I got to preach again on Sunday. I love preaching! I love the process as hard as it is of
preparing a message. I love watching how
God shows up for me and how He knits it all together. What was different this time was that God
gave me a new topic… I can count on my one
hand the amount of times I preached in the last year, but it started becoming
like a stuck record in my head. The
stuck record feeling felt like that because although unique each time the
essence of the talk was always the same core.
When I got the opportunity to preach in Germany last year, I
prepped hard and prayed much… the message themes did not move. I spoke to the leaders at the church saying
that I had tried to so hard to change my message, but it always come back to…
and Alex said to me… do you want a new fresh word or a God NOW word? This set
me off on a journey of looking at the theme of life words, perhaps I could not
move far from it because it was the message my life brought. My word of my testimony MESSAGE.
A few weeks ago, Andre our pastor in South Africa asked me
to preach. I said yes and started
praying and listening. As the weeks went
on I realised I have been given a new message.
God showed me in all different ways how He had been stirring my heart
for a whole year…
When I realised what the message was I started reading
furiously about the topic. The
delightful thing for me in all of it was how naturally God worked with me in
every day stuff. The highlight for me
was His engagement with me about the tough stuff and that the message was born
there in the desert place.
God was talking to me about the miraculous and my control
issues…
Am I prepared to remain in peace, trusting and obeying EVEN
if the miracle does not happen the way I want it to?
After all this whole foster care journey has not gone the
way I thought it would and I have been asking God over and over why HE did not
warn me. After all it was not like we
did not prepare and pray. I had an idea
of how it was going to work. This has not really gone my way!
I have very real needs.
They are not my needs! It is the
need for the children I care for… all 7 of them. God has been showing me that the impact of
doing this well has the potential to impact many families... a ripple effect. This has been challenging and scary. Caring for the seven has been a challenge I
had no idea I would be able to do, but His picture is still BIGGER. Like
I mentioned in an earlier blog, I never became a nurse for a reason…but God is
showing me in fresh new ways all the time how I am in the center of His will
for me.
Foster care has turned out to be the most frustrating and
painful thing I have done in my working life… but I know that I am here for
such a time as this.
The message He gave me is to sustain me in this season. He used an opportunity to preach to give me sustenance
for the journey I am on. The journey that
took another huge twist this week.
I thank GOD that on this journey that we get to experience
real joy and delight too.
It is tough… but a beautiful journey and I want to take this
opportunity to thank all of you who pray for us, support us and take the time to give praise for our faithful village
of people who are walking with us in this season of our life.
I trust that God will miraculously carry us through and that
these little ones will have awesome testimonies of God’s faithfulness.
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