“I don't think I had a real hug for three years,” John Beeson recalled. “I don't think I had a real kiss. Like, I don't...like the way she spoke to me was like, ‘you're my roommate now.’” 

Before John and Angel married, Angel knew exactly what kind of man she wanted to spend her life with, a pastor. She says, “I knew that if I found a man who would love Jesus, he would know how to love me. Like somehow along the line, like I just had it in my core that if he loved God, he could love me.”

The two married and started a family while he was in seminary. John became a pastor and gladly took on every role church leadership assigned him. He said, “And I was just so eager to finally do what I felt like I had been made to do, what I've been called to do. My identity really had become rooted in that place of being a pastor. Things were great in my marriage. I'd invested a lot there already. We can push pause there, right? I can now try to tend this new wife, right? This new partner that I had. One of those wives that I had was much more demanding than the other. Let's guess who it was, right? It was the church and so Angel, our kids really kind of got the leftovers.”

“The one who was supposed to be my protector and the one who brought me comfort and, joy, right? And security just, I just felt was leaving me,” shared Angel. “If this is what ministry is, God, like I want nothing to do with it because this is too much for me. And that was the moment then that I just, I would say is when I just shut the door on Jesus and opened a beautiful French door to the enemy into my heart.”

“I knew the day that she went dark spiritually, she went ice cold toward God,” John recalled. “She went ice cold toward me.” Angel confirmed, “I just said, 'okay, I'm done. Like, I'm gonna do me when I wanna do me.'" 

Angel turned her back on God and pulled away from John emotionally. She found the attention she longed for at the gym. She began having an affair with her personal trainer. She remembered, “Not only do I feel bad for what I have done, like I now hate myself. I am completely worthless. I'm, that there's no value in here. Like I am the biggest hypocrite. What's the point? Why try? And so I just gave myself to whoever wanted me.”
 
Overwhelmed with guilt, Angel eventually confessed the affair to John, but her heart remained hard. John kept the affair private. He admitted, “If I share this, if I force this to the table, what happens then to who I am, a pastor, right? Does that just all go away? And so that definitely fed into my fears and my cowardice.”

It wasn’t long before Angel had another affair. The spiritual turmoil she lived with consumed her life. She said, “I can't keep living this lie because I am dying inside and this is not who You created me to be. And so I am just praying for brokenness.”

While on a Christian retreat, in the middle of worship she began to shake uncontrollably. Angel said, “And John looked at me and he was like, ‘Are you okay?’ And I said, ‘No, I'm not okay. I have something I have to confess.’ And I just confessed at that point that I had been having affair.”

John remembered, “I just felt sick. And yet at the same time, I felt hopeful for the first time, like as Angel shared then and continued to share throughout that night, I was like, my wife is finally back. Like those dead eyes were finally alive. What held me there was actually the spirit of God granting in me deep compassion and love for my wife. Like a renewed love, a restored love. In some ways, I would say kind of a clearer, Godlier love for her than I'd ever experienced before.”

Together they began a two-year process of reconciliation and forgiveness with counseling: confessing every sin and misplaced priority. Angel said, “This was the prayer of my heart, 'If there's anything in the dark, Lord, bring it to the light. No matter the cost, bring it to the light. I want nothing, nothing to get in the way of You getting glory in my life and of me stepping in Your will. Have mercy on me. Don't forsake me, don't leave me, don't leave us. Restore this. You can do it. It's in your power. I'm giving you my all Jesus. I don't wanna die rejecting you.'”

With their marriage restored and their priorities in order, John continues to pastor with Angel by his side, thankful for God’s love and forgiveness. “We celebrated 23 years together yesterday,” John said. “I know what a treasure I have in Angel. I know what a treasure I have and I would give up pastoring in a heartbeat for her if that's what I needed to do.”

“Jesus sings and dances over me and He delights in me, and my sin, my guilt, my shame is covered by the blood of Christ,” said Angel. “And so, you have freedom to think whatever you want about me. But I'm not gonna let that define me because Jesus does. And He's happy with me and that's good enough for me.”

