Rhonda’s Journey to God
of a car accident and pup Rhonda Frankham discovered God.
I had never read the Bible during my entire life, but I recognised that on many occasions God had been there for me. I got to know Him only late in life. I still find it incredible that God would cause so great a change my life, the result of a chance encounter with a young man and a dog.
It dates from a time soon after my second husband had died of cancer. We would never have had a minister or a priest come near us, for, as far as we were concerned, they were hypocrites and, anyway, we didn’t believe in their kind of “rubbish.”
Two years after I buried my husband, in 1999, I was involved a car accident—that pulled me up with a jolt, physically and spiritually. Amazingly, for someone without much experience with God, my first reaction was that God had stopped me in my tracks and that there must be a reason for it. I began to keep my eyes open for a clue as to what that might be.
My accident, I’ve now realised, was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. Previously too busy to read, now, laid up with nothing else to do, I began to read and found I enjoyed it.
One day when I’d recovered a little, I was slowly walking home when I stopped to admire some puppies a youth was carrying in a milk crate. A neighbour had said I should get a dog—a Staffordshire terrier, she suggested—for company, so I was attracted to them.
“Ooh, they’re so-oo cute,” I gurgled. “What breed are they?
“Staffies,” he said. “You can have one if you like.”
I felt it was meant to be, and then he offered me one, saying, “Call him Job.”
So I accepted it and walked toward home. When almost there, I was stopped by a woman I knew who had been born in Egypt. She looked at my new best friend.
“So, what are you going to call him?” she inquired.
“Job,” I responded.
“Oh,” she said. “He was a terrible man who wanted to turn the heavens black and called on the stars to fall out of the sky.”
What has that young man done to me? I asked myself, defensively, as I walked in my front door. I immediately phoned my grandchildren—the eldest is 13 years old—and informed them of my acquisition.
“Come over and see him,” I said. “By the way, his name is Job.”
They were keen and brought him an old basket with a pillow and the word
J-O-B written on a piece of wood wired to the basket. I was pleased for their interest, but had to correct them: “You don’t spell Job like that; it’s spelled J-O-B-E.”
“No, Nanna, that’s not right. It’s in the Bible—J-O-B.”
We enjoyed the time together playing with the pup, but as soon as the children left I went looking for a little black Bible belonging to my daughter that had somehow followed me whenever and wherever I’d travelled.
Being a reader now, I quickly read through the short and fascinating Old Testament book of Job.
I liked this man Job so much that I read his story over again, then yet again. Job was a good man rewarded with evil, and his woes and losses so reflected my own life that I felt an affinity with him: Why would anyone say Job was a terrible man? I wondered.
As a child, I’d been physically, mentally and sexually abused by my stepfather. Once married, I discovered my husband was no better, and he physically abused me as well. On one occasion, when I was 20 and six-months pregnant with our first child, he kicked me in the stomach, leaving me on the ground bleeding.
Things were so bad that I contemplated suicide, to the point where I locked myself in a room with my infant children and a loaded shotgun, planning to end it all. As I looked heartbrokenly at my children, I heard a voice inside my head pleading with me to not do it. God gave me the strength to flee with my children halfway around the world to Australia and safety. Then I lost my second husband.
Like Job’s friends, I questioned God, wondering what I’d done to deserve such bad luck. Why ever was I born? I asked Him. But like Job in his troubles, I also survived—but only through the overseeing power of God in my life, although then I didn’t know it.
Three months later, the young man who’d given me the pup came to see how it was getting on. He was a Christian, and when I told him I’d read the story of Job, he asked me if I’d like a larger-print Bible to read further.
When he delivered it, he agreed to stay for a bit to explain some of it, starting in the New Testament. He also showed me where various Christian churches were in my local area.
As my TV had stopped working, I continued to read the Bible he’d given me. I did this every day for 12 months, and began to attend church. I tried this church and that, but found that I was going home dissatisfied with what I was hearing in that it didn’t quite match what I was reading. Having read my Bible, including the story of the Creation week and then the Ten Commandments, I asked about the Sabbath, which is mentioned in both places.
“It’s just the way it is,” they said dismissively, which was unsatisfactory to me.
I grew to really love my Bible and the time we spent together. But I felt that I must be doing something wrong because I just didn’t seem to fit in the church I’d begun to attend regularly. In fact, I sensed a feeling of resentment toward me because I didn’t like—and wouldn’t do—what they were preaching and insisting.
Frustrated, I put away my Bible and stopped going to church altogether and bought a TV instead. Then one night I saw an advertisement for a video* about the second coming of Christ.
I’d like to know about this, I thought, but it’s probably the same old garbage. I put off responding until after seeing the advertisement for about the sixth time, when I noticed it was sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Well, if these people acknowledge that the seventh day is the Sabbath, then maybe they are God’s people and can give me the truth, I thought.
I rang the advertised number. A young man delivered the video a few days later and told me there were 20 in the series. I wanted them all and he said he’d send someone with more. I felt a need for a real Bible-study class and to once more attend a church. When I asked, he told me his church believed in the Ten Commandments, including the seventh day as the Sabbath, and that members endeavoured to honour the commandments as best they could.
Now I was happy. To me that was such a positive statement.
Two days later I received another video, this time from the minister of the local congregation. I immediately put him and his church on notice: “If I can’t find the truth in you and your church,” I told him, “I’ll be the first to tell you.”
I watched the videos and joined the minister’s weekly Bible-study group and finally was baptised. I found that in Jesus I can have eternal life, and that He is coming again.
I found Him all because of a cute little pup. Well, not quite.
“Thank you, Jesus,” I say.
* The Search series of videos is available from the Discovery Centre Video Lending Library
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