When Peter Coleman set out to follow God’s call to serve as a missionary in Nicaragua, he couldn’t imagine the journey ahead. But as he faced danger, uncertainty, and life-threatening illness, Peter learned to lean on the Lord in new ways. Tune in for this episode of the Joni and Friends Ministry Podcast to hear Peter Coleman talk about living out God’s call and trusting Jesus through hardship.
When Peter Coleman set out to follow God’s call to serve as a missionary in Nicaragua, he couldn’t imagine the journey ahead. But as he faced danger, uncertainty, and life-threatening illness, Peter learned to lean on the Lord in new ways. Tune in for this episode of the Joni and Friends Ministry Podcast to hear Peter Coleman talk about living out God’s call and trusting Jesus through hardship.
About Peter...
Peter Coleman studied Sustainable International Development at Brandeis University and went on to serve as a missionary deep in the jungles of Nicaragua where he and his team faced danger and hardship every day. After contracting a severe virus similar to Dengue fever in addition to malaria, Peter spent many weeks in the hospital. The illness took a brutal toll on Peter; he lost 40 pounds, 30% of his skin, and most of his memory.
Peter eventually made a full recovery and continued his thriving ministry work in Nicaragua until he sensed a clear call from God to return to the U.S. and began a new season of ministry work. Then in 2021 an unexpected stroke left a legion on Peter’s brain stem and sent him into a frightening medical decline, including the development of multiple large brain and brain stem tumors.
After six months in the hospital, Peter emerged unable to read or write, challenged to swallow food or respond to stimulation. But by God’s grace, Peter has made a slow recovery, surrendering to God every day. Despite the unknown ahead and the benign tumors in his brain, Peter looks to Christ—just as Jesus’s disciple Peter did in Matthew 14 as he stepped out of the boat to walk across the water.
KEY QUESTIONS:
KEY SCRIPTURE:
Matthew 14:25–33: “Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. ‘It’s a ghost,’ they said, and cried out in fear.
But Jesus immediately said to them: ‘Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.’
‘Lord, if it’s you,’ Peter replied, ‘tell me to come to you on the water.’
‘Come,’ he said.
Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’
Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. ‘You of little faith,’ he said, ‘why did you doubt?’
And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’”
RESOURCES:
Crystal Keating: This is the Joni and Friends Ministry Podcast and I’m your host Crystal Keating. Each week we’re bringing you encouraging conversations about finding hope through hardship and practical ways that you can include people living with disability in your church and community. As you listen, visit joniandfriends.org/podcast to access the resources we mention, or to send me a message with your thoughts.
In 1998, Peter Coleman was called to help with emergency response in Central America. After a powerful hurricane devastated the land and killed thousands of people, Peter was eager to respond to God's voice to leave his home and move abroad. And this call eventually led him to serve full-time in the jungles of Nicaragua.
Like many of us, little did Peter know what God had in store for him: an abundant and thriving ministry along with brutal challenges to his faith, violence, life-changing illness, and a heartbreaking call to return to the States where he eventually discovered he had developed numerous brain tumors.
Through it all, Peter has experienced God's care and has trusted in the Lord's wisdom and love for him. And today, Peter joins us to share more of this incredible story.
So Peter, welcome to the podcast. It is such an honor to sit face-to-face with you and hear about all that God has done through such severe circumstances.
Peter Coleman: Thank you so much. What a joy to be here.
Crystal Keating: So I just want you to take us back 20 years ago when you heard God calling you to serve in Nicaragua after that devastating hurricane killed over 10,000 people. That is so tragic. How did you sense God leading you there, and what did you think you'd be doing?
Peter Coleman: It was a devastating time for Central America, and particularly for Nicaragua as they had suffered repeated natural disasters and a tremendous civil war that had just battered them for decades.
After the hurricane, literally a month after, I had some time available and I spoke to my father who was a Baptist pastor.
I said, “Dad what can I do? I'd like to serve, I'd like to volunteer somewhere. Somehow, I just feel called to do this. I don't know what, when, where, how, I only know why.”
And he said, well, son, why don't you talk to this young man, Nick Cole, who put me in touch with his father, who was the founder of the Peace and Hope Trust in the U.K., a retired Royal Air Force squadron leader.
And Mike Cole and his Air Force buddies had mobilized a number of Christian expeditions around the world. And about a year prior to the hurricane, they had done a trans-Central America expedition, and they were really exposed to the magnitude of poverty that Nicaragua faces. And so they felt called through their faith and through their resources to try to make a difference and to engage, particularly the indigenous communities on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in response to the hurricane.
