Praying

Sending up prayers tonight for two small children in our area whose mother died in a car crash yesterday.  Their lives have now been forever changed. 

Realizing that if our Abigail comes to us in any way other than biologically, she will most likely bear her own grief over whatever situation puts her in a position of needing a family.

Knowing that our God is a healer, that He can bring good out of even the worst circumstances, and having hope because of that.

Praying.

A steadfast spirit and finding joy

Last Sunday evening, September 11, my husband had opened up his Bible looking for some answers to a situation he was dealing with , and one of the verses that just jumped out at him was Psalm 51:10 - Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
That seemed really familiar to me, more so than just having read through it in the last couple years, so I grabbed one of my journals where I've been chronicling the Abigail journey.  While I didn't see anything there, it fell open to an entry dated 9/11 .  . . . . looking on the page before, from 2006, when I was newly pregnant with my son.

And ...... you guessed it, there at the very top of the page was Psalm 51:10, along with my prayer for God to create a steadfast spirit within me.  Exactly five years earlier, the same verse!

And that's not all.  On the facing page, there's a short list, which is not labelled, so I'm not sure if it came from a book, my own writing, or what exactly, but it reads:

Joy is . . .
- knowing that it's not all up to me
- knowing that God has it all together
- knowing that He can mend our broken pieces
- knowing that this life, however beautiful and terrible, is only a stage
- knowing that a future more wonderful than we can imagine awaits
So I grabbed my big Bible to see if I'd jotted down the part about Psalm 51:10 there from five years ago.  And don't even get that far.  Because there inside the front cover, on one of my post-it notes of verses and dates, it reads:

9/11/06
Psalm 40:1-3

Yes, the Abigail verse was part of that day too!  God has been so faithful in giving confirmation of this journey through His word, in ways that have been in process for many years.


This whole week, joy has been a recurring theme in so many places.  And not always easy joy .  . .  but joy in the midst of hard circumstances, the joy that comes only from God and His redeeming work.

Hebrews 12:2
. . . fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.


PS:  A week later, I just ran across a page in my journal from the very beginning of 2011.  On January 5, Psalm 51:10 was my prayer.  Thank you, Lord, for the way you are using specific verses to build my faith on this journey!

Supersizing my faith

Our yard is at times overrun with creeping charlie, a small-leafed green plant with LONG runners that can take over everything if left unchecked.  While it can be a nuisance, it does have pretty purple flowers and a pleasant scent, and doesn't get overly tall if we haven't mowed for a while.  Normally the leaves are about the size of a dime, like the ones at the bottom of the picture. 

The other day when I took some scraps out to the compost pile, though, I had to look twice at the runners growing across the pile.  The leaves on that creeping charlie were gargantuan!  Huge!  Larger than life!  I'd never seen a creeping charlie leaf that big before, and could hardly believe my eyes.  But something in that compost pile was providing a super dose of nutrients to this plant, and it was producing supersized leaves.

I couldn't help but think how my faith is a lot like those leaves.  Most times it keeps growing by sending out runners, covering a bit more ground, but remaining small.  No wonder, since it often is neglected and lacking sufficient living water.  But like creeping charlie, it takes a lot to kill it, so it doesn't die off completely. 

This year, though, God is taking that small faith and is supersizing it.  There are days when I can hardly soak in enough, the thirst is so great for His word, that living water.  The leaves of my faith are growing ever larger as they are nourished by hearing how God has been faithful in the lives of others that He has called.  Instead of broadening in many directions,  my faith is starting to send down deeper roots as  I read and write and process, some days barely able to scrawl down notes fast enough as the connections come together.  A verse given early on begins appearing again ~ here, from a friend, and over here, in a memoir, and then again in a study on fasting.  There's barely time to wonder where God is going with it all before the next source of nourishment comes and I begin drinking it in as if I'd been without water for days.

He has given me a new song to sing, a hymn of praise to our God.  Many will see what He has done and be amazed.  They will put their trust in the LORD.  Psalm 40:3

Encouragement

Yesterday was a day of prayer and fasting in the midst of the regular homeschool routines.  Prayer for direction and guidance, for the new HOPE ministry, and for several friends going through valleys.  I've been learning that fasting forces me to draw closer to God, whether it be for a meal or a day, as the standard "comforts" are out of bounds.  Yesterday was tough ~ it had been several months since I'd fasted, and even my normal eating had become more decadent as I found myself reaching for comfort foods.  But God was good, and despite a tired morning, He brought me through it.  A person from my past in need to prayer, tasks to focus on, and even my daily Bible reading included words to cling to:

He has filled the hungry with good things  . . . Luke 1:53a

Despite that, it was a hard day, and the worry over some things was hard to shake.  Fatigue was wearing me down physically and emotionally. Today I woke up fighting a dark cloud of emotion. But then in Mark 1:9-11, I began to really think about how much of the power that Jesus had came from the Holy Spirit.  If even Jesus had the Holy Spirit to perform so many miracles, how much more important it is for us, who are truly powerless on our own, to have the Spirit of the Lord guiding us and giving us strength?

The encouragement continued.  An email from a friend described an answer to prayer.  Another friend stopped by to drop off several books that she had just found at a yard sale around the corner.  As she handed them to me, she explained that even though God hasn't revealed his plan yet, she thought of Abigail when she saw them and wanted to bring them just in case it should turn out that adoption is the route God has to bring us together with Abigail.

On FB, a sidebar showing my status from a year ago read:  From my fortune cookie: Success won't taste so good, without Failure as appetizers.


An email update from a blog that I follow began with the words:

This post may not be for you      
I do not know everyone this post is written for.
I do know that this post is not written for everyone who will read it.
Who is it written for?
Maybe it is only for one person?
I don’t know.
And don’t need to know.
I do know…

It continued on to talk about considering adoption of a child with special needs.  A short time later, a different blog update was dedicated  " to my friends who are waiting faithfully for the Lord to "bring their children home".  And then the icing on the encouragement cake? 

This book, Daughter of Joy, appeared  on Inspired Reads as a free Kindle download, and showed up today on my FB feed.  The main character's name is Abigail.  This is the book that I had just finished reading the night back in February that we received the Abigail promise. 

So many little bits of encouragement that even when it seems that nothing is happening, God knows how it will all unfold.    Earlier this week a friend had sent a message that included the line, "Also, wanted to share that I am finding my mind and heart praying and thinking lots about Abigail lately.....not sure what God has coming up but it seems He is leading me to pray."

All of these things together made for a very encouraging day, and just helped me to remember that this really is God's plan.  He knows what needs to happen, and when it needs to happen so that He gets the glory.  My job remains staying close enough to Him that I can hear when it is time to move.