Finally whole, dancing with Jesus

We meet together for Celebrate Recovery every Thursday night, and we have become family. Last week, one of our C.R. family became very sick. Mendi Krey had asked to share her testimony at Celebrate Recovery last week, but she became sick on Wednesday and was in the hospital on Thursday. She passed away early Sunday morning.
Last night, her husband Arcy shared her testimony and I want to do my best to share her story as her husband told it.

Mendi’s mother ran away from home when she was 16, and Mendi was conceived shortly after. Mendi was a child of a child, and had a lot of insecurity and neglect to deal with during her early years. When she was 9, she decided she could not take the hard reality of her life any longer and she ran away from home. She continued to try to get out of her difficult home life until she was finally put into foster care. She was adopted when she was 11, and finally found love and security in her new home, although she was always haunted by the insecurities from her early life.

Arcy met Mendi when they were 19, when Arcy saw the glow on her face and asked her to dance. They were married a year later. During the next years as they raised 3 children, they struggled in their marriage until, after 15 years, they made the decision that, no matter what, they were both committed to make the marriage work. They spent 10 years undoing the damage they had done, and rebuilding their marriage. Both Mendi and Arcy were Christians, but had trouble finding a church they felt at home in, where they could serve. Finally, they followed their daughter to Cottonwood, where they became members. Mendi had suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis for years. One leg had been amputated a few years ago. She struggled with constant pain, and was frustrated by the limitations that kept her from serving her family and the church like she wanted to, and frustrated that she could no longer dance with her husband. The last conversation that Arcy and Mendi had, Mendi asked Arcy to help her stand and hold her up, then move his hips. She said, "Now we are dancing."

Last summer, when we began to announce the start of Celebrate Recovery, Arcy immediately became a part of the volunteer team . Mendi joined us when we began in October. Although the first week, she was unsure about it, by the second week, she told Arcy that “they could not make her leave”. Since then, Mendi has been a best friend and a mentor to many of the women in C.R. She was been excited and enthusiastic about what God is doing. A few months ago, Mendi began to post a word of encouragement every morning on Facebook, and to send a text message out to her friends and family sharing a word from the Bible. We use the term “our C.R. family” a lot, and I think that Mendi was the first one to use that. God brought Mendi and Arcy and their daughter Toni to us. God has woven the hearts of the C.R. family together in a unique way that is so precious. As we gathered for our Celebrate Recovery meeting last night, we celebrated that Mendi that God had done a great work in Mendi’s life, that we had come to know Mendi and become a family, and that now she is dancing in the presence of Jesus, fully “recovered”.