Crystal Keating: So you joined them not necessarily knowing what you were gonna do, but you were so willing.
Peter Coleman: I was willing and I had no idea what I was going to do whatsoever. It was a 30-second phone call with Mike Cole saying, meet me in Managua, is how the Brits say it.
And that was it. Hung up the phone. And so I said, okay, Lord, I'm in. I was younger and I was enthusiastic about this. It was an adventure with a purpose and I showed up, met this wonderful man named Mike Cole. And we traveled to the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and we actually struggled for days to even find a boat, that would take us up into the areas that were hardest hit by the hurricane.
There was debris, homes, massive trees floating down the highest-volume river in Central America, the Río Grande de Matagalpa. It was just devastating to see entire villages wiped out.
There was massive flooding upriver, folks downriver weren't aware. And basically a wall of mud and water just raged down this river for 80 miles, getting bigger and bigger and wiped communities right off the map.
Crystal Keating: That is devastating to see. And so while you were there, what are you sensing God leading you to do?
Peter Coleman: Well, at that moment in time, yes, it was just Mike and myself, and very shortly thereafter, as in a matter of days, it was just me and six ocean containers full of supplies, relief aid, you name it, whatever folks were able to donate from the U.K.
And I just had to figure out what to do and how to do it without a lick of Spanish. Miskito is the indigenous language.
Okay. The most popular common indigenous language. Hmm. Neither of which I had of course.
Crystal Keating: How did you, being there and. and eventually caring for them, how did that develop into being directed towards serving full-time in the deep jungles of that country?
Peter Coleman: Well, it exposed me to something, a level of poverty I had not known prior. And it was a very deep, powerful experience. God made it very clear to me. He says, Peter, you are relatively young. You're healthy, and I want you to serve here. Just do whatever.
I have no idea what my trajectory is, what my strategic plan would be. And I said, okay, Lord, I'm going to serve. And so shortly after that I founded Peace and Hope Frontier Mission in the United States. Goodness, that would be around 2000. And by God's grace, that ministry grew and it continued to grow.
And eventually in 2004 we had grown to the point where we needed permanent staff in Nicaragua, and I was able to move to Managua to serve the ministry from Nicaragua.
Crystal Keating: So what was the mission of your foundation at that point, or your ministry?
Peter Coleman: We were very, very focused on the extremely isolated and often called forgotten communities on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua.
We're talking about communities of 150 to 300 people with an illiteracy rate of 90% to 95%, no access to medicine or medical care. Other than maybe a two-and-a-half to three-day paddle to a remote clinic of sorts. Extremely limited production capacity as far as food is concerned.
So they could grow rice, but their ability to mill it really didn't exist. They would just break it, get the husk off and boil it and eat it. Although it was a wonderful rice, but they couldn't do anything with it. So food security and looking at issues of sustainability, seeing, okay, there's some opportunities here to sustainably reduce poverty without leveraging the future of the generations to come.
Crystal Keating: Right, because it sounds like you're working with communities of indigenous people, not just bringing in support, but actually partnering with them, which I think lends itself to sustainability.
Peter Coleman: We would conduct a needs-based assessment once we had an adequate relational equity with the communities.
And we'd work in one community and all of a sudden five communities upriver would hear about us. Oh yeah. And they would send, the local pastor would come down and we'd have a nice chat and probably a really crummy cup of coffee, whatever we could make with a fire. And the relationships just grew.
And we moved further and further upriver and all of it was built on relationships. So we were utilizing volunteers not just from the United States, but from the U.K., from Germany, from New Zealand, from Australia from South Africa were coming. And they were finding this to be such a gripping, engaging, challenging opportunity to serve Christ that most had never imagined was possible.
We did take myriad risks. It was part of the calling to serve the people we were serving, as the communities were only accessible by boat and a long, fast, high-speed boat trip at that. And really in the heart of “narco” trafficking of the drug world.
We're right off of the coast between Columbia, Guatemala, Mexico, right? And a lot of drug activity took place right offshore, like five, ten miles. And so a lot of these villages would have these windfalls of resources if there was an intervention and the Nicaragua Navy or police were to try to intercept a boat at sea. They would throw their cargo overboard. And the folks in the communities knew that they could comb the beach every morning.
