Streams of Mercy; Turning Impossibilities to Possibilities

By Ronke Carons

Streams of Mercy is a true story of a teenage orphan who turned so many impossibilities to possibilities. She lost her mother at 13 and her father at 19 and was tossed into the unknown and unsecure world though a beautiful one by God's creation with no hold like a rudderless ship. She looked to the right no father, to the left no mother. No one should have to suff er her kind of pains. No one can replace your father and mother. Within the short period of her life with her parents, she had been grounded in the knowledge of the power of faith, hope and love of God the heavenly father. That was her place of solace. The very fact of the absence of the spiritual aura of the parents made the journey more tedious and excruciating. Here is a simple truth that is generally lost in the scheme of things; a child with two living parents has three prayer pivots and routes to the throne of grace. When they die, those pivots and routes are reduced to just one. This makes the life of an orphan unenviable on all levels. She had to survive on her own along with her siblings. The journey took her through many mountains and valleys including moments of joy and sadness, success and failure, laughing and weeping, births and deaths, frustration and restoration. The pivotal essence of her life was the streams of mercy. At every juncture of obstacles and impossibilities, the wonderful, beautiful and calming stream of mercy fl ow from the throne of grace to create a way to the possible. This experience is beyond imagination. This book will touch your life like never before. Enjoy and share.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640030497

Book preview

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement

Prologue

Introduction

The Great News

My Butterfly Years

The Unknown Future

My Destiny Beckons

Coming to America

On the Shores of America

The New Immigrant

College Bound

Gold—Homeownership

Entrepreneur—Subway Franchise

The Great Challenge

Search for a New Beginning

Family Reunion

New Hope, New Horizon

The Maze Matrix

Epilogue

About the Author

9781640030497_Ebook.jpg

Streams

of

Mercy

Turning Impossibilities to Possibilities

Ronke Carons

ISBN 978-1-64003-048-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64003-049-7 (Digital)

Copyright © 2017 Ronke Carons

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

To my three sons,

Jide, Tosin, and Akin

Acknowledgement

Glory to God Almighty through

Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, for the inspiration to write this book. God, in His mercy, continues to show up for me in miraculous ways with His streams of mercy and love, whether I am passing through waters and fires and/or mountains and valleys.

My profound gratitude goes to my sisters and brothers for their love and goodness. We are a bunch of survivors. My appreciation extends to all my friends and mentors. They came to my rescue as and when needed with love and care.

My three sons are my life and angels. I live for them. I pray, fast, and I dream big for them. They are now young professionals stamping their footholds in the sands of time. Mummy loves each of you for your uniqueness!

Finally, blessings on Denise Hunter my publication assistant, Joseph Magnolia my acquisition agent and all the editors who worked tirelessly to bring this book to life. I can never thank you enough. God bless each of you.

Prologue

Life is good.

Life is beautiful.

Life is complicated.

You cannot predict the future, but you can create it

with a focus on the highest ideals and the best of the bests!

Simply turn all impossibilities to possibilities.

Introduction

We all survive each day

through the streams of mercy that flow to us from heaven. I am chock-full of that stream. I was born into a very humble family who rely daily on God’s grace from above. However, my world was turned upside down when I lost my mother at the age of thirteen. She suddenly took ill, was rushed to the hospital, and she died the second day. My father and the entire family were devastated. I saw my father cried so bitterly; that made the situation worse for my siblings and me. We felt so lost.

We grieved. We put our lives together again, and my father worked so hard to provide for us. He was still young, so he had to remarry. He married a beautiful tall young lady who had three sons. We became a blended family with eight children, five from my mother and three from my stepmother. We survived holding on to one another. I finished high school and was admitted into the university because my father believed very much in education. In my second semester, my world came crashing again.

My uncle came to visit me in the university and told me we had to go to Lagos immediately as there was an emergency at home. We had to travel home only to find that my father had died suddenly in the night. He was rushed to the hospital but was declared dead. I was eighteen years old. So I became a teenage orphan. That is a situation I do not wish on anyone. It is a very bad place to be. I looked to my right, no father; looked to my left, no mother. Those are the only two very important persons who share their spiritual aura with you.

No one can replace your mother and father. Basic truth!

