How is God Acting in My Life
(since I let Him in)

My name is Fran Weinrob and I would like to share with you my spiritual journey. Every story has a beginning, and my story begins with the tears of a child…

It was the spring of 2000 and my oldest son, Nick, was attending kindergarten at Sandpiper Elementary in Redwood Shores. During the rare occasions of my dropping off and picking up Nick through the school year, I had come to meet and speak with Scott and Cindi Owens, whose daughter, Kaitlyn, was a classmate of my son. I came to casually know them as a nice couple who were always friendly and liked to give hugs, and who also happened to be very involved in Fully Alive Community Church. I was quite curious about the church, being that it met in the local community center just minutes from my home, but had not taken the next step of actually attending a service. Gosh, I hadn’t really gone to church since I was about 14. My life was hectic enough and I really couldn’t put anything more on my plate of activities.

One day after work, I came home to discover Nick sobbing on his bed. Now, this in itself is not that remarkable knowing my son, but he seemed distraught and his father did not have a clue as to what was wrong.

“Nick, Nick, what’s wrong? Are you hurt? What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, Mom! I’m going to hell because we don’t go to church!,” cried Nick.

My first reaction was “Oh, that Kaitlyn Owens!” And my second reaction was “Oh, no! What if you’re right!”

It was really just that moment that I truly realized what my husband and I were doing with our kids. We were doing the same thing that his parents had done with him. Our boys didn’t really have a concept of God, how could they? We didn’t speak about God and we’d never been to church together, except for the church we went to twice when Nick was a baby.

My husband, Lenny Weinrob, had been raised in the gap between a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, neither of whom practiced any religion. Lenny was, in essence, a religious blank, with no instruction or teaching from either faith.

As for me, I did go to church as a child with my sisters (my mother dropped us off in front of the church), but as I grew older, I was the only one left in the family going to church. And after the age of about 14, I never went back…or even looked back. Jesus was someone I just accepted as a truth from my childhood Sunday school classes, but was not someone I thought about or talked to or asked to be a part of my adult life.

It felt like a momentous scene playing out there, kneeling next to my sobbing 6 year old, reassuring him that he was not going to hell and that it was all going to be all right, because mommy had decided that we were going to church! He stopped crying, looked up at me and smiled, saying, “Thank you, Mommy!” The truth was Lenny had mentioned going to church, specifically Fully Alive, to me more than once and this outburst from Nick was just the event I needed to get motivated.

Our first day of church just happened to be Father’s Day 2000, and Fully Alive was putting on a show! I will never forget Scott Foreman as the grandfather clock and Gina Savage as an unforgiving taskmaster, who is saved by the love of children. I kept hoping something awful would happen to that nasty Ms. Curmudgeon, and so realized at the end of the play how far off the mark I was on the moral of the story. It felt like God was showing me something about forgiveness and giving, something I needed to learn.

Scott Owens saw us after the show, and asked both Len and I to please come back for a more traditional Sunday discovery service, and so it began that my family started attending Fully Alive. It was quite sporadic at first. We’d attend two Sundays in a row, and then skip three. It was a tremendous challenge to get kids who usually slept in on Sunday and watched cartoons half the day to get up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to church (even a church that is two minutes away).

And it was quite an effort for me, too. My Sundays could consist of anything from a family outing to working all day in my home office. I am sorry to say that working all day Sunday was more common than the family outings. The truth is that my family rarely came together over anything, certainly not meals, and when we were together, it was a struggle to get through a day without a lot of yelling and crying and counting to ten.

It was a familiar routine we had all settled into of being four separate people under the same roof. Nick and his younger brother, Danny, would get fed dinner by dad before I got home from work, always eating at the coffee table in front of the TV with Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network blasting away. Nick would play for hours and hours on the PlayStation, mastering games with an intense drive, while Danny would play by himself for hours with his many toys. Dad would go about his job of running the house and tending the garden, with the kids on autopilot, keeping an ear out for any sounds of sibling rivalry.

But the truth is that even on days when I would get home at a reasonable time, I would be “too tired” and would change into my loungewear and stay upstairs in my room to “decompress” from the day and the commute, and once again the kids ate in front of the TV, alone. Eventually I would come downstairs and prepare a dinner for Len and I. It seemed that before the last morsel of my dinner was chewed, Len was reminding me that it was time to get the kids ready for bed, never an easy task. And then after some yelling and counting to ten, the kids would eventually be in pajamas with their teeth brushed. Two bedtime stories (with a nightly negotiation for a third), a kiss on the cheek and lights out. Congratulations, Fran, you’ve spent about 30 minutes out of your busy day with your own children.