So folks would find the drugs and they would put them back into circulation and make pennies on the dollar. And that was how most of the folks we were serving were surviving.
The Revolutionary War was still fresh in the minds of so many, although it was 30 years prior. So a lot of hostility, a lot of fear. A lot of distrust for any outsider, regardless of the color of their skin. Very violent, hostile land issues. We experienced a lot of violent attacks, sadly, a lot of lives lost in the communities we were serving.
So it was a challenging time seeing children dying unnecessarily from diseases that could be malnourishment or a disease that could be fixed with two antibiotics.
Crystal Keating: They just didn't have access to that kind of care. None whatsoever. Wow. Wow. So tell us about what it was like to live there. Are you living within community? Did you have your own home? Did you eventually start learning the language?
Peter Coleman: Right before I moved to Nicaragua, I finished grad school where I studied sustainable international development, which was really quite useful as I was approaching, these communities trying to do that sustainably, inclusively.
And I loved being there. I had a little home in the city in Managua at the capital where I'd spend maybe two weeks of the month in the office collaborating with volunteers and donors, and at least two months upriver serving the communities, building relationships.
Crystal Keating: So you're very mobile.
Peter Coleman: I was. Yes. We were all over.
Crystal Keating: You were all over.
Peter Coleman: Yes, absolutely. So it was either an outrageous four-by-four cross-country trek on dirt track at best, crossing rivers, sinking the truck in rivers, getting stranded for days, you name it.
If it could happen, it did. You know, we can't spend that much money on logistics and not hang around for a good period of time.
Crystal Keating: Hmm. And so did any of this deter you to keep going? I mean, I'm pretty faint of heart. I would've said, I don't know if this is for me.
Peter Coleman: You know, it didn't.
Crystal Keating: You found it exciting.
Peter Coleman: I did. I found it exciting in that question you just asked me. People would say, gosh, haven't you been through enough? Isn't that a sign that it's time to stop? And I'd say, well, you just said I've been through a lot and I have, and God has been faithful and he's seen me through this. So to me it's a sign that that I should continue.
Crystal Keating: How interesting. What a different perspective, and okay, so I want to kind of change directions because while you were in Nicaragua, you contracted a virus, which completely impacted your health. So why don't you tell us about your experience with Dengue Fever?
How did you survive such a severe disease?
Peter Coleman: Um, yes. Dengue Fever was, I had heard of it for years, and it takes hundreds of thousands of lives every year unnecessarily, similar to malaria, a vector-borne, mosquito-borne illness.
But in most cases it can be treated as long as the fever can be managed. So I contracted a very, very severe case of it.
I woke up one morning unable to see, unable to move, in absolute agony, and I didn't really know what I was going to do. It was overwhelming, shocking, scary. The fear hadn't really set in because the pain was so severe and maybe the pain was a blessing.
By God's grace, a British woman who I was supposed to meet at the embassy to help her with some paperwork, she realized maybe something was amiss and she knew the hotel I was staying at. She found me and was able to get some hotel staff and ultimately a doctor and we start doing blood tests and figuring out what on earth was happening.
Crystal Keating: That sounds terrifying.
Peter Coleman: It was, it was. And I was in and out during this, I mean, I couldn't see anything. I didn't altogether know what was happening. And so they filled the bathtub, the little hotel bathtub with ice, and they put me in the tub of ice.
Crystal Keating: And to reduce your fever, right.
Peter Coleman: To try to get it to a manageable level. It was pushing 107. So, you know, I wasn't in a good place, to say the least. And it was a French doctor and bless him, he just, filled me full of drugs and kept me on ice and tried to get an ambulance for me to bring me to the hospital.
Well, no ambulance would take me because they didn't want me dying in their ambulance. They were so sure I was going to die. So ultimately, he gave up on ambulances and he put me in the back of his pickup truck and he drove me to what then was the best little hospital that could be found in Managua, where I spent many, many weeks, really on the edge for a long period of time, generally incoherent, which might have been a blessing. And during that period of time, because of the extreme fever, I started to lose the skin from my elbows down to my fingers and from my knees, down through my toes and my hair was falling out and my face was peeling off.
I wasn't obviously able to eat and I just lost weight at an incredible rate. I lost roughly 40 pounds in the period I was in the hospital and they were just trying to keep me going, just trying to battle the fever. And it's what they call “bone break fever.” And I understand why, because you literally feel like your bones are breaking in your body.
