The Landing, part of Celebrate Recovery, helped students (middle and high) with their own hurts, habits and hang-ups. Currently, The Landing is on hold as it looks for leaders to continue this powerful ministry. To learn more about serving, visit blue-ridge.org/serve.
Here are two leader stories and how they grew through serving in The Landing.
Marilyn Gray
I served in The Landing when it first started at Blue Ridge. I have watched God work in the students’ lives, but the most interesting is how He worked in my life and grew me.
I had no idea of the additions to my "family" that God was going to give me over the years I served. I have become "Mama G" to many of my fellow servers and they have become some of my most trusted and loving "family.”
I guess the biggest way to describe this is to tell of a powerful act of kindness I have received from them. My husband passed away in September 2014. My family and I were scheduled and had already paid for a trip to Disney over the Thanksgiving holiday. Our first inclination was to not go as without my husband, we would all feel weird being there. But the reality was that no location was going to change how things were, so we went.
There were good times and many tears but we expected that. Then the trip home brought the reality of living life and our first Christmas without him. We didn't feel like celebrating Christmas and decided that we would do what we had to to try to keep things as normal and festive as possible for my grandson.
Well, driving down my street to my home, I noticed something in my yard and lights on my house. My Landing family had purchased Christmas decorations, and placed them on my home. And not only my home, but on the homes of both of my daughters while we were gone.
They gave us our Christmas back!!!
God is just so good and these "hands and feet" of my Landing family have become so important to me.
In our meetings and prayer times together, we were honest with what was going on in our lives and prayed for each other over the week between meetings. God brought an amazing group of people around me and sustained me when I need Him most. I will forever be thankful of the group he knit together for "such a time as this".
Tony Erskine
While serving in The Landing I was exposed to the 12 steps and 8 principles of Celebrate Recovery. In trying to help others, I was confronted by my own two-decades-long, ongoing struggle with pornography. I got into a Step Study and applied the principles that I had been teaching to the teens (yeah I had things a little backwards), and through that fellowship; God was able to lead me out of bondage.
That was a little over five years ago. During that time I have had the opportunity to walk out others’ stories. It has been a tremendous blessing.