Families and friends rallied around us to support us and help us, but there is a limit to what they can do. They have their challenges to grapple with too. With time, everyone fizzled from our lives, and we had to fend for ourselves. It was and still an excruciating experience. After my father’s funeral, my siblings and I were divided and sent to live with different relatives. Since then, I have survived on the streams of mercy that flow to me every day. When all seems lost and hopeless, this miraculous stream of mercy will flow to deliver, uphold, strengthen, guide, and lead me on.

Life for me has been a roller coaster. I have experienced all shades of life. I have been on top of the mountains and also in the deepest valleys of life. I have made money and have lost money. I have been very healthy and suffered from major illnesses and currently battling leukemia. I was issued a bill of death in 2010 for leukemia, but I am still here and thriving. I developed a vey big heart of gold, welcoming huge smile, and a wide bear hug so the streams of mercy can keep flowing my way. I learned the strategy to remove myself from the bandwagon effect so I can strive for the highest ideals in order to achieve my dreams. I count my blessings and challenges every day and have found that my blessings outweigh my challenges. I found that life is mountains, valleys, and mountains. That is simply life. When on the mountains, be merry, be happy. When in the valleys, be happy because valleys bring out the best in us, and one is able to quietly turn impossibilities to possibilities. God has been good to me. I have three wonderful sons, two beautiful daughters-in-law, three wonderful granddaughters, and a handsome grandson. I am still waiting for more blessings of children. My challenges pale in the face of these manifold blessings. What we deem to be challenges and dark moments of our lives are actually the times of new reborn that propel us back to reality and new possibilities. Think of Silicon Valley; that is the seat of technological innovations in the world. Think of Sonoma Valley; that is the food basket for America.

Valley of life can be good. Whatever the challenges, use your resilience to figure out and tap into the stream of mercy. It is forever flowing. Get yourself back up and move on. Embrace the mountains and the valleys because you did not ask to come here. Your parents in love conceived you, brought you down here to enjoy and participate in the beauty of creation. Things good and bad can happen along the journey. Whatever the circumstances, it is still a beautiful world with all potentials at your feet beckoning. Dream big, live your dreams, take the bumps, and accept the chards. Forge ahead with humility, openness, eagerness, and faith.

You are here for a purpose, and you need to achieve that purpose and leave the world a better place for generations to come. Play the game in quietness and wisdom. Every little hand of fellowship, words of kindness, breath of compassion, little gifts of love, courage, calculated risks for great endeavors add joy to this beautiful world. You have only one life to live. As an American, the potentials and possibilities in human endeavors and development are limitless. The sky is the limit. You cannot predict the future, but you can create it with a focus on the highest ideals and the best of the bests. Earnestly seek to achieve your dream through hard work, diligence, patience, and obedience to the rule of law. Be smart and just beat each odd as it comes at you through the stream of mercy. Be merry and simply laugh each day off.

My book narrates the streams of mercy I have enjoyed over the years. It depicts my roller-coaster life that has conquered all possible obstacles and challenges, turning all impossibilities to possibilities. I am sharing with you the joy that comes from the streams of mercy so you too can tap into it and elevate yourself whether in joy or in sorrow. That stream is forever flowing from above, will never dry, and is available to you at no cost—only through faith, hope, and love. Enjoy!

Ronke Carons

Maryland, USA

2017

1

The Great News

The first great news is

that the world is still a beautiful place. Blessings and challenges abound. Celebrate blessings and be happy for challenges. Everyone will be knocked down at one point in life. It is only human to fall down on your butts either due to your mistakes, failures, commission or omission, or due to the commission or omission of another person, or simply due to natural disaster for which you do not have control. Things simply happen. Life will come at you; no one is immune to life. However, what you do or how you react when challenges come determines your destiny in life. You either wallow in self-pity or misery, or you arise and shine, lift up your head, square your shoulder, and declare yourself a winner, the child of the Most High God with a blessing to become victorious. Sing a new song in your heart and hope for glory. Now it is important to know that coming back up could be daunting, but when you are determined to succeed in this life, you will overcome.