And it was quite agonizing. They didn't have strong advanced pain meds there. It was a hard, a hard, hard time.
Crystal Keating: Did you have any kind of spiritual experience while you were there? Did you feel God's presence? Did you feel alone?
Peter Coleman: I did not feel alone, nor at that time did I feel the overwhelming presence of the Holy Spirit.
But nor did I feel a sense of fear, a fear that I have felt in the past. I just felt, “one second at a time, buddy” and “just hang in there” kind of thing and praying as best I could when I could kind of conceive of how to pray.
Crystal Keating: Right. Because your mind's not all the way there.
Peter Coleman: I mean the brain isn't supposed to handle those temperatures.
Crystal Keating: No, it's not.
Peter Coleman: Especially over a long period of time. And I was fighting that fever for a solid two and a half weeks before they could get it down into the low hundreds. And you know, it's still very uncomfortable. It is. And those, those drugs that they would use to help fight, combat the fever, which they had to use, didn't do my liver and kidneys any favors. They're pretty strong, but you know something, God is so good. He's just so good. And after nearly four weeks, I was well enough to travel back to the States, using a wheelchair, unable to walk. In fact, unable to move the wheelchair because I didn't have skin on my hands. I can just remember sitting in my little airline seat, pretty uncomfortable and watching chunks of my face fall off onto my lap while I'm sitting on the airplane.
It was the first time , I had been seated upright in nearly a month. Anyways, I got off the airplane and my dear folks received me and they brought me home and they just generously cared for me until I was well enough to start handling the wheelchair myself.
And by God's grace, my skin recovered quickly and I was able to walk and I was able to use my hands. The vision was much slower to recover as was my memory, but those things came back by God's grace and I just…
Crystal Keating: Amazing.
Peter Coleman: It really is.
Crystal Keating: So after you made a full recovery, where did you go from there?
Peter Coleman: I went back to Nicaragua.
Crystal Keating: Did you have any doubts about that decision?
Peter Coleman: Not a single doubt.
Crystal Keating: Okay.
Peter Coleman: The world seemed to have a ton of doubts, but I didn't have a single doubt in my mind.
I was just grateful that I was where I was and I was how I was, gave the glory to God and said, “Okay, Lord, thank you. Let's press on.” And I went back.
Crystal Keating: After you recovered, how did you see God continue to use you in the ministry there? And what kind of ministry was happening at this point through those seasons in your life?
Peter Coleman: I did have a new lease on life and God just poured out his bounty on the ministry. New partnerships were coming to life.
Miraculously my Spanish developed very, very quickly. So in a very short period of time I was able to speak the language more than adequately. And God was just so generous and he poured out his bounty on the villages we were serving on the people serving alongside us on our national team.
We were able to move further and further upriver to, more and more isolated communities where there was a deeper level of poverty, deeper level of isolation, and a deeper feeling of abandonment or, really where we use the word “forgotten.” These folks really are invisible to the world.
Crystal Keating: So what's ministry look like there? Are you planting churches? Are you sharing the Gospel? Like are you bringing resources as an entrance point to building relationships? Help us to see what life was like at that stage in the ministry.
Peter Coleman: Right. Our entry point to new communities was often through a program where we would distribute a Bible translated in Miskito language. We would just wipe out the Nicaragua Bible Society.
Every time they’d have them in stock, we'd buy them all. Again, As we know, mosquito-born and illness is such a killer and such an endemic problem in Nicaragua and in so many other countries. And just the introduction of a mosquito net can reduce the level of illness by a massive percentage, so that was a great entry point.
Crystal Keating: Life and ministry are thriving. You're seeing God move, you're seeing God work and then things changed after 20 years of ministry. You heard God calling you once again, but this time the call was very different and unexpected. So, Peter, how did God speak to you and what was your response?
Peter Coleman: Well, he did not speak to me gently. He did speak clearly for which I am grateful. I was sitting, having a cup of coffee in my backyard, just an average lovely Nicaraguan morning reading my Bible. I was in Proverbs and he just struck me with a command.
There was no questioning the clarity and the seriousness of that command. And it was an, “Absolutely, you’re done.” And it physically knocked me over. I was on my hands and knees wailing, not so much because of the immediate sense of loss, but the absolute knowledge of truth that command came from God. And the fear of disobeying that command was greater than the fear of leaving my home, my pets, my friends, my career, and a thriving career at that.
