Pondering Knoll: December 2014

Monday, December 22, 2014

In Loving Memory of Aubrey Andrews 1994-2014

Aubrey was a friend and sister in Christ to me. I first met Aubrey when she and Eddy started coming to our church a few years ago. She was a fairly new Christian and was eager to learn about the Bible and grow in her relationship with the Lord. She was a beautiful young woman who was full of life. She said the turning point in her life was when she believed in and accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as her personal Savior. Even though she had a difficult upbringing herself, she overcame it, and wanted nothing more than to give her own son a better life. He was her absolute pride and joy of life. She was a wonderful mother, and she loved children, loved to learn, and was working towards the goal of being a Pediatrician. Everything seemed to be going in the right direction in her life and she was hopeful for the future of herself and her little family she wanted to build with her husband, Eddy.
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Like all of us, life was not without it's trials for her. She had her difficulties and faults, but from what I knew of her, she really did have the purest and most sincere desire to want to try to become a better person and wife, and she strove to be that person through her Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. She prayed faithfully for her husband and family. I remember once after a prayer meeting that she started crying and was saying how incredibly happy she was to have the Lord in her life and just how wonderful He was and how she couldn't imagine how she ever lived her life before without Him. She said it was when she drifted away from the Lord and stopped spending daily time with Him in prayer and reading her Bible, that life really got difficult and hard to bear. When she was close to the Lord, it was evident how genuinely happy she was. She loved telling others about the Lord, and when we did a Gospel outreach in Napa, she was the one who was the most excited out of all of us to share the Gospel and her testimony with complete strangers, and she was just beaming with joy afterwards because she got to share her newfound faith with so many people that day. The Aubrey I knew was a lovely young lady who was genuine, open, and honest.
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Though it has been a year since we have seen Aubrey, this was the Aubrey I was honored to know while she was coming to our church. Though she has gone through some difficult trials this past year, I know that now she and her baby are with the Lord, where He will "wipe away every tear" (Rev 21:4). She is at peace with the Lord now. She and her baby are by His side, and I'm sure she must be full of inexpressible joy because she is finally face to face with the One she put her faith in while here on earth. She is home. Words cannot express the hurt and sorrow we feel at her passing, but we take comfort in knowing that one day we will see her again. Thank you for touching our lives with your sweet presence, Aubrey...I will see you again.
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"Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
-Jesus (John 14:27)

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“In order to be a disciple we must deny ourselves - this is to exercise authority over our own spirit. We must take up the cross - this is to submit to Christ’s authority. And we must follow - this is continued obedience. This is the road not to confinement, to bondage, to a stunted or arrested development, but to total personal freedom. It means not death but life, not a narrowly circumscribed life but “abundant” life. The gate is narrow but not the life. The gate opens out into largeness of life.”

-Elisabeth Elliot

“No sigh ever reached the Most High, except through Christ—I mean so as to move His heart to pour out His grace. Prayers, groans, tears, all these are like arrows without a bow, till Christ comes and fits them to the string, and shoots them home for you and me. All our prayers are like a victim, with the wood and altar; Christ must bring the fire, and then the sacrifice smokes to heaven. He is the messenger. Oh Christian, do you not rejoice in Him then as the Messenger of the Covenant? He is doing thy errands before the throne tonight, pleading for me, pleading for you."

~C. H. Spurgeon

“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might, He increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Isaiah 40:28-31

"...The central place of faith in Christianity, and its significance...is precisely that which, on man's side, adjusts him to the living and merciful presence and action of a trusted God. In its nature, not by any mere arbitrary arrangement, it is his one possible receptive attitude, that in which he brings nothing, so that he may receive all. Thus "faith" is our side of union with Christ. And thus it is our means of possessing all His benefits, pardon, justification, purification, life, peace, glory."

-Handley Dunelm