Siesta Spotlight ~ Melana

Name: Melana Lorene Cummings
Age: 52
Residence: Sheridan Wyoming

Things I love: anything purple, Bible study, stuffed animals, a good biography, laughing, being with my family.

Things I don’t like: being territorial, being overweight, people who lie, scary movies, negative people.


As a child my mother took us to church regularly, until my father left her and then she stopped going. I was 17 years old. I remember one time walking to church several miles, on a Sunday morning because I felt like that was what was missing in my life. I was working at a gift store and even bought a rosary (though I was not Catholic), thinking that would take care of what this yearning was. But it wasn’t until I was 21 that I heard about a personal relationship with Christ. THAT WAS IT!!! I knew that’s what was wrong. I knew my void had something to do with God, but I had no idea how to fill it.

God spared me so much of the pain so many of my friends and you siestas have experienced, as a young person. I was part of our state’s drum and bugle corps (The Casper Troopers) until I was 21. In fact, it was there that I found Christ. My friend Laurie had been led to the Lord by a guy named Tim Cummings. I saw this difference in her and I wanted that! Because of her witness to me, I prayed to receive Christ somewhere in the Midwest in August of 1977 while on tour with the corps. I attended the University of Wyoming that fall and was surrounded by the most wonderful bunch of Christian kids. We were all a part of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. During that time I snuck (is that a word?) this Tim guy’s address out of my friend Laurie’s dorm room and wrote him a letter. After graduation I became a staff member for Youth for Christ in Denver where I worked with “troubled” youth for 5 years.

Tim and I wrote letters to each other for 4 years, (hundreds and hundreds of them) seeing each other when the opportunity would permit. In April of 1981, I told him I liked him as more than a friend. He said “What’s wrong with being friends?” I resigned myself to writing letters to him the rest of my life. Then the following June I received two letters from him on the same day. One envelope said “Read this first” He wrote that he was tired of saying good-bye to me in airports and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. I was afraid to open the second letter. I thought it might say that he had been in a diabetic coma and to please ignore that first letter. IT DIDN’T! I was going to get to marry my best friend! The first time we kissed, was the day he put the engagement ring on my finger. We just celebrated our 25th anniversary this past February.

Our daughter Sarah is 19 and was married May 24th of this year. We had infertility problems and suffered two miscarriages when we decided to try to have another child. I had to take fertility drugs to get pregnant and hormone shots to stay pregnant and still could not have a child. So, at 40, the pain of those losses was just too much and I was getting so old anyway, so we stopped trying. God had other plans. I became pregnant at 41 and started to have the same complications. This time we told everyone we knew, to pray, including a group of monks where my husband would go for retreats. Emily is our miracle and she was born 6 weeks before my 42nd birthday. Most people think I’m her grandma, but I don’t care. I can’t imagine my life without her.

I have worked for the State of Wyoming for 21 years. It’s a good job, but it’s just the place where I earn money, it is not my life. My life is Christ. I have also served on the Board of Directors, of our city’s largest day care facility for 9 years.

Three years ago, I felt like I just wasn’t where I should be in my walk with Christ. I began to pray, “Restore unto me, the joy of thy salvation.” A few weeks later, a woman at church, (who would later become one of my dearest friends) showed a little film clip about a Bible Study she would be starting by someone named Beth Moore called “Believing God”. AGAIN….THAT WAS IT! I knew after that little clip, that was what I needed. Now I have completed 4 of Beth’s studies, 1 by Stormie Omartian, and have been to 2 LPL’s and am so looking forward to seeing Beth in SA and Billings MT, this summer, as well as the simulcast. I co-teach Sunday School to 3rd-5th graders, with that friend who first showed the Beth clip I’ll be leading the summer Bible Study Beth has planned for us. Some folks think I’m a Beth freak….I always correct them and say, “No, I’m a Jesus freak.” But I will be forever grateful for Beth’s ministry which has helped me find Jesus to be the Delight of my life! As I said in the ice breaker, I want my girls to love Jesus so much, it aches, not to be in His presence.