UChurch is Adopting a Family - We Need Your Help!

We all know many needs in our world, but sometimes, the need is on our doorstep. These are the kinds I believe we must respond to.  Please read through this and prayerfully consider what you might be able to help with – we get to be ‘family’ to a family in need.

Our dear Lutz and Arlene introduced us to the need at our last Sunday gathering. Arlene shared about Gloria (a single mom & her four children), who will be relocating here from Paraguay on December 2nd.

Arlene shared some background and ways God has orchestrated for our lives to intersect. If you are unaware of the story, I encourage you to read the full story (below) of how God has been at work behind the scenes and how we might become family to them.

How You Can Help

As you will glean from the story, Gloria and her four children are about to arrive on December 2nd.  They cannot bring anything with them but a few suitcases. They have left everything else behind – not an easy thing to do for Gloria or her children. They do not yet have a place to call home here (many are looking for a reasonable rental place), but until that emerges, Lutz and Arlene have graciously offered to have Gloria and the children live with them. Adding five people into their cozy abode is nothing short of love personified!  Arlene shared with us at our Sunday gathering, “Although it will be a stretch, the blessings are many (as she chuckled), one being we get to declutter our place! Lutz has already carted away a ‘huge pile’  of clothes tucked away in needed closets, including a 40+-year-old Bavarian suit that has never been worn!”

In the link below, you will see the equivalent of a ‘registry’; it is a list of practical items needed to stock a home for a family, starting with nothing. Take a peek at the list and see if you can help! It is preferred that items offered be in ‘Good condition’ (or new).

Brant

Click the link below to see the items

1. Look over the list and see if there is anything (or a few things) you can help with.
2. Click on the blue area “I have something!”  This will direct you to a simple info page where you can provide a short description and photos of the items. Easy to use!

We hope you can hold on to the items until the end of January when we expect they will have a place to call home. However, if that creates a challenge for you, please let me know so we can make arrangements.

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"Adopt a Family" Item List and Form

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You will also see the names/ages of the children – with Christmas around the bend, and having brought nothing with them, we believe it would be good if we could surprise them with a wee bit of extravagant generosity appropriate for each of them as they start life anew.

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The Story from Gloria herself!

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Hello, my name is Gloria Trescher.

Brant asked me to share my story with you. So, here we go…
I’m on an exciting adventure with God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and I’d like to invite you to join me.

My story reminds me of the story of the Israelites, how they were being held in slavery by Pharaoh, and after being rescued supernaturally they wandered in the desert for many years until the slavery mindset was removed from them(the old had died), so that they were able to enter the Promised Land and receive all the blessings that God had for them.

Maybe you’ll see a connection to it here.

I was born in Paraguay in a Mennonite community as the oldest of four and the only girl. I gave my life to Jesus when I was 8, because I didn’t want to go to hell, which I believed was the other option.

Growing up in the countryside was physically safe, but my spirit and soul did not fit into the norm and expectations of my parents and my community.

I gave up on school after grade 10, and in 1995 at 18 I got married to a Brazilian which was almost unheard of at that time in our faith community. To marry someone from a different nationality or culture was called being unequally yoked.

We had our first daughter 9 months later, and our second one two years after.

We struggled financially, and in 2004 we decided to move to Canada in search of a better life. First we lived in Manitoba, where we had our first and only boy, and in 2007 we moved to Saskatchewan, where we had three more girls. My children are 11,13,15,17,25, and 27, as of September 2023. The oldest two are married and have their own little ones.

My marriage was very difficult, and I experienced a total health breakdown in 2018 as a result of it. I could never pinpoint what the problem was until 2019, when I read a book by Dr. David Hawkins on Emotional Abuse. It described what I’d been experiencing almost word for word.

In response to that revelation I moved away for a season to recover and get well physically and emotionally. Just before the lockdown in March 2020 I moved back, and we tried to make it work on our own, without getting help.

In January 2021 we went to visit our two oldest girls in Paraguay, and because of Canada’s re-entry restrictions we decided to stay there.

Things seemed to be getting worse in my marriage after we moved back to our hometown, even though we did take a marriage course to try and “fix” it.

In October 2022, when my brother passed away under traumatic circumstances, I saw what I’d been trying to ignore, that my husband’s heart was not for me. We mutually agreed to separate on October 31. 2022. He moved out the next day.

What followed were some of the darkest months of my life where, as I was mourning the death of my brother and the end of my marriage, I felt abandoned and betrayed by some of my closest friends and some church leaders because of my decision to separate.

Even though they love Jesus, I feel that because of a wrong understanding of the Scriptures they weren’t able to walk alongside me and my family.

Father did bring a couple people into my life, including a Christian therapist in Saskatchewan, who understood me and my decision, and that helped me tremendously.

During this time I was getting the sense that I was being led back to Canada with my children.

I had been connected with UChurch in 2018-19, coming to some events in those two years, but I had lost all my contacts when I went to Paraguay.

In a series of Holy Spirit led circumstances I was reconnected with UChurch in May 2023 and then came  to Calgary without my children at the end of July for what I thought would be 3 weeks to visit and “scout out the land.”

Then Father asked me if I would stay and trust Him with my children which, even though hard for me as a mother, brought a sense of peace, because Father has proven Himself faithful over and over, and I know that I can trust Him.

I asked some people in the UChurch community to pray for confirmation, and after talking with my children and finding they agreed with it, I decided to stay.

Lutz and Arlene lovingly opened their hearts and home for my extended stay. And they, together with many of the UChurch family are walking with me in this journey into the Promised Land that unfolds one step at a time.

What I believe Father’s saying to me right now is to prepare a place and then bring my children. At the moment the plan is for them to come at the end of November/beginning of December.

Hope Cleaning has hired me as a part-time employee as of September 20th, and I am so thankful for this provision!

I’m also looking into providing house cleaning services privately to families for income.

If you would like to be part of my journey, your prayers are very much appreciated. For my children’s spiritual, emotional, and physical protection in this new season, and that I would continue to hear Holy Spirit’s voice clearly to make the best decisions for my children.

Practically, I am starting a new life with nothing in the material sense.

The greatest need at the moment is a reliable vehicle. (this need has since been met since writing this !). And a safe place to live, ideally a 3-bedroom one, and everything needed to set up a household.

One of my deepest hearts desires, and it has been for many years, is to help mothers who are or have been in abusive relationships.

Abuse, in all its forms, and as I am realizing now as I can see more clearly coming out of it, emotional abuse especially is so insidious and often almost unrecognizable for those who are unaware of it. And sadly, it’s rampant even in Christian marriages.

I pray that through my experience from being in the slavery of abuse and being led through the wilderness into the Promised Land of healing and freedom and the abundant life that Jesus came to give us, others will receive the same - and all my suffering and pain will have been worth it.

In these difficult and dark years, the Trinity has been drawing me gently into deeper relationship, and among all the very precious treasures in the Bible, two of them are standing out to me in this season:

“Do not [earnestly] remember the former things; neither consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs forth; do you not perceive and know it and will you not give heed to it? I will even make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

Isaiah 43:18-19 AMPC

“For I know the thoughts and plans that I have for you, says the Lord, thoughts and plans for welfare and peace and not for evil, to give you hope in your final outcome. Then you will call upon Me, and you will come and pray to Me, and I will hear and heed you. I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will release you from captivity and gather you from all the nations and all the places to which I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I caused you to be carried away captive.”

Jeremiah 29:11-12, 14 AMPC

Thank you for letting me share my heart with you.

God give you His Shalom!

Gloria Trescher

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