This is another section of my book I wanted to post before the thanksgiving craziness of tomorrow! Enjoy!
God designed the church body to lift one another up and be there for one another. I started something amazing with my Facebook account that I know completely came from God. I take a day of the week and update my status with asking for prayer requests that I will lift up during that day. It is amazing, the number of people who respond to me and ask for me to pray for them. I also encourage them to post testimonies about what God did through prayer to help encourage those still with a prayer request. I do not consider myself someone who knows everything about terminal disease or being sick for many years. I actually feel blessed that I could have a few years of pain to experience the things I did so I can somewhat relate to people of all walks of life who have some sort of crap going on in their lives. I was sick just long enough to have the “we don’t know what else we can do” conversations with the doctor, have a major test done on my body and be sent home to wait for the results hoping it wasn’t cancer. I was sick just long enough to have the privilege of spending some time at the Arthritis Clinic in the Remicade room, hearing so many heart-breaking stories.
I consider my experiences to be wonderful opportunities to have a peek into the lives of people who were dealing with life-altering disease and to encourage me in a new way to pray for them and believe for God’s best for them. I have let the pain I went through be a catalyst, of sorts, to help me understand how to pray and to have a heart that goes out to every person who has a serious need in their lives. If you don’t know Jesus as your best friend, then you really need to have that connection in your life to get a full grasp of what I am saying. This is more than just having “good and positive thoughts” about a person. It is doing something in the spiritual realm to lift a person’s needs before a God who will always be there to listen and to help you use your difficult circumstances for a greater good than just getting through the inevitable pain in life.
Holy Crap Moment:
Being a “strong” person, and just keeping good and positive
thoughts going will not make real change in your life and probably won’t be enough to bring you through really tough times. When you have a relationship with Jesus though, you change from just trying to survive by your positive mental outlook alone, to now having a deeply personal connection to God, and it’s His love for you and His power at work in you, making real and lasting change.
Holy Crap 