After 10 YEARS— Melanie is Restored!!!

Sowing & Increasing

One morning the Lord reminded me of the two most hopeless Restoration Journeys that I still have ever seen over more than two decades of ministering. They were two women who came to me, years apart, but each had absolutely HOPELESS situations!

Yet would you believe that God used these women to teach ME something I almost missed. Let me introduce you to the first woman, Melanie and her Restored Marriage Testimony.

Helping & Focusing on Others!!

Melanie had believed God for her marriage for over 10 long YEARS!! She found my ministry and began coming to my weekly fellowship meetings. Very soon she and I became close friends and my four children began calling her Aunt Melanie.

Hearing all the things she was doing in her desire to restore her marriage to her husband, nothing made any sense to me. She was doing EVERYTHING right and yet she still did not have a restored marriage after almost 10 years.

(pictured above: Melanie, Erin's daughters, 5-year-old Tyler, who is now happily married with 3 children, and also Tara, as an infant, who is now a young lady and did much of our site's web design.)

Melanie was from a long line of powerful Christians: well-known missionaries and pastors. And interesting to me, also, was that she and her husband were still surprisingly very close, spending time together as he came and went from their very spacious home. She was not contentious or many of the other things that caused marriage destruction.

Yet like all of us, Melanie wanted a faithful husband and for her husband to choose her over the other woman he had been seeing for all those very long and painful nine plus, almost ten years! But after so many years, it seemed impossible to me, to her, to everyone but God!

What God did to change Melanie's situation instantly, suddenly, and miraculously will surprise you as much as it surprised me. It is something that I have tried to encourage women to do who came to me in desperation for their marriage to be restored. Yet, it was only recently that I realized it was that special hidden KEY to unlock restoration and to finding and living the abundant life!

Not surprisingly it's the very message that Jesus taught and lived—but oh so very few Christians follow. The word Christian actually translates to "followers of Christ" therefore all of us who claim to be Christians need to be willing to follow Him and His example, which means...

Our lives must be about caring for OTHERS more than caring about ourselves.

Caring for OTHERS was what I saw in Melanie. She always lived that way, but once she began coming to our Restoration Fellowship meetings, from the very beginning, she forgot all about how long she had waited for her miracle. Instead she began to think of others: caring for others, and not with the mindset that God would do anything for her.

Once she was surrounded by women who had needs, she began focusing on them, and no longer on herself or her restoration!! (pictured above right: Melanie & Erin at a Restoration Fellowship luncheon in 1993.)

The first I noticed this difference in Melanie, and her focus on others, was when I watched a young man bringing in a comfortable chair through the doors of our classroom where we met each week. Melanie looked for, found, purchased, and then secured this young man to deliver the overstuffed chair and set it up in the back corner of the room. Why? Because there was a woman who began coming to our meetings who was dying of cancer. Melanie wanted to be sure that she could sit comfortably during our one to two hour meetings each week.

Next I watched Melanie organize weekly picnics for the young mothers of our group. Then so organized and encouraged the older mothers to begin to help teach these young mothers how to "calmly" and "lovingly" train and discipline their own children.

Melanie even played a key role in the restoration of my own marriage. Though my husband had already returned, all of our furniture and personal belongings were still locked up in a storage facility miles away from where we lived. Because adultery reduces a man to a “loaf of bread,” we simply did not have the money to rent a truck, or pay for gas to drive the 20 hours round trip. Melanie mentioned this to her estranged husband one evening who suggested the women in the fellowship simply take up a collection.

Melanie told me later that she just chuckled to herself thinking "You just don't understand. These are single moms, most of whom are on welfare and food stamps!" But she kept silent and asked God to show her how to obey her husband. Immediately a thought came to her mind and she grabbed a clean yogurt container and wrote with a marker "Thiele Family Fund." She turned with a smile and told her husband that it was a "wonderful idea" and that she would bring it to the following fellowship meeting.

It wasn't more than a few weeks later that the women had collected almost half of what we needed, which was a huge miracle. The following day I shared what these women were doing with my own father when I went to visit him. My father interrupted me and told me to get his checkbook. I told him that was not why I told him the story, but he insisted and wrote out a check for the other half!! God used Melanie to restore what the locust had eaten—all our family belongings and furniture!! I sowed into her life, and I reaped a blessing I had never imagined.

Melanie was always faithful in the little things: Little things that resulted in huge blessings for others. The greatest blessing was when she offered to take over my fellowship meetings while I took a six week maternity leave when I had my first "restoration baby"—my daughter Tara!

(pictured left: Erin with newborn, Tara & sister Tyler)

It was at the end of that very week that Melanie, who had forgotten about herself, but had focused on helping and blessing others—that GOD remembered her and blessed HER!!

After 10 YEARS Melanie's husband left the other woman for good! And to prove it was final, he wrote a song for Melanie that he sang to her at her church in front of hundreds of people!! People who knew what had been going on all those long ten years, who thought she was crazy for believing that God could restore her marriage—they ALL watched GOD do what He had promised!

I was just one who got to be there as her husband sang the country song he wrote for her that chronicled his mistakes and his love for Melanie. Even the men who witnessed him singing the song right to his wife, brought all the men and all the women to tears!!

We have seen this same thing over and over and over again: Women who stepped up and begin helping just one person, and then a few more—these are the women who FINALLY received their MIRACLE—GOD blessing them with restoration AND an abundant life!

SPREAD Encouragement through His promises!!  

Melanie found a way to GIVE encouragement with everyone she met. When I first came to visit her in her home, she opened a tiny tattered box that held small cards with a promise on it. Today you can do this very same thing but not just woman you meet face-to-face but women around the world! As an Evangelist.