Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / October 13, 2020 | Expresso - Mona Cope

Transcript

October 13, 2020 | Expresso - Mona Cope · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Mona Cope.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really nervous about this.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: So in opening, I want to just say that God is faithful even when we're not.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: He will never leave you, even when you turn your back on him.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you allow him, he is the great healer and the great rebuilder.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: My parents met while Daddy was in the army.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: My mother worked at an ice cream shop, and he walked in one day and he saw her.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: He asked him, asked her to uh go out with him, and she said, I don't know anything about you.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he proceeded to lay all of his identification out on the countertop.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Now you know about me.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Will you go out with me?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, she said yes.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: In 1958, they were married January of 1958.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: In July, my sister was born.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And shortly after in 1960, my brother was born in January, and I was born in June of 1962.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was raised in Denver, Colorado, in a godly home, a strict Baptist home.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: No cussing, no drinking, no dancing.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I can remember going to church on Sundays and Wednesday nights, and quite often we would spend the Sunday afternoons gathered around the piano singing all gospel songs.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I accepted Jesus into my heart in sixth grade at a church camp and was baptized the next Sunday at church.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: We also enjoyed camping, fishing, going to the lake and boating and water skiing with friends, trips to Arkansas to visit our relatives.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas city slickers got our country learning.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: My self-esteem was destroyed at an early age.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: For as long as I can remember, I was compared to my older sister.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: She's tall, beautiful, talented, short, I'm short, plain, not talented, a tomboy.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: She got A's and B's in school, and my brother and I struggled to get C's and D's.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: I can still hear the words ringing in my ears.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why can't you be more like your sister?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up, I was believing, I was ugly and stupid.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: In junior high, a guy that I liked came to our house one day.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: He looked at my sister's picture and he asked me if there was anyone else like her around.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: A dagger to my young heart.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: My freshman year of high school, I often heard myself referred to as a pirate's dream.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: You see, I hadn't blossomed yet.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was flat as a board.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I can remember things being said about me like, if you turn sideways and stick your tongue out, you could pass as a zipper.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, between my summer and my freshman, or between the summer, between my freshman and sophomore years, I finally blossomed.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I made it over five foot and was never referred to as a pirate stream again.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: I met my high school sweetheart in my junior year.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't believe a guy that cute could be interested in me.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: We dated over the next two years, much to my parents' dismay.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was constantly defending his actions or lack thereof to my parents.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: I graduated in May of 80, and we were married in October of 81.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: We lived in the A-frame above the apartment, an A-frame apartment above the KOA campground store that his parents owned in Strasbourg.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Small.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: His parents lost the campground in 83, and we moved in with my parents for six long months until we can afford to move to an apartment.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was required to stay shapely.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever I started gaining weight, he would let me know with sly little comments.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: One day, late into our marriage, I was getting dressed and he walked up behind me and he pinched the skin on my fat and proceeded to tell me I was getting rolls.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Shortly after we moved out of my parents' house, much to my horror, I discovered his addiction to pornography.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I had no one to talk to about it.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And me being the attention-starved person that I was.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And not wanting to fail in my marriage, and not wanting my parents to say I told you so, believing in the good that I could see in him, and thinking, I can turn him around.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: However, it was just the opposite.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And slowly but surely, I gave myself, my identity, away.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I let him drag me into that deep, dark, ugly world.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: He had a bad temper, and everything was turned back on me and became my fault.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knew we were leading double lives.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: We were active this whole time during in church.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I made it look like everything was normal on the outside.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: But on the inside, I was dying.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: In 84, we were blessed with our oldest daughter.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: I went to dental assisting school and shortly after, I had barely graduated in 85 when I was in a bud car accident.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I walked around with my head on my neck for the next three months, or on my shoulder for the next three months.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: At that time, I was told I couldn't continue my job, but I did.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: In 89, we were blessed with our third child, Michelle.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: She was a surprise.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: I had gone to see my doctor about getting my tubes tied because we didn't want any more children.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: He came into the room with a grin on his face.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he asked me, What are you here for?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, to talk about getting my tubes tied.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: He says, We'll talk about that later.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, we have to talk about your prenatal care.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Shortly after his birth, we moved into an apartment across the street from my parents.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I first met Mike.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Our kids went to school together, and he lived next door to my parents, and we lived in the apartments across the street from them.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Until he moved his family to Kansas.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: In 1984, my ex and I bought our first house.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: A year after we moved in, I started getting sick.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Weird dizzy spells, sinus, colds, migraines.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: My emotions and moods were going crazy.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I was going crazy.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I could literally poke myself in the eye and not even know that I was doing it other than to see the ripples.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I was tested for all kinds of things, including lupus and MS, all of which came back negatives.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: This went on for 10 years.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: I finally, um, the doctor that I worked for, he sent me to a near nose and throat specialist.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: He galtered my sinuses and found mold and conditus in them.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: We had our house tested and found out that it was full of mold.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was in the walls.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: It took two treatments of fogging the house before it came down to livable conditions.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: In 2001, my daddy suffered what's called a triple A.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's where the garden hose in your body that feeds your blood to your body ruptured at home.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And they told us he was five minutes from passing away when we got him to the hospital.