URGENT CALL TO PRAYER: DAY TWO • AnGeL Ministries • Anne Graham Lotz

URGENT CALL TO PRAYER: DAY TWO • AnGeL Ministries • Anne Graham Lotz

Because people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care

I'm in the throws of the busy summer season. The garden is planted and coming up. My flower pots are filled and flower beds are all cleaned up.

Our weather is beautiful, even though we had some snow and a slight frost a week ago. Living in the mountains at 7000 ft. It's really more like late spring here rather than early summer. But the warm weather is here, finally! Thankfully we usually have long dry falls and are able to enjoy the outdoors for many months to come.



Summer is break time for me from homeschooling and it is my time to emerge myself in God's word. I have a double bible study going.....Beth Moore's "Children of the Day" which is a study of 1st & 2nd Thessalonians

and I am also doing a Precepts study by Kay Arthur on 2nd Thessalonians.

This is my second study with Kay Arthur's "Inductive Study Method".

As you can see from the chart above there is a lot of marking your bible in this method so I bought a special Inductive Study Bible just for this. I like this method a lot. It really causes me to stop and ponder the who's What's When's Where's and Why's of the books of the bible you are studying. (I say it is like "picking the chicken off the bone".) 

I love learning and growing in my knowledge of God's word but

 I have heard it said many times that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.....

 I am embarking on a new path that the Lord is leading me on. 

I have been invited by Ann Dunagan of  Daring Daughters ministry to take part in her Leadership Training. It will be training for mentoring young girls in the Lord with a heart for missions and the hurting and lost of this world. 

I am truly thankful for my home and the beauty that surrounds me but there are so many things that matter more than a beautiful yard or garden............."Thank you Father for all that You are and all that You have done for me! Thank you Father for continuing to lead my heart and showing me the things (ones) that matter most to you." I know all too well that when my time is done on this earth I will not look back and be filled with pride because I had beautiful flower beds even though I enjoy them very much. It will not matter If I drove a nice car or lived in a big house. What will matter is knowing what I did with what God has blessed me with. How much I loved, how much I cared, how much I gave of my time and resources that God has blessed me with.

I believe that the reason God blesses us with more is not so that we can heap these things upon ourselves but so that we can heap love and compassion on the hurting and the broken of this world. So we will feed the hungry and clothe the poor. So we can send out missionaries and even take mission trips ourselves in order to share God's great love and His beautiful gospel with a lost and dying world..............Lord, here I am, send me!



What a great way to spend my summer time!



Have a blessed summer and may the Lord move in your heart to go and care for the widows and the orphans of the world or even right there in your own town.

A Relaxing Week with a Beautiful Lady

I had such a relaxing week this past week. Portia and Paris went on vacation to San Francisco and the Redwood Forrest with their dad.

 It was the perfect time for my mother to come up and stay with me for a week. I love spending time with my mother and we never seem to run out of things to talk about.  We talked about the bible and God's Word, we talked a lot about the details of my brother and fathers passing. We talked about the girls and homeschooling, about all of our family dynamics. We talked about her future plans and her BIG house or at least her house that seems so big as she adjusts to her new life without my dad.

 We went to Wal- Mart and she helped me to figure out finishing the afghan that I have been working on. We went to church and it was fun to hear her perspective on what my pastor was preaching on. We sat and watch tv each night as I worked on my afghan and she rolled scans of yarn into balls. We talked about politics and things that are going on in our government and it was wonderful to just sit and have good conversation with a like minded soul.......you know, they say, "the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree".  We have so much in common, oh we are very different in how our brains process things but we are very much alike in our values and world views.

This is my beautiful mother, Fran. I love her so much! She is truly the matriarch of our family and has been a tremendous stabilizing force in my life. 

We have always called her the energizer bunny, it is so hard for her to just sit, she has to have a plan and loves to have something to do so while she was here I took advantage of her expert organizational skills and we cleaned out all of the school curriculum and art supplies, sorted out some old books that I no longer wanted and reorganized both the school cabinet and the built in bookshelf.  This took us an entire day!

Then we spent half of another day cleaning and organizing the garage pantry/food storage. Dealing with all the empty canning jars can be quite a challenge but we put our heads together and managed to get everything into the cabinets. The girls other grandparents gave us several boxes of their old canning jars that they were no longer going to use so I had to make room for those too. 