When was it that my life became such drudgery? I was tired of always working too hard, tired of being tired, tired of sniping at Len, tired of snapping at the kids. For all my financial rewards from working so hard, nobody (especially me) was happy for it. Oh, sure, we looked like we had a lot…one look in the boys’ toy room and you could tell they had their hearts’ desire, but I felt like the entire family’s unhappiness factor was at an all-time high, and it was showing. We couldn’t get through a single event without some kind of major emotional breakdown by at least one or more of the family. The ordinary, everyday kind of life we were living was sapping the joy right out of us and there were few bright spots.

Then one Sunday, Scott Owens stood up and gave a sermon about my life, or so it seemed. He spoke about how everyday life can leave you joyless and uninspired, and I wondered how it was that he knew about my life. How was it that he knew how I felt when I hadn’t told anyone?

Something changed inside of me that Sunday morning and I did something I had not done before…I started to talk to God. I asked God to help me see the blessings in my life, I asked God to help me find joy, to find patience, kindness and perseverance. I didn’t call it praying then. It was more of a one-way conversation, with me talking and God listening. I talked to God mostly in my car during the commute home. I’m a deposition reporter and my schedule and location of work changes each day, so sometimes God and I had a nice long talk and sometimes it was brief, but how wonderful it was to open up to God. I felt silly sometimes when I would notice other drivers looking at me and wondering who I was talking to, so then I’d just talk to God in my mind. It made my commute go faster somehow, and when I arrived home, I was more energized and ready to launch into home mode.

And you know what? I started to feel much better! I started to feel happier. I started to find joy in little things. And I started to be nicer to my family, nicer to my husband and more fun to be around. There was a definite lightening of my spirit and a more relaxed frame of mind. I found a new humility and a willingness to be taught and, boy, oh, boy, did the lessons spring forth. Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find!

We had been going to Fully Alive now about seven months and a class was opening up that intrigued me. “The Jesus I Never Knew,” a lesson book written by Philip Yancey and a class being sponsored by Dan and Laurie McElroy’s Wednesday night community group, was starting the third week in January 2001.

My husband suggested that I might like to attend, but being that the class was held on Wednesday nights meant that my husband had to be in charge and take care of the boys for their nighttime ritual of pajamas, teeth brushing and stories, a daunting challenge even when both of us are there. Being nicer to my husband was really starting to pay off. What a nice guy I married!

And so I signed up for what was yet another momentous milestone, for it was at this class that my spiritual awakening was about to begin…I began to read the bible! Yes, it’s true, for all the conversations I’d been having with God, commuting up and down the Peninsula, from San Francisco to San Jose, I had yet to read more than a couple paragraphs of the bible. I started “brushing up” for my new class because I didn’t want to be the only one there who hadn’t read a bible story since she was a teenager.

I was feeling pretty confident of myself, boning up for the class, and was thanking God for Fully Alive and all the wonderful people in it, and especially gushing to him how eager I was for the class to begin when…ring, ring, ring!

“Hello?” “Hi, Fran, it’s Dennis Murphy, President of the Redwood Shores Tennis Club. Happy New Year! It’s time for our first board meeting. We’d all like to meet at my house next Wednesday."

"We’ve got a lot of work to do, setting the tournament schedule and getting the newsletter started.”

“I can’t make it and neither can Len” I said flatly.

“What? Why not?” he asked incredulously.

I was vague. “Um, well, it’s the first night of my new class and Len’s at home watching the kids” I said mysteriously.

“A class? That sounds great, Fran. What kind of class is it?” he asked sincerely.

“Um, well…um…um…” I stuttered.

The words were stuck in my throat. It was as if I couldn’t speak.

“It’s a class that my church is giving.” I muttered.

“Really? What kind of class is that?” he kept on asking.

“Um, well….um…um…it’s a bible class about the life of Jesus!” I blurted out with total exasperation!

God was letting me know what he thought about all my oozing and gushing about how happy I was to attend this class. He knew I was scared to death and I could barely speak about it to “a regular person”! When I hung up the phone, I roared with laughter at my hypocrisy. Once again, God kept my feet firmly on the ground and reminded me that I had a long, long way to go. I realized that my journey was going to be made up of a lot of baby steps.

I started to read the bible, and I was startled by the words of truth that came jumping out from the pages. I looked forward to each class and loved pouring over the scriptures and gleaning a deeper appreciation of their meaning. I knew that Jesus came from humble beginnings (born in a manger and all that), but I had no idea just how ordinary a person he was. My childhood images of Christ (blue eyes, blonde hair, with a dazed look of serenity – no kidding!) was being replaced with a real, live man who had the whole range of human emotions and very dirty feet!

To be fully God and fully human at the same time was blowing me away as I tried to grasp what it must have been like to actually live in those times and see Jesus and hear his words.

