Summer Stories: Redemption

The Key to Heaven
A guest post by Lee Carver

Disregarding all those Saint-Peter-at-the-gate jokes, what determines whether you gain entry into heaven? I mean you, personally. An often-effective evangelism question is, “If you died today, would you be in heaven?” Most people will say yes, though some say it rather guardedly. Then the evangelist follows up with, “Why?” The answer may be, “I’ve done more good than bad in my life. I never killed anyone …” and the list goes on.

When my husband and I moved from our missionary service in the Brazilian Amazon to Texas in order to care for his parents, we joined their church. It’s a body of sincere believers who do a lot of good in the community, but some of the basic theology gets lost in the shuffle. Eventually, a couple of men in our Sunday School class came to my husband with doubts about their eternal salvation. These were good people who had been active church members for many years. They asked, “How can I know I’ll go to heaven when I die?” My husband reminded each man of the scriptures he’d heard for years:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (John 3:16-18 NIV).

“Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’” (John 14:6 NIV).

Other scriptures speak conclusively of this truth: belief in Jesus is the only door to heaven. What’s more, God removes our confessed sin “as far as the east is from the west,” (Psalm 103:12 NIV) and salvation is “not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:9 NIV).

What if a woman grew up in an unchurched family and had a real come-to-Jesus moment as an adult? What if she accepted Jesus, repented of her sins, and studied the Bible, but she had difficulty accepting the totality of God’s forgiveness? Simple forgiveness might be good enough for most people, but she had been seriously off track a few times. Regardless of her weekly studies in theology, she might feel she needed to do some kind of penance. This is the premise of Rebecca’s Redemption. Rebecca Singer, an American RN, has decided she will serve God in the most difficult place in the world, the deep Amazon jungle, for as many years as she lived a godless life. She will pay God back and thus build up points to enter the Kingdom of God.

I felt this was a story I was meant to write—called to write if you’ll allow me to play that card. The romantic thread, well, that was my own idea. Maybe if it’s also a sweet love story, more people will read it. Maybe Christians will enjoy that truth, and others will come to believe. 

And that’s why I wrote the third book in the Call to the Jungle Series, Rebecca’s Redemption. If you have any doubt or argument with the thesis, let’s talk.

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Author Bio:

Lee Carver and her husband lived in the Brazilian Amazon for six years, where they served with a Brazilian organization, formerly MAF-Brazil. 

He flew an amphibious ten-seat Cessna Caravan over jungle area half the size of the United States. 

Their home in Manaus—the largest city in the world with no road to it—was a free guest house for missionaries, pilots, mechanics, and medical volunteers. 

She went on missions, speaks the language, and knows the people whose story she tells.

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Book Blurb for Rebecca's Redemption:

A nurse seeking redemption for past sins joins a doctor contending against the jungle. Both healers need healing.

Rebecca Singer once was the kind of nurse who partied all weekend and closed the bar with the last karaoke tune. Then she met the Lord and vowed to make up to Him for those wasted years by serving in the worst place in the world. She determined to earn her redemption in the Brazilian Amazon jungle.

Dr. Ed Pierce, a widower with two young daughters, operates a Christian hospital in the Brazilian Amazon. A lifelong believer, he struggles with the tragedy of losing his wife—his love, the mother of his children. When the mission board agrees to hire a nurse, he requests an American who can split her time between the hospital and home schooling his children.

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Buy Rebecca's Redemption (book) on Amazon

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Connect with Lee:
Website - www.LeeCarverWriter.com
Blog - http://LeeCarverWriter.blogspot.com
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/lee.carver.507

Twitter - https://twitter.com/leecarver21

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Fall into Love: Lee Carver's story

An Autumn Remembered
A Fall into Love story by Lee Carver

Fifty years ago, my grad school roommate cornered me into a blind date with a guy in her German class. He invited me to the UNC Chapel Hill football game, for which we both had free student cards. I hadn’t been to a single game. I didn’t even know where to park or which section to sit in, but wanted to see a game before the season ended.

At the time, I lived off campus as a graduate biochemistry student and owned my first car. My prospective date had given his VW bug back to his dad because the university deemed that a student didn’t need a work scholarship if he could afford a car, and he worked in the library photo shop. So we’d use my car, and it wouldn’t cost the guy anything to take me. No strings. I accepted.

After the game Darrel drove around, tried to connect with his friends giving a hamburger party which never developed, and we wound up having dinner in an Italian restaurant. The date ran very long, and I had a terrible headache because I’d stayed up sewing until the wee hours the night before. I enjoyed his company and found him the most normal guy I’d ever met—no pretentions, not braggadocios, always polite, and he made no improper advances. At the end of the day, he said he’d call me.

Yeah, right.

But he did. We went to a movie, Bonnie and Clyde. I hated the movie but liked Darrel.

My roommate raved about the beauty of autumn in the North Carolina mountains. Being from South Alabama, I’d never seen the leaves as she described them. We don’t do autumn down there. “You’re going to miss it,” she said. “This is probably the last weekend the leaves will be pretty.”

In many hours of conversation, Darrel had spoken of having gone to the mountains during fall and over Christmas with his roommates in previous years. He knew where to go, and I had the car. So I, who never called men, phoned my new best friend. “Would you like to drive to the mountains with me to see the leaves this Saturday?”

He impressed me by filling the car with gas as we began the most beautiful, glorious drive I’d ever experienced. He bought us a KFC picnic, and we spread out on the deep, green grass in a field beside a little white Baptist church. In the grand setting of the North Carolina mountains dressed for autumn we began to realize we had something special.

