By His Grace, this is my story.

Now aged 60 I look back over my life and realise that one might think that God has had a piece of elastic attached to me. I so often have stretched it to its full length only to find myself being snapped back to face the consequences of my waywardness. God has never turned His back on me even though I have tested every possible boundary there is.

I grew up in a family where Mum and Dad went to church (not very often) out of, what I can only see now, as a sense of duty. Mum, had a faith but was unaware that she could have a personal relationship with Jesus...fairly typical of the Anglican and Catholic teaching. Somehow the “Good News Message” was missed by most of us in these congregations...in my case,praise God, the seed must have been sown!

Dad came from a Christian home but his home life was pretty dysfunctional due to an alcoholic/gambling father who was rarely there for his family so consequently when Dad was about 13 or 14 his parents divorced (almost unheard of back then). He then grew up in a house full of women, mother, grandmother and four or five maiden aunts. In later years I knew my Dad’s father as a wonderful gentleman and I really looked forward to his visits. My Gran played a big part in my understanding of God; I knew that she read her Bible daily and constantly prayed for her family...she was a very important and beautiful part of my life; I still miss her after all these years.

I was the eldest in a family of 3 siblings; two younger brothers. Most Sundays we would go to Sunday school and I in particular stayed involved with our church til my mid teens. I taught a little Sunday school and sang in the choir and went to Holy Communion. At school my friends new me as a bit of a rebel but “religious”.

Dad was a WW11 POW in Germany for 4 1/2 years and as a result was very emotionally damaged; many of his generation were and who wouldn’t be after all that they had seen and been through! Dad and Mum became engaged by letter from one of the Stalags where Dad was incarcerated. Mum waited faithfully for his return for over 5 years. She once admitted to me that she didn’t really know if she loved him as she didn’t know him very well before he went away but she could not bear to let him down. They were married not long after Dad returned home and she remained faithful and loyal to my Dad for over 50 years. It was a very tumultuous marriage and even as a child I wondered why she put up with it...why she didn’t run away! Dad like his dad became a slave to the bottle which started when I was about 12 years old after he had a couple of strokes (which he fully recovered from). Our home literally became a living hell for my mother, my brothers and me. In Dad's defence he never was unable to work and he was a good provider; it was just those nights that we all tried to escape.

Dad joined the Free Masons and for a couple of years we went as a family to the Masonic Christmas parties. I don’t think that he moved up through the degrees and he didn’t stay an active member for very long but the (Masonic) oaths he took were obviously planted with the intended impact. Right to the end of his life he refused to talk about the Masonic movement with me and became enraged if I suggested that it was not what it seemed.

Mum had loving Christian parents but was a very shy person (quietly stubborn) with many phobias and problems which grew worse after years of living a sad married life. She grew up in a large family of 10 children on a very isolated property in outback Queensland. They rarely saw people other than family who lived on neighbouring properties.

Mum gave her heart to Jesus in 1996, thanks to the wonderful faith of her 80 year old sister who travelled from Queensland to Sydney for the express purpose of seeing Mum and to pray with her. Sadly Mum had been suffering from dementia for some years prior to that but miraculously, her failing mind, knew Jesus. She died two weeks after Dad in 2001. Only the Lord knows where my Dad’s heart was at the time of his passing!

My brothers both left home at a very young age basically to get away from the unpleasant home life while I stayed, under sufferance, til I saw a possible escape and so was married at the age of 21 to an Englishman who was a professed atheist. I had drifted away from the church completely and had a very poor self image...riddled with guilt for the way I had been living my life. We had two beautiful daughters before the marriage ended after only 5 years. One of the biggest contributors to its demise was my husband’s sordid interest and obsession with pornography and what that lead to in our relationship.

God was a distant memory by this stage as I believed that I had sunk about as low as I could go and I guess I assumed that He wouldn’t want to know me...I was so “unworthy”! So I just continued to sink into all sorts of “out of character” lifestyle choices. Looking back now I realise that God might have been a distant memory to me but I was in no way forgotten by Him...His hand was on my life but I just didn’t feel it...I had been too busy putting as much distance as I could between us; or so I thought!

It was towards the end of 1974 that I was what I now know to be anorexic. I was smoking heavily and drinking a lot just to get through each day. I often thought about suicide in those dark days but knew enough to be scared of not being "right" with God; also the thought of the two babies lying asleep in the next room made be realise that I couldn't leave them to face life without their mother...they were, in a sense, my glue! To cap it all off my ex husband wanted the house sold and without knowing where I was going to live with my two babies I set too with the paint brush to prepare the house for sale. It sold within a few months and I now had $6000.00, nowhere to live and the girl’s father just disappeared out of our lives forever.

I could never really understand why Mum & Dad didn’t step in and insist on us going to live with them, even if it was for only a while; having said that, it probably would have been very hard to go back with my two babies to the life that, I had mistakenly thought, I was escaping when I left home to marry. They did however give support to us in many other ways...they would always be there for us in the years to come and I loved them both very much because I know they did the very best they could!

My darling Gran died 25th February, 1976 which was a huge blow as I had lost a special person and the most stable influence in my life.

