable. I had to find that answer. The only thing I could think of was that Jesus is real, at least I hoped so. And if He is real, then now is the time, more than ever, that I needed to hang on to Him.

          While several doctors had given me the same prognosis for Daisy, I decided to regard Jesus as one of the doctors in the hospital who had not yet given me his prognosis. In that I had a feeble flicker of hope that, in Him, some other outcome could, just perhaps, apply to Daisy. Or, was that just some kind of wild irrationality?

          I never returned to answer the question the neurologist had asked. I could not be the one to decide Daisy’s future. If she lived, died, or survived as an invalid, it had to be in God’s hands completely.

          As soon as word began spreading that Daisy was in the hospital with a life-threatening stroke, I began receiving calls from quite a few people offering concern, prayers, Bible verses, and advice, lots of advice. Much of what was recommended could be considered home remedies.

          While I greatly appreciated all the genuine concern, I was numb and had no interest in experimenting on Daisy. Others spoke prophetically, and again, I just didn’t have the energy to process all the great things people were saying that “God says …” I just wanted Daisy to be healed. I wanted God to simply show up and make everything better.

          I received a call from a pastor I not had contact with for many years. I was so exhausted physically, emotionally, and spiritually that when he spoke so confidently in my ear over the phone, “Daisy is going to be just fine,” I just wanted to reject it. What I really wanted was someone to share my inner agony.

          “Don’t worry, Wendell. God is showing me that she will recover from this. Just believe!” He went on and on, and the more he talked, the more I wanted to hang up the phone. I had no faith for anything. At least that is how it felt.

          “Hallelujah! Glory! God has this Brother!” he tried to reassure me over the phone. “Wendell, God gave me some Bible verses to give you from Mark 2:1-12. This is God’s Word to you. You got to read it as soon as you get the opportunity.”

          I didn’t want to read anything at that time. However, after processing what the pastor said, I felt that maybe I shouldn’t be too hasty in writing off whatever, however, and by whomever God might be wanting to work. So later in the day, while eating lunch alone in the hospital cafeteria, I read the verses.

When Jesus returned to Capernaum several days later, the news spread quickly that He was back home. Soon the house where He was staying was so packed with visitors that there was no more room, even outside the door. While He was preaching God’s word to them, four men arrived carrying a paralyzed man on a mat. They couldn’t bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, so they dug a hole through the roof above Jesus. Then they lowered the man on his mat, right down in from of Jesus. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralyzed man, “My child, your sins are forgiven.”

          But some of the teachers of religious law who were sitting there thought to themselves, “What is He saying? This is blasphemy! Only God can forgive sins!”

           Jesus knew immediately what they were thinking, so He asked them, “Why do you question this in your hearts? Is it easier to say to the paralyzed man “Your sins are forgiven,’ or ‘Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk’? So I will prove to you that the Son of Man has the authority on earth to forgive sins.” Then Jesus turned to the paralyzed man and said, ”Stand up, pick up your mat, and go home!”

          And the man jumped up, grabbed his mat, and walked out through the stunned onlookers. They were all amazed and praised God, exclaiming, “We’ve never seen anything like this before!” (Mark 2:1 -12 NLT)

          Initially, when I read the verses, my reaction was dismissive, that these were just feel-good verses. They may have made the pastor feel good, but for me, I just felt more helpless and discouraged.

          Forgetting about the phone call, I made preparations to head to the airport to pick up Lee and Jonnie, our two sons, who had taken the first flight possible to rush to their dying mother’s side.

          It was evening when I arrived back at the hospital with our sons. Ellie, our daughter who lived Kauai, met us at the hospital. Together, we went into the room where we found Daisy in a semiconscious condition, unaware that the whole family was at her side.

To be continued tomorrow…

The magnitude of the tasks ahead of us since we returned to OH May 22 made me realize posting for the next two months would definitely be off limits. Seldom during our seven months in Boquete Panama have I shared much of my personal journey. This blog is not about me; it’s all about Him and His plans and desires for us in these last days. I am only to point to Him and encourage you by whatever means He provides me as I seek to be faithful. Actually tonight, I had gotten into bed, and after reflecting 3-4 minutes, I decided to rise and write. It is my favorite hobby. Today I’d risen at 5 am to read, study & pray, as I needed to run by Schlabach Engine before going to the Aultman Gym on Crown Hill at 7 am for my 90 minute routine. I did accomplish much today (wait a minute, He did, not me) as He continually provided me the insights all day right up until chasing me out of bed 2 hours ago. And, believe me, I am so very thankful He was there for me.

          Earlier this evening, I was feeling really guilty when I reflected on how I just shut down with no explanations. So here goes my attempt to bring you up to speed. FYI, the following is a note I sent earlier in the week to friends in Panama that explains our trip home.

