In this episode, Gina continues her conversation with Mickey & Karen Stonier. They discuss their book Get Out of Control, how God works all things for good, and the freedom that comes when we surrender and trust Jesus even in the hardest things. God is a relentless pursuer. He is a Redeemer. Whether we can see Him moving, or feel like He’s here or not, it doesn’t change the reality of his presence, it doesn’t change the truth of his word, it doesn’t change who He is. Even in the darkest places. He is there. He’s moving. He’s speaking. He’s redeeming. He’s pursuing.
Check out Mickey & Karen’s book Get Out of Control
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Follow along by listening below, starting at 17:04.
Messy Redemption
Mickey:
We were in Catalina as a family, and my granddaughter, who was 10 years old at the time, said, “I have a game. Let’s play “fortunately – unfortunately.” She made this up. So we sat in a circle and you create a the story, but the next person had to say, “but unfortunately,” and make it go negative, and then the next person would say, “but fortunately,” and make the story positive, and so on.
I actually use this as an example in my chaplain training that I do for crisis intervention. So I tell the story, I say, “Up in Huntington Beach, there was this family on vacation, and they were out swimming in the ocean, in warm summer water. And the dad swam out past the surf and got bit by a shark.” And then the next person has to say, “but fortunately,” and they tell a story.
People laugh and they come with all these scenarios. But it’s actually a true story. A family from New Jersey was out on summer vacation. The dad got bit on the backside, but survived and was rushed to the hospital. They stitched him up and they canceled their vacation and headed home. He was so traumatized, but after he healed up, the pain just got worse and worse.
Finally, he goes back to the doctors, they can’t figure it out, so they do an MRI and find a tumor on his kidney and they catch it very early. That normally isn’t even diagnosed till it’s far too late, so they did surgery. I saw the news article and it said, “Shark bite saves man’s life.”
And I know so many stories from car accidents where someone is rushed into the hospital, they end up having to do surgery, and they find a major problem with the heart that they’re able to repair, where if they would have waited that person would’ve died.
Gina:
That happened with my uncle! So, my mom was an alcoholic my whole life. And my mom’s sister’s husband, my uncle Bob, was a burly guy, and he didn’t know Jesus either. And the joke with those of us who came to Jesus, was the day that uncle Bob and my mom know Jesus, Jesus is coming back.
So, my uncle was at a construction site, and he fell off a ladder, and did something to his shoulder and needed surgery. Because of that, they found that he had blocked arteries and would’ve died of a heart attack. As they were doing bypass surgery, they found that he had cancer that would’ve killed him.
If he wouldn’t have fallen off of that ladder… well, that kept him alive for a year or two, to the point that my mom ended up in the hospital dying. That’s a whole other story about her alcoholism. And we did an intervention, she went into detox. She went to Calvary ranch. She did come to Jesus.
But just again, kind of back to that lack of understanding of emotional mental health at the time, there was no infrastructure to really help her through once she was sober. Now you have to process not only what God did for you, but how to receive it, and how to heal, and how, how to face the reason you started drinking to begin with.
So there was none of that set up. So she was drinking really fast right away and retreated from God and us, and just kind of disappeared. Six months later we found her, and she had basically drunk herself to death, and was in the hospital.
So we’re in the hospital and my uncle was in cancer treatment. His prognosis was really good. It wasn’t life threatening, but he was in the middle of radiation treatments. And we went to visit him at the hospital to share with him about my mom, first of all, and then also to share with him what God was doing in the midst of it.
He just cried and then Norm asked permission to pray for him, and he prayed for him. It wasn’t like a prayer to receive Jesus. It was just a prayer for him. And then exactly one week later my mom passed away. One week later, my uncle goes in for routine radiation. They went in, they prepped him for it. They left the room, they came back, and he died.
And come to find out his son, my cousin, was able to lead him to the Lord right before that. But it was almost like the Lord kept him alive long enough for my mom to die so that we could share God’s love with him. That we could share what God’s love and redemption actually looks like.
