BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

********** ADVERTISEMENT ********** events Bogotá, Colombia Aug. 18-19 Victory Campaign Anaheim, Calif. Sept. 8-9 Living Victory Columbia, S.C. Sept. 21-23 Word Explosion Maracaibo, Venezuela Oct. 13-14 Victory Campaign Washington, D.C. Nov. 9-11 Victory Campaign kcm.org/events 1-800-600-7395 (U.S. only) Schedule is subject to change without notice. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Kenneth and/or Gloria Brooklyn Park, Minn. : Aug. 24-25 2017 Upper Midwest Faith Explosion lwcc.org Forest Park, Ill. : Sept. 11-12 2017 International Faith Conference billwinston.org or livingwd.org Orlando, Fla. : Sept. 28-29 Jesus Conference 2017 jesusconference.tv (registration fee required) Douglas, Ariz. : Oct. 7-8 Ministerios Palabra de Fe mpfccc.com Kansas City, Mo. : Oct. 24 Kairos 2017 kairos2017.com (fee required) * * * * * * * * * * * Kellie Copeland London, Ontario : Aug. 27 Word of His Power Church wohp.org Bogotá, Colombia : Oct. 12-15 2017 Women’s Conference Palabras de Fe y Vida Church Elizabethlo73@gmail.com Contact the host church for details! ********************************************** * * * article continues * * * Hoping for an answer, Melanie shut her eyes and allowed her mind to experience what she thought would never come. Suddenly, in the silence of her meditations, she heard a sweet, soft whisper: 'I’m calling you into nursing, and in your latter years you’ll write.' “I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, because I’d never heard the voice of God before,” says Melanie. “I just honestly wanted direction from the Lord, and when it came I just said, ‘OK, now I know what I’m supposed to do.’ Was I disappointed that He didn’t say I was going to be a writer then? Not really. I just understood that I was going to get both. I knew the time would come when I would become a writer.” That she had a passion for writing from an early age was no real surprise to Melanie, considering the dynamics of her family and the penchant she, her three siblings and her parents had for books. “We were a reading family,” Melanie explains. “We didn’t have a lot of money, so our family vacations were often camping trips. My dad built a trailer he hooked up to the back of the car to carry camping gear. He built a bookshelf onto the back of the trailer. On the way out of town we always stopped by the local library to check out books. When we got to the campsite, we’d take the bookshelf into the tent. Almost every afternoon when it rained, we’d crawl into our cots and read to the sound of rain on the tent. “Though I loved books, I’d never even considered writing,” Melanie said. “That desire came after I was in a roller-skating rink one day and heard one of the skating coaches talk about going off to college. He said, ‘I’m going to become a writer.’ That was the first time I’d ever given any thought to where books came from. I never really focused on the fact that people went to school to learn to write. I thought, Someone actually writes the books I love! “My parents had no money, and no one in my family had ever gone to college,” said Melanie. “I decided to enroll in the Diversified Occupation program at my high school so I could go to school half days, work the other half, and save enough money to go to college.” Melanie enrolled in the program, but the only job available was as a nursing assistant—the one thing she never wanted to do as a career. Looking back on what the Lord spoke to her that day as she sat out in the field, Melanie can see how landing a job as a nursing assistant fit His plan for her life. “While I was working as a nurse’s aide, the local association of doctors’ wives offered me a partial scholarship if I would go into nursing,” Melanie said. “I was taught that if a man lacked wisdom, he should ask God. That’s why I kept going back to Him with the same question.” Melanie accepted the offer. In 1967, after graduating from high school, she entered the Baptist Hospital School of Nursing in Oklahoma City. She graduated in 1970 and became a registered nurse. While Melanie had always been devoted to the Lord, an incident soon after she graduated from nursing school shook her faith, leaving her bereft. “One of my best friends in high school, who’d never had a sip of alcohol, went to a party where she was shamed into drinking. She not only got drunk that night, she got pregnant. Her family and church elders insisted that she marry the man, but she was afraid of him. Our senior year, he burned her with cigarettes, beat her and threw her down a flight of stairs. She had a broken leg when we graduated from high school. “Things got so bad that she went to her family and the elders in her church and told them of the abuse. She wanted a divorce. They impressed on her that divorce would send her to hell. She ended up committing suicide a few years later. “She wrote me a letter before she died and said, ‘If I believed everything that I’ve been taught in church, then I’m doomed. And if it’s not true, then what is there to believe?’ I was so angry at the injustice that I stopped attending church.” 14 : BVOV

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