Angela Ielasi

Obituary

Angela Joy Ielasi, passed away peacefully in her home in Athens Georgia on the morning of February 28, 2025. She was born on July 10, 1957 in Adelaide, South Australia, to Harry & Barbara Caust. She is survived by one brother, Phil Caust of Gold Coast, Australia and her husband of 28 years, Steve Ielasi, whom she married October 19, 1996.

Angela, affectionately known simply as Ang by her loved ones, was a woman of many talents. She was a gifted seamstress, cake decorator, jewelry maker and gardener - just to name a few. In Adelaide she worked as manager of Spotlight, a fabric and home decorating store, before opening up her own flower shop, Sweet Pea Flowers, which she and Steve ran together until their move to the US where she started Tarangela Studios creating jewelry, handbags and other handmade items. She was a vendor at the Athens Farmers Market for 10 years and served on the board for 8 of those years.

But her real passion was serving in various ways in her church, The Revival Fellowship, which she joined in 1983 after experiencing the life changing power of receiving the Holy Spirit. In the fellowship in Adelaide, she assisted in many ways, for example making wedding dresses, cakes and flower arrangements for countless assembly weddings. She loved helping with costume and set design for the legendary Don’t Knock Noah play where she was cast as the “Old Woman” for 20 years as well as many other stage performances the church presented.

In 2007, Ang and Steve began a new adventure by moving to the States to support a small Revival Fellowship assembly starting up in Athens Georgia with Steve eventually becoming pastor. In the church there, she continued to serve right up until her final days doing everything from cleaning bathrooms to looking after children to organizing camps to coming up with many “scathingly brilliant ideas” to support the work over the years. She will be deeply missed by Steve and her family and the fellowship in Athens, who know two things with great certainty; there will only ever be one Ang Ielasi, and they will see her again one day soon.

A Celebration of Life will be held Saturday March 8th at Lord & Stephens Funeral Home at 4355 Lexington Rd, Athens at 11 am. All who knew and loved her are invited to attend.

Eulogy for the celebration of life of Angela Ielasi – March 8th, 2025

Written by her beloved husband, Steve Ielasi.

First of all I want to thank all of you for coming today to celebrate Angela’s life as well as the people watching the live stream. I’m sure there will be many in Australia who will watch the recording later given it’s around 2.30am there.

I also want to thank our worldwide fellowship for your prayers & messages of support over the past couple of years – Ang & I really appreciated that and often commented about it.

Angela Ielasi was born on July 10th 1957 in Adelaide, South Australia to Harry & Barbara Caust. She has a brother, Phil Caust who lives on the Gold Coast, Australia with his wife Ayu and their daughter Anisha - unfortunately they can’t be here today.

Angela grew up in an eastern suburb of Adelaide, Campbelltown which was a neighboring suburb to where I grew up so even all those years ago it seems we were destined to be close.

Her cousin Vicki told me that she and Ang loved dressing up Barbie Dolls and that Ang would search the house for fabric and clothing to dress up in -I guess this was the start of her performing stage career !

Times were very different to what they are today. Ang’s family didn’t have the phone connected (landline) until she was 14 years old so if they wanted to make a call they walked to the end of their street where there was a phone box. Of course, nobody could call them !

At around the same age, her grandma was having a birthday and they were going to have it at the Pizza Palace (which was the only Pizza Place in Adelaide at the time). Ang had to ask her mother what pizza was and would she like it. How many 14 year olds today don’t know what pizza is !

When she was 17 her parents moved to Perth (about 1600 miles) for her dad’s work. Ang had left school and was working at this time and didn’t want to go so her parents got her an apartment and set her up. Her mother had taught Ang to sew at a young age and she was working at the “Yippee Yahoo Shirt Factory” – that wasn’t the real name but apparently the owners were hippies so Ang named it that.

So began a lifelong interest in crafts and creativity. She became an excellent seamstress, jewelry maker, knitter – in fact there was almost nothing she couldn’t do and excel at (except Excel spreadsheets which she left to me). She was the manager of a store in Adelaide called Spotlight which was a fabric and Home Décor store. It always amazed me how she folded things – eg a fitted bed sheet which are so painful for us mortals – she seemed to just throw it in the air, wave her hands and it was perfectly folded, all corners at 90 degrees. It just seemed to encapsulate her ability when it came to such things – it was all so easy for her.

She did a horticultural course when in her early 30s – she could rattle off the Latin names of so many plants, where they grew, how to look after them – she aways loved gardening and in 2021 we completely raised our yard to the ground (back to bare dirt) – one day her, Sage & Irie just started putting down edging, bark chips and moved some outdoor furniture to make a patio – it was the start of a wonderful garden that is still a work in progress. She loved her garden and teaching the children all about the plants, how to plant and look after them. She often got up at 6am in summer to work out there until around 10am when coffee called and the temperature rose.

As you can see she was a great cook – she had her own recipes in her head that always turned out perfectly. She always said “Cooking is an art, something you feel, you don’t need a recipe”.

I replied “ that’s OK for you but what about the rest of us?” She loved having the fellowship over to the house and providing good food for them – we had some great Christmas Lunches and the food she put out for Housemeetings was legendary.

Ang had a pretty good & stable upbringing but by her mid twenties she had become disillusioned with life – her friends were not reliable and life was getting tough for a single girl.