"Tunnel of Trees" photo by Lee Carver

Four months after our blind date, I made a lovely wedding dress, my family came up from Alabama, and Daddy, a minister, officiated at our marriage.

Pictured: Lee Carver and her husband Darrel

This year we celebrated fifty years of courtship and marriage, our romantic season from September to February, by driving in search of autumn leaves. We went to Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Kentucky, Virginia—and the best place at the perfect time, Lake Placid, New York. Every day we walked in the crisp air, captured the colors in photographs, and praised God for his craftsmanship. Along seacoasts and in mountains for more than a month, we wrapped ourselves in glorious reds, oranges, and yellows. We held hands as we strolled and stopped for kisses in hidden glens. Red berries hung from flowers and trees along the Blue Ridge Parkway, in botanical gardens, and deep in the wild forests. We feasted our eyes and our souls on God’s creation.

When we’d drunk our eyes full of shimmering fall beauty, we started the drive home to Texas. On the way, we stopped for a week with our son and his family in Maryland, where fall had not yet gotten serious, but the crab was fantastic. During evening prayers the first night with Quinn, his wife Sue, and their three children, a sense of joy settled over my heart. 
This was what our fifty years was truly about: our adult son and daughter and the five precious grandchildren they had given us. Each of them has chosen to live in a loving relationship with God, each accepted salvation through Christ Jesus. Surrounded by their prayers, Darrel and I witnessed and felt the wholeness of our fifty years of love.

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Author bio: 

Lee Carver lived in the Brazilian Amazon for six years, the hardest and best years of her life. 

She and her husband served with a Brazilian organization, formerly MAF-Brazil, in which he flew an amphibious ten-seat Cessna Caravan over jungle area half the size of the United States. 

Their home in Manaus—the largest city in the world with no road to it—was a free guesthouse for missionaries, pilots, mechanics, and medical volunteers. 

She went on missions, speaks the language, and knows the people whose story she tells.

~*~
Blurb for Lee's book Rebecca's Redemption: A nurse seeking redemption for past sins joins a doctor contending against the jungle. Both healers need healing.

Rebecca Singer once was the kind of nurse who partied all weekend and closed the bar with the last karaoke tune. Then she met the Lord and vowed to make up to Him for those wasted years by serving in the worst place in the world. She determined to earn her redemption in the Brazilian Amazon jungle.

Dr. Ed Pierce, a widower with two young daughters, operates a Christian hospital in the Brazilian Amazon. A lifelong believer, he struggles with the tragedy of losing his wife—his love, the mother of his children. When the mission board agrees to hire a nurse, he requests an American who can split her time between the hospital and home schooling his children. 

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Buy Lee's book on Amazon

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Connect with Lee:
Website ~ Blog ~ Facebook ~ Pinterest

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Enter this book giveaway contest for your chance to WIN a copy of this book by filling out the entry form on the Rafflecopter widget below:  

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Words of Faith: Lee's story about church songs and peace for your mind

A Song of the Mind

A Words of Faith story by Lee Carver

The elderly women behind me in church wouldn’t stop chatting during the prelude. The ladies seemed urged to talk, ignoring this moment of quiet inspiration just to visit, making no attempt to lower their voices. But perhaps they had been lonely all week, I thought. Or maybe there was a certain gene activated in aging women that compelled them to talk during the prelude, during the music, during the sermon. I should be patient. I might be there someday.

Virginia and Ed, a dear couple well known to us, sat down to my left, and I smiled and nodded. It was clear that her losses to Alzheimer’s disease were progressing. An hour before, she had not recognized me. Now Virginia looked directly into my eyes and said in a clear voice, “Where are we?”

On what level should I answer the question? What, exactly, did she want to know? What building we were in? What city? What meeting we were attending?

“We’re in church. We’re going to worship God together,” I answered.

For a moment that satisfied her, and then she asked her husband, “What church? What church is this?” He tried to gently quiet her. Then she took the hymnal from the rack before them and read its title aloud, “The United Methodist Hymnal,” her thin, childlike voice standing out as the congregation stilled. “Oh. That’s nice.”

Virginia loved to sing, and she knew the words to all the verses of the old hymns as the service progressed. On the less familiar songs she bent low over the hymnal held by her husband.

During the offertory, the choir sang a tender and moving hymn arrangement accompanied by the organist and a violinist. Virginia sang along, inaudible more than a few feet, “My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou art mine.” She smiled peacefully as she sang, and no one minded a bit.

As they sang, my mind wandered back to last week’s sermon which had deeply impressed me. Dr. Jerry Chism asked the question most painful in a believer’s odyssey: When life is hard, when suffering comes to Christians, is God there with us? To these I added the question which so saddened me today: Why do elderly people who have lived good lives of dedication to God and their families become senile or suffer dementia? Is God still with them as the light of their minds grows dim?

As if answering my question, the choir and Virginia ended their anthem together, “If ever I loved Thee, My Jesus, ’tis now.”

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Author bio: 

Lee Carver is once again failing at retirement, a hybrid author in every sense: fiction and nonfiction, traditionally and independently published. 

She also does freelance editing, formatting, and uploads as well as being a Stephen Minister, alto in the choir, crocheting with Pray Shawl Ministry, and volunteer pianist, among other activities.

Married forty-eight years to a very tolerant man, they have two children and five grandchildren.