Everything about my mom’s death from a world’s perspective is a tragedy, “This is a terrible loss, what a waste of a life.” But this redemption that came in through and how God met me, that’s all another story, but God did miraculous things. When you walk through something like that, your faith changes.
The word of God that we talked about already, it’s the powerful Word of God. But when we say Scripture out of context like, “All things work together for those that love God and are called according to His purpose.” We can actually do damage with God’s Word, when we use them flippantly or out of context, or we don’t understand them.
But then in the middle of that, you realize, “Oh my gosh, it’s true.” It’s not a Hobby Lobby decoration that you buy, it is true, and it’s deep and it’s wide and it’s painful sometimes. And it’s messy. Sometimes the Bible is messy. It’s excruciating, but it’s redemption, right?
The Parable of the Vineyard
Mickey:
God is using all these amazing men and women, whose lives are totally messed up. I mean the whole story of the Bible, when you think you’ve messed up, just read the Bible! Because every single person who God uses, God doesn’t hide any of their garbage.
Gina:
And we try to hide our own garbage! That’s what living under religion encourages us to do. We gather and sanitize everything. And that’s what hurts people. Now, I see a whole generation of younger people, and especially those that grew up in church, that are walking away because they were so hurt by that, “Sweeping under the rug.”
Everybody’s tripping over the bodies that are under the rug as they come in, and that’s not an indictment, it’s not an accusation. We are all weak, we are all broken., and we do these things again, to cover up with self-protection.
Karen:
I want to go back to your uncle’s story and your mom’s, because as I listen to that, I can see myself and other people thinking, “that’s awful” or “this is terrible.” And this perspective of we lost her, she died too early, and he’s not gonna be at the wedding of his children.
Yet again, if we can look up and realize the worldly perspectives, what we have been groomed from little kids to believe and think and see in situations. We started a little phrase within our family when different things happen, “Wow do we know?”
Look at your uncle who got saved because of what happened through your mom, God was restored and redeeming. To look at whether it’s a flat tire or something like cancer, how do we know what God’s doing? There’s this whole Spiritual realm in which He’s always lovingly, actively, working.
Gina:
Even in those last days with my mom in the hospital, she was a self-inflicted alcoholic who was uninsured. This was a 1998, and I’d gone through a lot of things with my grandparents in hospitals. You have to advocate for yourself, and you don’t get a private room.
But for my mom, the second day she was there, she was in a private room. Somebody had washed her face and braided her hair and put flowers in the room. It wasn’t any of us. There was just such a demonstration of, even in that, the Lord going, “She’s mine.”
I woke up the next day after she went into the hospital and I remember waking up and going, “Lord, I don’t see you anywhere. I don’t get this. I don’t get it. I had my mom back for the first time, for two weeks, and then it’s over and here she is. I don’t see you. And I don’t know what’s going on.”
I was sitting in her hotel room, and by this time she’s comatose and we’re basically waiting. Her organs are shutting down and it was just her and I, and I had this encounter with the Lord. That was the most profound I’ve ever had.
And God just said, audibly, “She’s mine.” And I looked at her, and there’s a parable that I never understood and always made me mad — it’s the parable of the vineyard owner. He goes out and hires someone at nine, and at noon, and at three, and at the end of the day. He pays them all exactly the same.
They’re like, “That’s not fair. I’ve worked eight hours, they worked two.” And the vineyard owner responds, “It’s my money, and I can do with it what I want.” That’s the end of the story. I’ve always thought that this is ridiculous.
But as I sat in that room by myself, and I turned around, I said, “You’re getting paid, you’ve done nothing, and you’re getting paid. And you know what? I’m so okay with it. I get it. Because that is grace. That is mercy. That is God’s love that is relentlessly pursuing us, even when we’re clueless and don’t get it. So whatever we’re facing, even in the darkest things happening, God is present. He’s a Redeemer and He’s a pursuer.
Karen:
Always.
Gina:
Always.
Check out the first part of this conversation: Get Out of Control
Check out the Dwell Meditations