It was at this time that her brother Phil told her of an experience he had – he’d been to a church in an old picture theatre where people received the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. She had never heard that before and when Phil invited her to a Revival Fellowship meeting she accepted. At that first meeting she was baptized by full immersion – later that day she went home, knelt by her bedside and prayed – soon after she too received the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues as the Bible evidence. It was June 12th 1983 (her best friend Leroy’s birthday) and was the start of her walk with the Lord and it never diminished over the following 4+ decades.

I came to that same fellowship later the same month (as usual she always was one step ahead of me) and Angela & I were friends for many years. We were in a play “Don’t Knock Noah” together for 20 years – she played Noah’s mother-in-law and I was one of Noah’s sons and we were often out at the same “suppers” as we call them in Australia (coffee, cake, snacks) so we saw each other a lot.

We had known each other for 13 years when we began courting and on October 19th 1996 we were married by Pastor Darryl Williams who has flown all the way from Melbourne, Australia to be here today. We had wanted to be married fairly quickly but Pastor Darryl thought we should wait and come back and see him in a month which we did. This happened a couple of times until Ang said to him “I’m 39 years of age, my life is ebbing away before my very eyes, I want to get married now!” 3 months later we were married.

And so began our wonderful partnership. Just after we were married we were going to a quiz night and I asked her which team she was on (meaning which quiz team) . “I’m on your team” was the reply but she was referring to us – I always told her it was the most wonderful thing anyone has ever said to me.

We moved into our 2nd house in 1997 which she quickly transformed, almost single-handedly painting it inside & out plus completely re-establishing the garden. One of her favorite sayings was “I have a scathingly brilliant idea” – this generally meant a lot of work, a lot of money or both was involved. Certainly some were way out on left field but I learnt over the years that the majority were indeed, scathingly brilliant. Some people are good at thinking outside the box – Ang didn’t even have a box! Her least favorite place was in her comfort zone.

Around 2001 after all the work at the house was done, Ang was bored and needed a new challenge so she bought a florist just around the corner from our house. Someone asked her whether she had formal training – “None” was the reply but that was her advantage – the shop did very well and she was very pleased when she got the center spread in the Sunday Mail paper for wedding flowers she had done. Who needs formal training !

After 6 years of doing that it was time for another change – we had visited Athens GA in 2004 and in 2007 we moved to the USA (in Lexington originally) to help with the small fellowship. Ang put her sewing, jewelry and various craft skills to good use - we joined the Athens Farmers Market in 2008 (it’s inaugural year) and did the market for 10 years – she was on the AFM board for 8 of those years and wrote the Rules & Regulations for Craft Vendors. Ang loved spiders (especially Tarantulas) and at school her nickname was Tarangela -hence the Tarantula next door which takes pride of place on our mantlepiece_– her AFM business name was Tarangela Studios and every item she made has a small tab with a spider inked into it

She had so many interests in her life and was so good at them – she could look at a blank slate and see in her mind exactly how the finished product would look and how to get there – something I’m not particularly blessed with unless it’s a spreadsheet which she wasn’t impressed by.

But since June 1983 her overriding passion was how she could serve the Lord and her brothers & sisters. Over the years she made countless wedding dresses (including her own), cakes and flower arrangements. She made many costumes for the Don’t Knock Noah play and was a regular skit performer in our church. She loved nothing more than helping someone in need and was constantly coming up with various fellowship activities we could do together.

In 2019 she discovered a lump in her neck which was cancerous – it was surgically removed and they said it was slow growing. In January 2022 it reappeared and another surgery – this time they would remove a bone in her leg to reconstruct her jaw. On the morning of the surgery they wrote on her leg NO IV so that leg was left untouched. The surgery was meant to go 14 hours but after 8 they were done. Turned out the tumor had moved from where the MRI said it was so the whole leg bone removal wasn’t necessary. That was one of the first miracles of many.

In July 2022 she developed a cough – it was stage 4 lung cancer and she had 4 months to live. She started chemo but it was constantly interrupted by a whole range of things some of them as dangerous as the cancer itself – I don’t think she completed even 1 full cycle - one by one these were taken care of miraculously and despite all that by December 2022 the cancer was 90% gone. It was controlled for some time but never quite disappeared. Despite all this Ang was always positive, always figuring out what she could do to serve, always putting herself last. When our fellowship moved to a new hall in Sep/Oct last year she designed the fit out and when we were setting it up would move things around to where they needed to go from her wheelchair pushing them with her feet. Can’t was not a word in her vocabulary.

She continued to serve right up until her final days doing everything from cleaning bathrooms to looking after children to organizing camps to coming up with many “scathingly brilliant ideas” to support the work over the years in any way she could.

Ang always said “If I die I don’t want anyone to say I lost my battle with cancer”. She knew that even if that happened the truth is that a wonderful victory has been won, not lost – in fact the ultimate victory has been won. Angela was ready to go in the end but it was because she was very confident in her salvation. She knew that she had aligned herself with the Bible way of salvation, not man’s way – repentance, water baptism by full immersion and receiving the Holy Spirit with the Bible evidence of speaking in tongues.

Ang loved the Royal Family and our late Queen in particular – in the slide show you’ll see a picture of her dressed as the Queen. When her husband, Prince Phillip died the Queen said “Grief is the price of love”.

I’m so glad to pay that price and feel that grief because the love we had made it all worth it.

Last week she told her nurse “I’m going to a much better place” – she is asleep now awaiting the Lord’s return.

My dear Angela, sleep now – the very next thing she will hear…sound of the trumpet and then…

Mat 25:23 Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

Thank you for 28 wonderful, exciting, unpredictable years

So it’s not goodbye my darling girl,– because we’ll see you soon !