And so I said, okay, Lord, there is no mistaking this command. And a week later I submitted my resignation, giving, of course, my, the ministry about three months where I would close up shop as far as my role is concerned. And by God's grace, we had a phenomenal national team. They didn't need me.
They really didn't. They can do the job better than me by now. They probably always could have.
Crystal Keating: I think that's coming from a place of humility.
Peter Coleman: Well, I, and a place of hope too, I suppose. Yes. Because by God's grace that ministry carries on and thrives today.
So I set a date to leave Nicaragua for April 1st, 2018, and having walked away from the home I built and with two suitcases. That was it. That was it.
Crystal Keating: So where did you go? I went back to New England. And I thought, well, I do not know what the Lord has in store for me, and so I'm going to just go home and be around my folks for a bit and pray that God will lead me.
My goodness, a 44-year-old man, no job, at Mommy and Daddy's house.
Crystal Keating: So it's 2018, you're back with your parents, you're feeling very humbled. What was life like the next few years?
Peter Coleman: Well, I was committed to enjoying being reunited with my folks. I was close to my elderly parents and I had relatively good health. And so it was just a joy to be back in New England and to be connected to my church. And I just enjoyed that immensely. I started to take my job search very seriously. I knew I needed a good period of time before I did that.
Crystal Keating: And yet you were saying that something happened while you were in the process of those interviews. You had another really life-changing health issue?
Peter Coleman: I did.
Crystal Keating: Significant.
Peter Coleman: I did. I had a stroke and I ended up in the hospital. They saw this very large lesion in my brain stem, but I was talking, I was walking, my hands were working. I was swallowing my food and thinking wow, this is amazing. What a blessing.
Crystal Keating: How did you know you had the stroke?
Peter Coleman: I was starting to feel confused and my motor skills were diminished in my hands. Okay. And I felt like maybe my speech wasn't that clear.
And so I went right into the ER where I just, I was only there 24 hours. They diagnosed the stroke and they saw that I was functioning very, very well. And they referred me to outpatient neurology. And I left and I thought, wow, praise God. I couldn't believe that this had happened, and I'm walking around thinking about it and seeing the image of this massive pontine lesion, and I'm still functioning. I thought, well, praise God.
So I'm feeling a bit confused and a bit uncertain.
But I'm full of gratitude and I'm going about my normal life. And my folks had come up for a coffee, and as we're sitting there having coffee, I lose the right side of my body.
It goes rigid, super rigid, and I can't move my mouth or talk. And I thought, oh my gosh, I'm having another stroke. And that was, that was the beginning of what was an extremely frightening, long, difficult, period of my life.
Crystal Keating: Yeah. Well, and you had just gone through tremendous grief and you were still grieving. And so now you enter into this, really difficult season of another, life-changing challenge, right?
Peter Coleman: So I go to the ER and they admit me and they start doing a workup and this is a smaller hospital in my town and they don't have a neurologist on call or an attending physician that can really figure this out.
So they keep me for a couple days and over these couple of days, I continue to decline. Ultimately they send me to a bit more advanced hospital, and so I stayed another five days in a different hospital and my symptoms kept getting worse. I'm losing my hearing, my speech is diminished now.
And they say, okay, gosh, you did your treatment of prednisone and it's time to go home. And I'll never forget the fear when they wheel me out into the parking lot where my father has driven to pick me up and I'm just blown away by the environment.
I cannot hear or see or make sense of anything. I've been in my little hospital room, you know, for nearly two weeks now. By the end of the next day, I was at the ER and they just kept running me through the MRI.
They saw these lesions and what ultimately they called tumors getting bigger and bigger, more aggressive, more hostile. I'm losing more and more function. In a matter of five weeks, I'm unable to speak clearly.
Unable to think, unable to pray. I can't read, can't write, I kind of see, but not well. They wouldn't let me walk much. I was trying to walk and I just had this little, you know, that old-school grippy thing to squeeze.
Crystal Keating: Right.
Peter Coleman: And I can just remember trying to squeeze that thing thinking, as long as you can keep squeezing this thing, yes, maybe you're going to be okay.
Crystal Keating: At least some part of your body is still working. Was anyone with you? Was anyone speaking to you or just touching you? Because I guess you can't hear. Could you sense that people were around you? I mean, I'm thinking once again, you're here maybe alone.
