Thursday, September 27, 2007

Hello!

Okay, it's been forever since I've been on. Life seems to catch up with you! Hmmm, have I been doing anything new? Not really. I went to the Ladies Fall Fellowship last Friday, 150 women were there! It was so much fun! The theme was "A Journey through Time", all the table decorations were beautiful, every table had a different theme, and the ladies dressed up to represent different time periods. The speaker talked about writing down our timeline, our life on paper, and in hindsight you may be able to see God's guiding, even though at the time, it may be hard to see God's hand in it all, when we look back at our lives, it is so much easier to see GOD in it all!! She also mentioned the fact that we tend to keep our testimony to ourselves, and not just the time that we were saved, but the trials and triumphs in our lives.
It made me think of the stupid choics I've made in my life, yet God seems to find ways to make it all work out. I think of the teens that have come into my life, made some of the same choices, and they are still struggling. Can my testimony be used in these situations? I know the only reason I have been able to overcome so much is because of my humbling myself to God, repenting of my sins ( again, and again =/ ), and dedicating my children to God. How can God use me? So much of the time I would like to brush it all under a rug, now that I am older people don't notice the age difference between Shell and me. But I wonder if I should be using what I have learned to reach out to other girls in the same situation? How can I be used??
How can I tell others the importance of showing these girls God's love?? We are so quick to judge and turn our backs to them. DO we not see how that only turns them away from God? If they can't find love at church, where will they turn to to find the love and acceptance they are searching for? They are searching for acceptance, not that we should love the sin, but we should love the sinner!! So many of these girls are searching for a way to make things right, they just don't know how to do that. Can I be used??
Pray for me! I have been struggling with this for a long time. First I made the excuse that I was too young. Then I was so busy with all my litle ones... I'm all out of excuses!!

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

God's children

Wow!! To see 2 individuals come to Christ is amazing!! And to witness the joy in an entire church body when they see that their prayers of 2 years have been answered is tear-jerking.

Sunday morning's sermon was your steriotypical brimstone and fire preaching, it was on the Great White Throne Judgement, hearing about that time to come brings me to tears, knowing that so many people I have met and come in contact with, and even friends and family members are going to go thru that, and the emptiness of knowing that we won't remember them, and the realization that God will even cease to remember them, it makes my heart cry.

When Pastor Vester gave the invitation it seemed like a third of the congregation went forward to pray, I didn't know until that night that they went forward to pray for those 2 individuals, sitting in the pews, that had not yet made that all-important decision. To see one of the women stand up to go back to her seat, and as she turned, she saw her friend, kneeling at the alter, she started crying, and she knelt by her friend and was able to hear her prayer, the friend that she had been praying for for SO long to get saved! Then after the close of the service, to see all of the church family embrace her in hugs and tears, it was amazing.

To see God's working thru this church family that we have begun to call our own, even if it for only a short time, has been humbling. To see them on fire for God and His leading, to see the love that they have for each other and for their neighbors and the unsaved that they work with. It has been eye-opening, the importance that they put on the children, training the young men ( that is what they call the little boys 7-16) to become leaders, to disciple them from a very young age to become soldiers for Christ. To teach the young ladies what it is to have character and to live for HIM. To embrace those who have made some stupid choices, yet have come back to God, because they have witnessed God's love thru this church family.

I am so grateful that I have been able to witness these things. It has been amazing the way Dennis and I have been growing in our relationship to God, and in our relationship with each other.

To depend totally on God and to grow more dependent on each other and not on friends or family, I think that is one more thing that I can say I have learned this summer, my first summer away from home. And hopefully many more to come!!