COUPLES OF DESTINY I
CREATING THE RIGHT ENVIRONMENT

Beginning in Genesis 2:8-11, “The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man who He had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow, that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four river heads.”

None of us want to live alone. We are looking for our ideal man or woman that we want to marry. We watch television and the movies, and we see how marriage is portrayed. It is a picture that looks romantic, but when a person really looks into the lives of some Hollywood stars and the producers of books and media, a completely different picture emerges. There are huge celebrations and some times ceremonies are repeated so that friends can come and celebrate with them and spend huge amounts of money for their marriages and for their divorces, but there is very little stability.

What is disturbing is that the same kinds of eruptions and problems have seeped into The Church, and we know that there are situations and crises that all of us experience in our marriages. Most of us do not have that perfect family environment, but God has taken people whose hearts have been pure and whose hearts have been totally directed toward Him to establish a relationship that is depicted in Ephesians 5 as a shadow of Christ and The Church between the husband and the wife.

Some time God has to take us through dark and turbulent times before we can see the light that God wants to shed upon our lives. As a young woman who had come out of the system of communism in East Germany, I was taught to give my life for a cause. When I became a Christian, I began to preach a message of dying and becoming a martyr for Christ. I would go into war zones and into dangerous places because I embraced death, and God used that to teach me many things. I was ready to abandon myself completely for Christ. There was idealism in me that had to be transformed, and God has taught me to embrace life and not death. God used my husband and children to teach me how to embrace life. There is abandonment to God, not to death, but to life. Apostle Paul says, “ To live is Christ, but to die is gain.” Before I can gain in my death, I have to live in Christ.

I have seen many young people who in their desperation are willing to be stripped of everything to serve God, but they do not realize that fulfillment does not come through ministry. I have seen moves of God come and go. I remember the Jesus movement in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s bringing in a harvest of thousands of young souls. But as that “move” was not challenged, I saw the same hippies in the streets of India, begging for food and begging for money as I was standing in the mission field. They could not find the reality of Christ in The Church, not because there was no power and not because there was no fire of the Holy Spirit. It was because there was no reality in the family. Mom and dad preached and spoke in tongues, but they fought daily. Mom and dad spoke about submission, but young people saw no flow and fruit of their belief.

For ten years I served God alone, and I did not think that marriage could work. I had been in many pastor and deacon homes as I traveled, and I felt such atmospheres in the homes that I wondered how they managed to live together. I decided to serve God with all my heart and not worry about finding a husband. I never went on dates for ten years. Being in the ministry, often men were scared and awkward towards me. They didn’t know what to think or how to act in my presence. I was not like the girl who lived next door. Men were not accustomed to dealing with women preachers. I was trying to immigrate to America because God had spoken to me and said that He was going to use me in America, but I never was able to obtain my immigration papers. I was refused as a single woman through the ministry that I was associated with at that time. I had come to a point in my life where I was prepared to go to India where I had started my ministry and serve God there with all my heart.

In His Love,
      Sigi

• David & Sigi's complete: International Schedule