Your parents, a man and a woman, made love, procreated, and brought you into this world. Your uniqueness, which is the foundation and bedrock of who you are, comes from scientifically proven fact that you are just one sperm approved by God out of millions of sperms to create you. That means that God sacrificed other million children for you to survive to come into this world as a newborn baby. This information should spur you to action. You should hold this wonder in high esteem to recognize that you were wonderfully created for a purpose and a blessed destiny. You were a bundle of joy when you were born. The heavens and the earth celebrated your arrival. With that joy comes a lifetime of joy and achievements intermingled with challenges and sometimes difficulties that are unpredictable and unimaginable. These challenges and difficulties are valleys along life’s journey. The valley may be just a passing phase or a real, deep tempest. It may present in any form or shape. The valley may be the loss of a mother, father, or both parents in which you become an orphan. It may be the loss of a job, and you become penniless. It may be onset of debilitating disease that incapacitates you. It may be the loss of all your possessions, investments, and business that turns you into a pauper. It may be divorce that turns you into a single parent with all its innuendoes. It may be jail time that turns you into an outcast. The tragedies and adversities of life are countless and come in diverse formations. In real life, we tend to focus on the valleys, forgetting that they are our source of strength for greater heights of achievements. The fact of life is that joys and challenges are intermingled and interwoven. Those two phenomena lead the little child to the unknown along life’s journey. Each child has a peculiar and unique destiny for greatness.

If I could survive all the bumps, chards, valleys of death and still be here standing and breathing, you too can. I dreamt of coming to America since I graduated from college in 1975. The opportunity came on a platter of gold twenty-three years later. I was born into a very humble family sixty-five years ago in Lagos, Nigeria. We lived in a one-room apartment in a street lined with trees. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth but into a deeply religious and hardworking family. It was a very humble and loving family where we were allowed to dream, a family that works hard and plays hard. I grew up in a safe neighborhood where you could go out for a whole day or even travel out for weeks without locking your doors.

My father worked as a dock supervisor with the Nigerian Ports Authority, so I had early an encounter with the Western world as a child. Ships were allocated to my father’s shed to berth and unload their cargoes. My father made it a point of duty to take me on weekends aboard the ships to play with the captains and crew members, who gave me chocolates and candies. I remember quite vividly receiving a big live foreign chicken as a Christmas present from one of the captains. My whole neighborhood was agog with wonder at the time because the chicken was much bigger than the local ones, and it had lots of fluffy feathers. The chicken was a toy for the kids in the neighborhood for quite some time, but we eventually cooked it for Christmas. That early encounter with the whites informed my father’s decision to educate me because he wanted me to achieve greater heights. My mother was a small businesswoman in Lagos selling clothes from market to market. I had hands-on experience with business from my early childhood. Actually, I started my own small business as a five-year-old kid running a small fruit stand. I still believe in the power and greatness of entrepreneurship.

We were brought up under strict discipline of faith in God and in truth. Our typical day started at 5:00 a.m. when we go for early-morning church service. We came back home at 6:00 a.m. to prepare for school. We set out for school at 7:00 a.m. with a good home-cooked breakfast in our stomach and a little stipend for our snacks. The school ended at 2:00 p.m. When we got home, we ate our lunch, which my mother had prepared before going out for her business. By 3:00 p.m., we went to our mentor’s program, where we did our homework and received further tutoring for the next day’s schoolwork. The tutoring program ended at 5:00 p.m., and I had to join my mother in her store as her apprentice or assistant for the remaining part of the day. It was a great time of my life. The whole day was fully scheduled with little room for playing around. The only free day I had was Saturday, when I had freedom to wake up when I liked, did general cleaning (including laundry) and shopping, and participate in organized extracurricular activities with my friends.

Also on Saturdays, we could walk the long distance from home to join my mother in the store just playing kids’ stuff along the way. My childhood was so beautiful that I think of my mother and father every day even at this middle age. My father was all for education. He worked different shifts, but as soon as he got home, the first thing he asked for was my homework. He would check my homework to be sure it was done and pack my schoolbag for the next morning, in addition to attending or making provision for school requirements and my daily stipend or pocket money. My mother was discipline personified. We were under strict instruction to be on the right side of the law at all times. Street fighting or altercations was not permitted. We could play with other kids, but we had