How the book came about

Preview from Victory Through Surrender Volume Two
02.06.2021

How the book came about

This will come as a surprise to many people, but my wife and I have been married three times to each other.  The first time was in 1983.  We divorced in 2005 and after thirteen years of divorce, we remarried in 2018 – twice.  We planned to get married in September and bring our children from Nashville back to Arlington, Texas for the ceremony.  Along the way, we were spending time with our old pastor in preparation for the event and he mentioned, almost in passing, that he didn’t have a problem with people getting married earlier than planned if they just couldn’t wait.  Ceremonies are nice, but relationship is the issue.  We thought about that for a while and decided we did not want to wait any longer.  I asked a Justice of the Peace friend of mine if he would marry us and he agreed.  We were married the second time a few weeks earlier than planned and had the third wedding as scheduled, which was a fantastic time with friends and family.  We spent our honeymoon in San Jose, California attending the annual Transform Our World (TOW) International Conference. Tim Tremaine Books

There is more to the story behind our visit to the 2018 Conference in San Jose.  2017 was a pivotal year for me.  While there were many blessings and much to be grateful for, a disagreement developed between myself and my youngest son.  That conflict went on for months.  The rift in our relationship was the impetus for my desperation cry for more of the Lord.  There were many difficult discussions and cathartic experiences along the way.  The culmination began with the 2017 TOW conference, also held in San Jose.  The Lord spoke to me deeply about the needs in my life and the need for restoration in my relationship with my son.  I had a week of vacation scheduled, so I drove to Tennessee to try and fix things with my son.

What happened the day I drove to Tennessee has been the pivot point of my life so far.  I had an all-day encounter with the Lord, which included streaming the conference on my phone during the drive.  I listened to sermons, played worship music, worshipped, and prayed.  Everything came to a head at a mountain top rest stop in Tennessee, just outside Nashville where I finally came to understand what absolute surrender meant and gave myself to it. Victorious Christian Life

That week was good and started the healing process.  When I got home, the Lord brought some strategic books my way to help me understand what to do.  Those resources, and those that followed, are used in this book.  I developed a prayer out of that process that I have prayed every day since (mentioned in the introduction).  Getting re-married was one of the many demonstrable effects of that process.  I learned that surrender meant giving up a lot of things, but I also learned that the things God was asking me to give up were not the things I needed in my life to be an honest disciple of Jesus Christ.  Of all the people in the world to re-connect me with, He chose my ex-wife.  This was something I never thought would happen.  But in God’s providence, due to our oldest son’s impending wedding, we started meeting again and again.  Meetings became dates and the dates rekindled the relationship.  I began to think about how beautiful she was and how much I enjoyed being with her.  Then one day while I was driving to work, God said as clear as a bell, “You love her.”  So here we are, married for the better part of thirty-eight years (more or less).  God’s a funny guy.

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