Peter Coleman: Well, in the hospital, yeah. It was Covid, right? So it was really hard. My dear mom would visit if they would let her. And it wasn't easy to get permission to visit. It was a lonely time. I didn't feel overwhelmed with fear at this point, but I knew something was wrong and I was convinced my life would never be the same.
What that was going to look like, I had no idea. And so they sent me home after an infusion of an excellent drug called Rituximab, sort of a chemo medication, and it didn't work. Three days later, I'm in the ER at a wonderful hospital called Lahey. And the head of neurology there kind of circled the wagons.
He says, something's going on. We don't know what it is, but we want to find out, and I was just poked and prodded for weeks. And ultimately, they decided they can't figure it out.
They need to kind of open my brain up and take a chunk of whatever these tumors are. So now I have 13 deep, large tumors in my brain and brainstem that they can't even get near except for one kind of near the optic nerve.
Things aren't looking good. So I'm doing a lot of end-of-life stuff, which actually that is when the peace started to come. I'm like, well, Lord, now I really have to face things. There's not a lot of ambiguity left here. I'm trying to decide if I want to go onto a ventilator, if I want a feeding tube.
So they took a little chunk of my brain out and they looked at it and they thought, gosh, this doesn't look good.
And so they thought, well, it must be T-cell lymphoma.
So then I ended up at Dana Farber. They said you shouldn't still be alive and you wouldn't if it was T-cell lymphoma. And so they said, we can't give you an answer, but we're going to dismiss that diagnosis. So then I ended up in Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and that was a quick one.
They couldn't rule out MS. But nor could they really confirm it was, and it wasn't acting like MS at all. And during this time I'm not eating. I can't see. I can't hear, I can't use my hands, no reading, no writing, all of that.
And we get to a point where I end up back home in my house in good old Gloucester, Massachusetts. With some pretty major deficiencies in my ability to care for myself and to live on my own.
I was absolutely convinced that it was prayers of so many people that were keeping me going. Absolutely convinced, totally.
So I just went for it. And little by little I was able to get in out of bed by myself and little by little I was able to try to eat a little food and try getting downstairs to my washing machine and just feel my way around.
Crystal Keating: It’s like Joni says, you do the next thing, right?
Because that's the only way to live, especially when it, the only way it feels like you just want to give up. Right?
Peter Coleman: Yeah. Right. And so the conclusion was the only way I was going to carry on, maybe get a little better. And so I'm like, okay, Lord. You know, and every day it's just like, this is, this is your day, God. You know, I'm not sure I want to live this day.
But I'm gonna try. So I just kept pushing on by God's grace alone. No strength of mine.
And so by God's grace, I get a little stronger, get a little stronger. And I just keep progressing and keep advancing and getting better and better.
Crystal Keating: Your abilities are coming back. Right. And you're overwhelmed by God's grace and goodness.
Peter Coleman: I am indeed. I'm so overwhelmed. I can hardly have this conversation. When I think about it, when I write about it, I'm just overwhelmed with gratitude, just so much gratitude.
Every day I'm stepping out of the boat like Peter did. And every day, every day Jesus is there, waiting for me, standing on the water. Don't take your eyes away. Don't see, don't hear. Don't feel the wind. Don't be distracted. Keep looking at me.
Crystal Keating: You know what you're saying just makes me think of the quote by Corey Ten Boom. “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” And that is what you're doing.
Peter Coleman: Yeah. I try to do every single day and be filled with gratitude and let the gratitude push the fear out of my life. Let my faith push the fear away, and just look at Jesus Christ and keep my eyes on him. As hard as it is to hear the words, “don't be afraid,” it's just music to my ears.
Crystal Keating: So, Peter, as we close our time together, and it's been so rich, I just wanted to give you an opportunity just to talk directly to our listeners.
Do you have any words of encouragement?
Peter Coleman: I would say whether you're feeling it at the moment in your heart or not, just keep saying, “I trust you, God, I trust you, God,” over and over. When your mind struggles to even think of a couple of basic words, may they be, “I love you, Jesus. I trust you, Jesus.”
Just say those things. Whisper. Whisper them to yourselves. When you're unable to do what you've done before and when you're feeling limited and feeling the horrifying darkness and fear, and you don't know what to do next, just say those words to yourself, and as Joni says, do the next thing.
Crystal Keating: Peter, it's been such a joy to sit with you.
Thank you for sharing your story. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.
Peter Coleman: Thank you for having me.