Greetings Dear Boquete Friends:

We made the Orlando flight barely because of the short time and long distance thru the terminal. Fortunately, Loretta ordered a wheel chair for me (I was really quite appalled, first time ever I recall having an airport w. chair) and then that person after 10 minutes of guiding two electric chairs wisely intercepted one of those 4 seater golf carts and we were on that for I think 10 min careening thru traffic. I didn’t think the PC airport was that big! And then before boarding, Loretta got pulled out by TSA  and the final call went out twice. They literally went thru every nook & crannie of her carry-on etc . We figured she got pulled because of her 26 trips to Honduras made her the person of interest on that flight.

          We had a wonderful 36 hour reunion in Sarasota with our dogs and her brother and family. Hence the picture, and the night before we left their sons and families all joined us for dinner and goodbyes as they had all gotten rather attached to Riley and Angel the past 7 months. The next day after lunch we gave the dogs their prescriptions for the 20 hr bus ride on the Pioneer private coach that runs Amish between Sarasota and OH-IN. We stopped at the Georgia Welcome station 3 + hrs later, and when I opened up the door to Riley’s kennel to walk & water them, Riley had passed. What a shock! Not sure what happened. Not blaming anyone. Circumstance. At least we had 36 hrs to enjoy him and we figure he’s in heaven now cavorting with Loretta’s mom, who always said Riley was her dog anyway! At least we have our little King Charles, Angel and she is glad to be back home in OH, with us.

          There was more trauma in the apt when we returned as they are now building another apt next door in what was formerly the original PGDunn factory, now a warehouse. Our apt was formerly the office portion of the business. Somehow the drain plumbing under the kitchen sink got disconnected perhaps a month or two ago, such that the water from the dehumidifier over the sink simply ran onto the kitchen floor and beyond; none of which was discovered until 6 hrs before our arrival home! What a mess!

          Other than that, we’re all good. I’m back in my gym in Orrville 3 days a week attempting to safeguard and continue the progress that Ms. Amy started in me. We do have an unreal agenda while here basically reducing our storage footprint. We’re headed to WDC on the 8th of June for Robin’s 3rd birthday for several days. We’d like to get to MN also to visit family, if possible, but appears quite unlikely. We’re looking forward to our return to rejoin you in Boquete before Aug 1, but regardless, whether we’re stuck here longer in OH, for whatever reason or situation that comes down during these interesting climatic and historical times as prophesied, whether here or there, we’re in good hands and have prepared the best we can for such situations. God bless you all in all your plans and endeavors the next months.

Love to All,

Merlin, Loretta, & Angel

The note I’ve been sending our Christian comrades goes something like this:

“We are still seeking God’s direction for our lives for our remaining years. We have a never-ending supply of lost or deceived souls making our acquaintance whether we’re in Dalton OH or Boquete in the Republic of Panama. Satan’s Strong Delusion is being unleashed amongst the church and sadly too many are so clueless. We must RUN & FINISH our race, not merely existing as members near the track, but we ourselves, must insure first we’ve been forgiven, then, are being transformed and empowered while discipling & promptly obeying the Holy Spirit’s biddings NOW! 

Not later, not someday I’ll…, BUT NOW! There is absolutely no time to procrastinate during these last days… Just focus on Jesus! Everything else about us, my dear friends, and especially in our case, our junk in storage, are quite similar to all the trivial nonsensical destructive pursuits of those yet in their work-a-day worlds.”

Now, for the more fun stuff. A year ago I read Wendell Martin’s book “Go Now! From the Innermost Parts of the Heart to the Uttermost Parts of the World” and literally came unglued spiritually in a good way and shortly thereafter moved to Panama. Jon F informed me he was leading a group thru the book two Wed nights each month at KMC but it wasn’t until this past Wed (May 28) I could personally attend.

Wendell was there and he shared from the books last chapter of the forty miracles titled “Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” the story of his wife, Daisy’s catastrophic brain-stem hemorrhage, from which science predicted death in several days; and possibly a vegetative state at the very best. Over the weekend, I’ll prepare the Mon & Tues posts of that very phenomenal chapter, as I am compelled to get that testimonial out to as many people as possible. Text or email if you want a word doc of this chapter 40, or if you want your own book, contact Wendell directly at www.goforthinjesus.name as it is not on Amazon. I’m sure it’s in many local Christian bookstores, as well as in Choice Book racks, or surely should be, I’d think. More on Mon & Tues.

Have a Blessed Weekend clearing out the clutter so you can focus on Jesus’ plan for you today!!!

Picture of Loretta with Angel and Sir O Riley, being reunited 10 pm Mon May 19 after they stayed in Sarasota 7 months with Larry & Debbie while we were in Panama before we left 3 PM Wed May 21 for Wooster.

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipP988gW_1vUera_UKm7Df_1mVrz9Rp4_ql3mt4H