Towards the end of 1974 I met my second husband, a 40 year old confirmed bachelor, with a wild streak, a racehorse trainer, horse breaker and farrier and a heart for my girls. I don’t think that marriage was what he had in mind but he had allowed us into his life. I bought a caravan and we plugged into his power; we set up a home of sorts. We were married in 1976 and our son was born in 1977. In 1983 my husband legally adopted our girls.

My health was bad; I have been a bronchial asthmatic all my life and the climate where we were living was slowly killing me. Smoking didn’t help my cause much either but for years I had had an on-again-off-again "love affair" with nicotine. Not only were the circumstances affecting my health but also the health of the children and my husband who seemed to be always sick with colds, bronchitis and constantly on antibiotics.

Our doctor told us that we would have to move to a drier climate out west but at this stage we had no idea where. The move had to be somewhere with stables so that we could continue training the race horses but that was easier said than done with absolutely no money and very little of anything.

Now, this is where the miracles begin; suddenly out of the blue my great aunts tell us that they would like to give us some money to buy a house and to help us move. After much looking and many dead ends we had no choice but to choose a little place called Gulargambone. We could buy a small home there and there were some stables that we could lease to keep the business going. Gulargambone with a population of 500 in the middle of, pretty much, nowhere! It did have a dry climate, it did have 2 houses for sale and it did have the stables. We chose the house that wasn’t falling down, bought it and moved.

We had many dramas for quite a while; when we first got there our horses were let out of the stables (one being badly injured and of course the only one that was race fit), horse rugs stolen and our house nearly burnt down etc-etc. The fuses kept blowing in the power box so after much hassling to get an electrician one finally came and told us that all the wires at the back of the power board had caught on fire and fused together. He couldn’t tell us how we hadn’t lost our house (possibly even our lives); being built of Cypress-pine it would have been completely gone in minutes. What a miracle!

After settling the girls into the Gulargambone Central School I started to check out what this little town had to offer and found that for 20 cents each the girls could have ballet lessons one day a week for an hour after school. I arrived at the hall to drop them off for their first lesson and was met by the teacher who introduced herself to me. Even then, as we have often talked about it since, we felt an immediate connection and from that day on we formed a friendship that is still as strong to this day. It was this lady who led me to Jesus. She is my beautiful sister in Christ and I thank God for her friendship. Our two daughters and our son had some great times at Sunday school and we met with so many lovely Christians during our time there.

We only stayed in that little place for a moment in time as things didn’t exactly work out. It was the start of a severe drought and as we had closed the stables down (a long story in itself) my husband was relying on horse breaking, piece work in shearing sheds and on farms which was becoming impossible to find; no rain, no work!

We saw an advertisement for a job about 6 hours away and decided to apply for it. They were looking for someone to develop a thoroughbred horse stud. We got the job but decided that we should give it a 3 month trial as there was just an uneasy feeling about the setup. I stayed in Gulargambone with the children so that they could see the school year out and my husband moved to the new job. It was a tough three months for me with the kids on my own and for my husband it was a very lonely time.

Well it didn’t work out as it was supposed to but we applied for another position managing and developing a thoroughbred stud in another little town and got it. For the next 15 years we worked there, put our three children through private schools and enjoyed a good lifestyle. The one thing that was missing was a continuity of good Christian leaders in the local Anglican Church and so once again my Christian walk took a bit of a battering. I continued to go to church and saw quite a few ministers come and go but there was only one who was Spirit filled...I still keep in touch with both he and his wife. The children attended Sunday school and other Christian activities during that time. In 1992 I went to Cursillo (a Christian 3 day retreat which is run by the Anglican Church) and on that weekend I met another beautiful sister in Christ who also is a big part of my life still today.

In 1988 I was stunned to find out that I was again pregnant with our fourth child, 11 years after our son. I was then 40 and didn’t do the whole thing too easily but again a long story. I have to say that this child, now an adult of course, has been a wonderful blessing in all our lives.

We left the stud in 1996 and moved to another town in the middle of N.S.W.; the town that my husband had moved to at the age of 14 when his family’s sheep station was sold. We started a variety business which we ran for 4 years and then sold. Currently, after buying it, we are running a business that my husband’s family started back in 1912. We dream of selling the business and our home so that we can retire and become nomads for a while...God willing it will happen soon!

I am attending a Pentecostal Church in our town and I love it! At age 74 my husband has given his life to Jesus this year. My son is a beautiful Christian man and to our delight (again this year) has married the most wonderful girl, a Christian, from the States. Two of my daughters have a heart for the Lord and are works in progress. My husband and I have been blessed with a grandchild (to our oldest daughter) and there is another on the way, due in October. I will continue to pray for all of my girls in each of their situations because I know that God has brought us this far and He will take us all the way home to His Kingdom...I have seen His hand on our lives in some spectacular circumstances in spite of us He has been faithful. Praise You Lord!

One last thing I have to confess...although I’m not going to go into detail (my poor family have heard enough I’m sure). I have to say that there is not a Commandment that I haven’t broken...only by the work completed on the Cross by Jesus am I saved. I am so grateful for all He has done for me and I pray that by His Grace I will live my life to bless His Holy name.