So many wonderful things poured out from those classes, it’s hard to list them all. I was totally struck by the teaching of Dan McElroy. He imbued the classes with humor and wit, mixed with insight and wisdom. I had a real affection for the members of the class and enjoyed seeing everyone. Now I had someone to say hello to at church on Sunday! I felt the community spirit starting to grow in me and now my circle of church friends was finally beginning to grow.

But the most amazing thing that happened as a result of attending the lessons was my husband’s curiosity about the classes. Lenny and I would discuss each class when I got home and he started to ask me questions about Jesus and, guess what, I didn’t know the answers (well, sometimes I did)! I had major knowledge issues and didn’t know how to answer his queries. So we looked up the answers together, and that’s how my husband and I started to read the bible together!

I cannot describe to you what it was like for me to have my husband asking me questions about God! If you had told me a year ago that Lenny and I would be reading the bible together, I would have laughed out loud “NO WAY!” But here we were, reading the gospels together, me with my fancy new bible with application notes, and he with his straight-up, non-annotated NIV bible (complete with crayon scribbles from the kids).

That’s when it was that I started praying for my husband’s salvation. Len was not ready to accept Jesus, but he was curious about him and was willing to read the bible and that was good enough for me. I promised myself right then that I would never push Len to Christ…that he would come to God on his own when he was ready. I certainly didn’t want him to accept Christ because it would make me happy.

Eventually (14 weeks later), the Jesus class was concluded and the group had a celebration at the home of Felix and Kimberly Lee. It was an evening of mixed emotions for me. I was so happy I got to meet this wonderful group of people, but I also had to realize that I would not be part of the Wednesday night community group any longer. I was starting to feel sad for myself when, to my delight, Dan and Laurie invited Lenny and me to join their community group! I was so excited, I immediately said “YES” without checking with Lenny first.

Lenny knew what it meant to me to be invited to join the Wednesday group, but he also knew that the Wednesday group was adults only, and our teenage babysitter won’t work on school nights. I was very disappointed, but knew he was right, Wednesday night was not going to work out for us. Lenny said that if we joined a community group, it would have to be for the whole family (kids included) and not on a school night, with Friday night being his preference.

Well, I was quite sure that such a group did not exist, because who, after all, would be nuts enough to have a kids-included Friday night community group? Once again, God and Fully Alive delivered! As it so happened, the large community group that met on Sundays had gotten so large that they needed to split up into smaller groups, and – you guessed it – a family community group was in the works to meet every other week on Friday nights…all it needed was a host family.

This time I did talk to Len first, and he agreed…we’d volunteer to be the host family. How perfect was that? We didn’t even have to go anywhere, the group would meet at our house! It felt like God was walking with me every little baby step along the way.

It was going to take some time for the groups to get organized, and so I decided to accept the invitation extended to me by Christine Fenwick and join the Saturday morning small community group led by Cindi Owens. Jehovah, Java & Jive meets at 7:00 a.m. -- I’m not kidding – every Saturday morning at Ellen Ambers’ house up in the hills of Belmont.

Me get up that early on a Saturday? I had come this far, why not one step further. And so it was that I joined the early risers of the small community group called Jehovah, Java & Jive. The impact these five ladies have had on me is immeasurable…I love them all and would do anything for them. I joined the group when they were about halfway through a lesson book by Beth Moore titled, Living Beyond Yourself. It was an amazing journey that shed more light on my life than I thought possible. I found the tools I needed to be humble and teachable. Sharing each other’s lives was deepening my compassion and ability to care for others.

This takes me up to nearly current times. How is God acting in my life now? I can tell you that my family has been transformed in the following ways.

My husband accepted Jesus Christ on September 12, 2001. It seems to me that God works this way. Out of the tragic and horrible events of September 11, 2001, my husband realized that there was nothing holding him back and no reason to wait any longer. With the help of Scott and Cindi Owens, who were part of this journey from the start, we all held hands and prayed the prayer. Praise the Lord! It’s like winning the Super Bowl and World Series all at once.

We eat dinner together, at the kitchen table, no TV, (well, about half the time) and actually talk to each other! We pray over our food. This is a family that not so long ago lived as strangers under the same roof!

My children have a concept of God. Danny, my youngest, announced to me that “Mom, God made me silly!” Tears came to my eyes, because my sweet Danny knew that God made him!

The changes have been both large and small, and every single day I pray to God and thank him for the blessings that he has showered down on my life. Yes, I still have a long way to go on my journey. When I declare things like “Noah wrote Genesis,” (um, that would be Moses) and “Oh, there were lots of people in the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve” (I actually don’t know where I got that one) I know that I have more knowledge to gain.

The baby steps have turned into small steps, but now I no longer journey alone. Thank God for Fully Alive Community Church, without whom I doubt any of this would have happened.

To be continued…..
Fran Weinrob