John said, “Yes, I am ambitious for God's kingdom. I'm ambitious for His church. I'm ambitious for...for the things of the Lord. But that ambition has to be greatest for my wife. She's the first, most important thing I've been given to steward and then my kids and then the church.”
 

The Lius were thrilled to have twins and hoped their girls would always be happy and healthy. Then, the couple found out that one baby, Xinyi, had a hole in her heart.

Mr. Liu recalls, “She was diagnosed with severe pulmonary hypertension, which would lead to breathing difficulty, suffocation, and heart failure. When I heard this, I couldn't catch my breath. I’d heard about heart attacks on TV, but never thought anyone in my family would have one.” Mrs. Liu adds, “A doctor told us if Xinyi didn’t get surgery, she might not live to be a year old.”

Day after day, Xinyi struggled to breathe. “Her lungs didn’t have enough oxygen, so she stopped breastfeeding and choked, and her body didn't grow,” her father recalled. “She couldn’t speak yet, but she cried and screamed a lot. I think this was her way of asking me to rescue her.” 

Mrs. Liu asked family members to loan her money for Xinyi’s surgery, yet they wouldn’t help. So, Mr. Liu got a job in a coal mine. “Sometimes I wanted to quit,” he confessed. “But then I would think about my daughter and knew I had to go on.”

Meanwhile, Xinyi got weaker, and the hole in her heart got bigger. The Lius worried she wouldn’t make it. “My daughter’s blood vessels were really thin, and the doctor at the hospital had to try over and over to get a needle into her veins,” revealed Mrs. Liu. “Her father and I both cried as we watched.”

Mrs. Liu grew up as a Christian, yet she’d since forgotten her faith. Now, desperate to save her baby, she prayed. She explained, “I remembered how God had helped me when I was younger. So, I prayed, ‘Lord, I want Xinyi to get better. I hope you can come and bless her. Everything is up to you.’”

Soon, a nurse told the couple about Operation Blessing, and you helped make it possible for Xinyi to get heart surgery.  

“God listened to my prayer and helped us through Operation Blessing,” exclaims Mrs. Liu. “Without you, our daughter wouldn’t have been able to get this successful surgery.”

Mr. Liu added, “She’s gained five pounds. Now, she can crawl and she loves to laugh. I’m so happy to see her changing. She's like a different person.”

“Xinyi loves to play with her sister. Now she can have a wonderful life,” concluded Mrs. Liu. “I’m grateful from the bottom of my heart.”

Durga lives in a small village in India. She has deformed lower jaw caused by a benign tumor. The condition causes her both physical and emotional pain. “I've tried everything to fix it at home, but nothing worked,” she told us. “Now, my lower jaw swelled up, and it's really hard to eat or even drink water."

Durga said she now lives in self-imposed isolation, hiding from the cruelty of the community. “What people say about my face is really hurtful,” she said through her tears. “Their words broke my heart. It even made me question how I could go on living.”   

Finally, she had the courage to remove her face covering during our interview with her. “There have been times when I thought about killing myself.”  

Durga told us her family is poor and cannot afford surgery to repair her face and jaw. So she sits, waits, and hopes. “Whenever I see people who look ‘normal,’ I wish I could be like them too, a pretty woman like anyone else. It's hard to deal with the depression, especially when people bring up marriage. I can’t even think about that. All I want is to have surgery, but my parents do not have money for it,” she said.

Then Durga heard about Operation Blessing. Thanks to your support, we were able to provide multiple free surgeries to remove a benign tumor and repair her face and jaw.  

“Thanks to you,” she said, “I've now started a whole new chapter in my life. I'm thrilled! I keep looking at myself in the mirror because I can't believe how beautiful my face looks now. People who saw me after the surgery don't even recognize me! I've been dressing up and going to the market feeling confident and happy.”

Durga says she now has a happy life, one that she never thought was possible before.  

“I'm really happy that I can eat and drink without any problems now. I want to express my sincere gratitude to all the people who supported my operations. Thanks to you I have a brand-new life!” she said with a big smile. 

“I’m on the road to Angola,” Ronald Olivier said thinking on his bus ride to one of the most infamous prisons in the United States.  ‘Man, what did I get myself into?’ I heard all the stories of Angola, I know they prey upon the young. My mindset is this, ‘I’m going through these gates a man, I’m going to leave out a man, whether I walk out or in a box – if I have to die.’”
 
Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, added Ronald Olivier as an inmate at just 18-years-old. Looking back, it was his father leaving home that set the stage for what was to come.
 
“My father was everything to me,” Ronald said. “I was really hurt, and I felt abandoned, and that turned into anger. When I really needed a man to guide me and navigate me through what was happening in the neighborhood, I had none. It was the beginning of the crack epidemic. Me and my friends, that's when we veered towards selling drugs, stealing cars, anything that was going on in the neighborhood we was doing it. We became a part of it.”
 
But this new lifestyle would soon catch up with him. On Christmas Day, 1991, Ronald was confronted by a gang of young men, one of whom he’d recently had a fight with. Afraid, Ronald tried to get away, but then he felt someone grab his jacket from behind – he pulled out his gun.
 
“It was two guys that I shot, pools of blood,” Ronald said. “Two days later, I found myself arrested.”
 
One of Ronald’s victims would recover, but the other died. Only 16-years-old, the extent of the consequences he was facing didn’t fully set in until he found himself being tried as an adult for first-degree murder – the death penalty on the table.
 
“I didn't want to die,” Ronald said. “That's when I heard my mother's voice, so loud in my ear, ‘If you’re ever in trouble that I can’t get you out of, you call on Jesus.’ So, that’s what I did in that cell. A lot of people say, ‘Don’t make a deal with God.’ Well I made a deal with Him. I said, ‘Lord, if you don’t let them kill me, I promise I’ll serve you the rest of my life. For the first time in my life, there was a peace that I couldn't explain. It was this inward calmness that gave me an assurance that I was going to be okay.”
 
And then the verdict came – guilty of second-degree murder, life in prison without the chance for parole. But something inside kept telling Ronald not to lose hope, even as he was being sent to Angola. There, he soon started meeting Christians who helped guide him in the right direction.
 
“They was walking out their faith in the midst of all the chaos,” Ronald said. “I was amazed. I found out how important it was to get in the Word and study, to develop a prayer life. How important it is to fellowship with other believers. Guys who mentored me, came to fill that void in me of being a father figure. And of course, God stepped in and was that figure also. He's the greatest father of all. He began to change my heart from the inside out.”
 
Ronald took Bible college courses and received a bachelor’s degree in Christian ministry. He began ministering to fellow inmates, and then was given the opportunity to go to other prisons as a missionary. 
 
“When I got to share my faith, or share the Word, and see God change other people lives, I was so full of joy,” Ronald said. “I felt fulfilled, because here it is, I'm operating in purpose. I’m getting the sense of this is what I was born to do. That's how I kept hope and kept faith. I kept His Word in my mouth. I spoke that I was going home, I always said that I'll be going home.”
 
Years later, the Supreme Court ruled that minors could not be sentenced to life in prison without parole. Ronald found himself back in court for a re-sentencing. He was excited for a possible chance to get out, but there was someone in the room that he first needed to make peace with.
 
“I was very, very remorseful and sorry, and I thought about the victim's mother,” Ronald said. So, we had this conversation. I said, “Ma’am, I take full responsibility for the life of your son. I just pray you’ll find it somewhere in your heart to forgive me.’ She said, ‘I don’t hate you, I forgive you. I believe you deserve a second chance.’ That was more important than me getting home. For her to say that it was like even though I was handcuffed and shackled, I felt them come off of me. It was another level of freedom I have just went to. That’s something supernatural, beyond me or anyone. It was only God there.”
 
His parole granted, Ronald was unanimously voted for release in 2018. After twenty-seven years of incarceration, he was finally going home. He has since started a family and reconciled with his father. He now works for the Louisiana Parole Project where he continues to minister and encourage former inmates as he helps to rebuild their lives. He also recently wrote a book: 27 Summers – My Journey to Freedom, Forgiveness and Redemption.
 
“I wrote it for hopeless people, anybody who is down and out and feels like their life will never change,” Ronald said. “God can do anything at any time through anybody. If He did it for me, He can do it for you. He’s just looking for somebody to believe Him.”