Good News from Jayapura Congregation - Handoyo & Lina

Forgiving One Another and Living Out the Word to Restore a Marriage

A fractured family background can, to some extent, shape the way a person views marriage. The absence of role models in married life also leaves couples more vulnerable to the risk of divorce. Yet God does not remain silent when His children surrender to Him and ask for help. Handoyo and Lina, a couple who married in June 2007 and were blessed with three children, experienced for themselves how God intervened to bind their relationship back together.

Marrying at a very young age, right after finishing high school, made their married life full of struggles. Their lack of experience and their age caused both of them to stumble and rise again as they navigated the voyage of marriage and learned to become parents to their children.

Handoyo and Lina also came from similar backgrounds. Both of their parents were businesspeople who came to Jayapura to build businesses from the ground up. Lina’s extended family ran various kinds of retail businesses. Handoyo’s family, meanwhile, first started a chicken farm business, which later grew into a bakery and culinary business. This meant that both of them had friends who were also children of business owners. Handoyo’s and Lina’s parents, who knew each other well, unfortunately both went through failed marriages. Lina’s mother and father divorced, and her father remarried. Handoyo’s parents also separated, and his father has now passed away. 

Handoyo and Lina had once joined a garage community, where every weekend the two of them would gather with their friends to drink and play cards. Not infrequently, arguments broke out when one of them got drunk. Handoyo’s and Lina’s spiritual lives were no better than their social lives. Both knew Christianity through school, but they did not know who Jesus truly was. They only went to services on church holidays, or only when they felt like it.

The change God worked in their lives began when Handoyo became involved in an illicit relationship with one of the employees at his billiards business. Lina found out about the relationship, and it led to a major conflict in their marriage. At that time, Handoyo had already left Lina, while Lina was thinking about divorcing him. 

The turning point in their lives began when Lina contacted Silvi (a servant in Jayapura Congregation), whom she knew because their children studied at the same school. She told her about all the burdens and problems she was facing, then asked Silvi for advice. When she was invited to open the Bible and see what God wanted from her life, Lina immediately welcomed it. She even asked for help so that her husband could also be helped to know God.

God’s power worked in an extraordinary way. To begin with, Handoyo was willing to come home. Then the two of them studied the Bible and yielded themselves to be led in the truth of God’s word. For almost a year and a half, they persevered in aligning their lives with God’s will, forgiving one another, trusting one another, and building one another up. 

At the end of 2019, Handoyo and Lina finally made the decision to follow Jesus. Today, both of them are deeply grateful for what God has done in their lives. Indeed, there are still struggles they must face, but they now understand that by going through them together with God, they will be able to endure them. To God be the glory!

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