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Testimony of Joerg & Gaby Schaefer |
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Joerg: Becoming a believer in the Lord Jesus goes hand in hand with the discovery that the Bible is full of truth and life and excitement. At times I wonder why we did not discovered this earlier in our lives. But it does need the Spirit of God to open our eyes and hearts and to renew the mind, as Paul writes in the letter to the Romans. When we grow older we tend to get colder when we read of the things we don’t really like because they go against what we thought and wanted. Then comes the moment when we start to explain away the edge here a little bit or bend there a little bit so that we can continue to agree easily. That is when the brother has to step in. That’s when John the Baptist has to appear. The Lord said, that mountains have to come down and valleys to be raised up before His way is prepared. Yes, and very often John is sent in form of a brother, or a sister, or a wife or husband or even circumstances. Living together in a community provides the voice of the Lord every day. That is - when I look back - the most precious thing the Lord provided for my life over the years. Coming from Europe to Africa with a very intellectual und rigid mind set it takes long and many times a brother or two to point back to the ways of the Lord. Who of the European Christians can discern easy what is humanistic and what is biblical? Many Christians not even understand the importance of this and take the one for the other and don’t understand why there is no life happening. When we are entrapped it is impossible on our own terms to stop and to get rid of negativity or self-righteousness. We don’t even see it - we only wonder why the blessings of the Lord are lacking in our lives Many times I wondered why Africa? Why so far away from my own language and culture and the things I was comfortable with? Today I know why I did need that “uprooting”. The renewing of the mind is one of the great miracles in our time and so essential. And it needs a brother that is not engaged with the same comforts to see it and to have the courage to point it out to you. Praise God for brothers and sisters - that is our family.
Gaby: I will try and continue with a few added thoughts, about 6 years later than the last pages. In the mean time our oldest daughter Rachel has grown up into a young woman and she herself has chosen to follow the Lord. I can remember our first years as a young family, still in Switzerland, and me as a young mother, how much I prayed for her. I can see now how much the Lord has answered those prayers in an amazing way. She does not have to carry that old inheritance, she did not have to go through a rebellious youth. She has vision for her live and a good foundation. Coming back to our own lives, we can say that the more we ask the Lord to take us forward, the more things come to the surface that need dealing with… Coming originally from Europe, we grew up very much without guidelines, with a lot of “freedom”. Through the way our parents raised us, we had little order and discipline established in our lives, or we chose to ignore whatever guidelines they did give us. This created a lot of insecurity in us and a lack of having a healthy conscience. The Bible clearly speaks about the importance of discipline in a child’s life and also about the consequences of not applying it properly. It will cause problems, and eventually the parents will have to bear those consequences as well as the children. So we were a part of that generation that grew up sort of in the sixties and seventies, in a time when it became fashionable not to respect authorities of any kind anymore. That mindset has never stopped ever since and it is still becoming worse and worse. As believers we know that God is not only a loving Father and our Saviour, but he has many other sides that are part of his character. He is the absolute ruler over all creation, he wants to establish his authority upon our lives, he is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and in that way he will deal with our character. He will raise up the valleys and bring down the mountains, if we allow him to do that. But what does that mean… ….in our case it definitely means that these valleys are all the wrong foundations since childhood days. For me as a woman, and as a wife, I can see that much has been established through a godly type of authority, through my husband that is bold enough to tell me when I am wrong, to confront me and not to give into my ungodly strengths. This has broken many strongholds that were over me and that had ruled and affected my live in a big way. It has delivered me from old and destructive patterns, that were always there but because of growing up and living in a humanistic society, they were never discovered and addressed. I can say now, looking back at these very difficult first years of marriage, I know what caused my own downfall. It was that whole package of negativity and strength that can only be dealt with in the Lord, in an environment of godly and discerning people that care enough to speak the truth in love. Today I can enjoy my live, where as before it has always been a burden. I know that I can trust the Lord to bring about his full purpose for my live, I have experienced time after time his faithfulness in my live, he is truly the only one that has access to every corner of the human heart and he is a loving father that cares for us in an amazing way. |