 I discovered that with everything that was going on last fall with my brother and my dad that I really did not get as much canning or reordering of bulk supplies done as I had wanted to.  God is so good though, our freezers are full and we have plenty. We still have some squash and pumpkins left from last years garden in cold storage. I cook the pumpkins and feed them to my dogs, they love it!

Then we spent the last of our time together getting her ipad and iphone set up in a way that made sense to her. We even learned how to change your apple id and downloaded a few new apps. We had fun learning together.  I do soooo love my mother!!!

Every Season

Just like the earth has seasons, this life also has seasons. Many times throughout my life I have found myself in different seasons. Seasons for learning and growing are always enjoyable, I think of Spring. Seasons that seem to go by too quickly but are filled with laughter and exploring new possibilities and I think of Summer. Seasons of long dry deserts or times of deep reflections, I think of Fall.  But then there is Winter, it's long and cold and filled with death. It feels pointless. Everything that is beautiful seems to be gone even though it is only hidden for a time beneath the ice and snow. 

It is winter now, I have just come through an incredibly painful season in my life. But I know that after Winter comes Spring and God will bring forth new life again. 

Let me explain.........my father and my brother had both been battling cancer together. My fathers battle of 20 years with bladder cancer and my brothers battle of two years (that were know) with prostate cancer. Both metastasized to their bones. My dad passed away just three weeks before my brother, my dad was 76 and my brother was just 56. 

Once again I find myself in a season of life where my world has been shaken and I have been "Forever Changed!"

This is my beautiful dad

and this is my brother who was also my friend.

I am blessed in that I homeschool the girls so I was able to pack them up and move in with my mother for three months in order to help her with my dad and to be there for them both, also to put me closer in proximity to my brother so I could spend time loving on him and giving what support I could to his family. I live about an hour away from them both and commuting was just not practical and not a good option. 

I have the most wonderful, loving husband who held down the fort while we were gone. I am so grateful for the time I was able to give.
The girls and I have moved back home, we are all caught up on what we were behind on homeschooling and even though it is still Winter, Spring is coming! Praise the Lord!

Ecclesiastes 3

King James Version (KJV)

3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
9 What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?
10 I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.
11 He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
12 I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life.

Blessings!
Susan

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Father, break our hearts for what breaks yours!!!

I am reading this book to the girls in the mornings as part of our homeschool. What a wonderful story Katie Davis tells about the beautiful children of Uganda and the contrast of beauty, joy and love in comparison to absolute poverty, pain, sickness and even death that she experiences daily and how God has made her so aware of these contrasts that come in the very same moment and even sometimes the very same person. The plight of these children, who so many have lost their parents to HIV/Aids yet their hearts are so full of joy and their faces are filled with smiles. You can follow whats going on with Katie and her kids at http://www.amizima.org

Last year the Lord lead me to another ministry called Harvest Ministry, they have a wonderful missions ministry going all over the world and are the founders of the  "Guma Na Yesu" (keep with Jesus) children's center which is also in Uganda. What an inspiration Jon and Ann Dunagan are to me.

 

Ann also has an outreach ministry called Daring Daughters

There, she has available to mothers of teen daughters a mentoring e-coarse designed to help mothers (and Grammies)  train up our girls in the ways of the Lord and to have a heart of compassion for the broken and needy people of this world.  We have signed up and plan to incorporate this into our school curriculum.

 

Every morning, as part of our homeschool morning devotions/missions outreach we are praying for the children at the Guma Na Yesu and now also for Katie and her kids.....Last year we were able to support, in a small way, Harvest Ministry's orphans and this year we are praying that the Lord will open up doors and finances for us to be even more involved.

One very special blessing for me as a Grammy and as an educator is to see  that the Lord is developing a heart of compassion in the girls for the orphans, the poor, the walking wounded and the unevangelized people of the world.  My prayer is that the Lord will help me to instill these values in them, deeply, and not the values that society would put in them, caring more about themselves and whats popular and the newest style or whats "COOL" , shopping at the mall, give me, let me have, have you got mentality.....



 Makes me want to scream!!!!

sorry

but to teach them what's "COOL" is this.......

James 1:27

New American Standard Bible (NASB)

²⁷ Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained ^[a]by the world.

Father, break our hearts for what breaks yours!

Blessings to all and remember to keep your eyes on the Lord and He will keep your foot from stumbling ~Susan~