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: He spent 58 days in ICU, and every single one of them were touch and go.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: While he was there, my mother, sister, and brother and I would gather around his bed and we would sing.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: We knew he could hear us, and we would sing to encourage him to stay with us.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And we were blessed with 20 more years with him.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: In 2003, we were granted our first grandbaby, Emily.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: In 2005, we lost my sister's baby boy in Iraq.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: His name was Chad, and our family was devastated.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: In 2007, I shattered a disc in my neck and had to have a plate placed.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: After that, I couldn't do my dental assisting job anymore.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, my ex lost his job and had to take a job that was half the pay.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: In 2008, we lost the house and our marriage started really falling apart, even though I didn't want to admit it.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: In 2012, our first grandson, Blake.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: In 2012, on my birthday, my ex came to me and said that he's not going to sign another lease with me on the house that we were renting at the time.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: I remember asking him, what are we going to do?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's when he told me he would live in his car if he needed to, and he didn't care what I did.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: I found out later that he'd already been looking at apartments with another woman that was two years older than our oldest child.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: How could he do this to me after all that I had given up for him?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was angry, devastated.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I had to learn to forgive.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hanging on to that anger didn't hurt him any at all.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was only hurting me.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: In 2013, our divorce was final, and I was finally free to spend time with my family, which I hadn't been able to with since we were married.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: I posted on Facebook we were getting a divorce, and Mike came back into the picture.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: We kept in touch off and on over the years.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: In 2014, after I'd lost a couple of jobs due to illness and depression, Mike offered for me to live with him in Topeka.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: I had to make the difficult decision to leave my family behind just when I got them back and start my life over in Kansas.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: In 2015, I got a call from my youngest daughter who was pregnant at the time.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: She was going in for emergency C-section.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: She'd had a maternal fatal hemorrhage.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Hazel Grace was born.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: She stayed with us for nine days, and then she went to be with Jesus.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: During that time, learning to pray, Thy will be done, was the toughest thing that I could do.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'd started attending TBC with Mike when I moved out here.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: I attended the divorce care class and came out engaged.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Something that didn't go over well.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Mike and I got married in 2016, and we bought a house.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: We live fishing and camping and fishing and riding motorcycles.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And did I mention fishing?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: We also that year were blessed with a grandchild with grandson number two.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Chad.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: He was named after my sister's baby boy.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Grandson number three, Gideon.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: One day on a Friday afternoon in May of 2018, I was making plans to take the dogs and go fishing at the lake, like I usually do when it was warm.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I had a seizure in the backyard.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: We figure I lost about an hour and a half that I don't know anything about.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Resulted in the finding of a brain tumor.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: I had that removed.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And before I had been getting horrible migraine headaches, so bad that it would make my left side of my face droop, and I could barely hold my left eye open.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't had a migraine since I had surgery.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that same year, we were blessed with granddaughter number four, Victoria Grace.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Later that year in October, my daddy said, enough is enough.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And two weeks later he went to be with Jesus.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: In January of 19, 2019, I attended a wellness revelation class given by Valerie Tolin.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: During that class, I told God if I could use his, if he could use my story to help someone else, I would be willing to tell it.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you better be careful what you tell God.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because a year later, Miss Connie contacted me.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: After Connie read through my story, my journey, she asked me how I kept my faith.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't about me.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's because God never gave up on me.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: There were a lot of dark days.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was mad, angry, and often I believed God's grace was for everyone else but me.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: A lie from Satan.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow he kept calling me back, and I've learned to find my identity in him alone, and he is rebuilding me.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: My loss may be great, but my God is greater.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back, God is restoring everything that Satan has stolen from me.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: My identity, my husband, my family, my home.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And my youngest daughter that lost the baby.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as Connie said, she's been blessed with triplets.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Who are now this is a month old.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um they're six months old now.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: So and they were born the same month that Hazel Grace was.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I came across the story that I want to share with you if I have time.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Gracefully Broken.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was in the Dollar Tree last night, and there was a lady with two kids behind me in long a long line.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: One was a big kid and one was a toddler.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: The bigger one had a pack of glow sticks, and the baby was screaming for them.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: So mom opened the pack and gave him one, which stopped his tears.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: He walked around with it, smiling and shaking and waving it around.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Till the boy took it back.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: The older boy took it back.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Mom was about to get on to him, but then the older boy bent the glow stick and handed it back to the baby.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: As we walked outside at the same time, the baby noticed that the stick was glowing, and his brother said, I had to break it so you could get the full effect from it.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: I almost ran because I could hear God saying to me, I had to break you to show you why I created you.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: You had to go through it so you could fulfill your purpose.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: That little baby was just a happy swinging the unbroken glow stick around in the air because he didn't understand what it was created to do was to glow.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are some people who will be content just being.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: But some of us that God has chosen, we've been broken.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: We have to get sick, we have to lose a job, we have to go through a divorce, we have to suffer with disease of addiction.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: We have to bury our spouse, parents, best friends, our children, grandchildren.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: But in those moments of desperation, God is breaking us.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when the breaking is done, then we will be able to see the reason for which we were created.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: So when you see us glowing, just know that we've been broken but healed by his grace and his mercy.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.