You Are Supernaturally Planted!

I live in International Falls, Minnesota. People have said to me “why would you want to live in that ‘God forsaken’ part of the world? After all, our slogan is the “Ice Box of the Nation.” Can you imagine being in one of the coldest parts of the lower 48? Funny thing is I love to tell people when they ask that I love where I have been planted! 

One year when the Weather Channel was here reporting on our "Ice Box Days" festivities (the Freeze Yer Gizzard Blizzard Run, Turkey Bowling, etc.) one of the camera men caught me going in to our early church service (yes, before 8:00 AM in January) and briefly asked me how I liked being out on such cold mornings to go to church. I can't remember how cold it was but enough that most folks would shudder at the temperature. I said something to the effect that I loved it and that we are a hearty bunch up here because we endure the cold even to go to church on an early Sunday morning. How funny when I got a call from a lady that was originally from here (but now residing in the warm and sunny Florida Keys) who said she saw me on television at church! Although, I can honestly share with you that I did not always have that positive of an attitude, having been here now for over 40 years given me a wide range of emotions affiliated with the reality that this is home. Some are great, but the reality of my children and their children leaving the area makes it not so great. In some ways it is the end of the world (well the United States that is) as Canada is right across the bordering Rainy River.

My first twenty years of life were filled with many short-lived stops along the way and no, I was definitely not a military brat. I went from being born in Connecticut, to Columbus, Ohio, (living in various apartments for my first 9.5 years of life) then New York City (Manhattan Island) for five years. It was then…four more years of bopping around the country which brought me up to Minnesota. Yes, Minnesota. When I am asked how I ended up here I always say that it is just too long a story to go into! Ultimately, I have come to know without a shadow of a doubt that it was the providential hand of God that brought me here. After all, I met God in the "Ice Box of the Nation"! And I have grown quite partial to my little neck of the woods (literally speaking.) Funny thing is there sure are a lot of people I know who would rather not be here. It is usually weather related—too cold, too rainy, to smelly, etc. Yes, it is frustrating at times that you have to drive for at least two hours (four hours round trip) to find something more than a Kmart to do your shopping at and spring may come early but you can count on at least one snow shower in May!

What I would like you to know is that even with its lack of amenities, God has given me an incredible love for where I live, my community and the people who live here. Think about this. I'm sure you find it so easy and comfortable to pray for friends and loved ones. Now, let me stretch you just a bit...can you honestly pray for a place you do not love? Or how about a place you hate or feel trapped in? Maybe, you do not like the politics in your community or it seems like the area is drying up. We certainly have justification to give up, don't we? But why not do the uncomfortable thing by stepping out and praying for everything that is 'wrong' with where you live? You know that it probably will not warm up if it is the weather you dislike or there may never be a “Target” (or whatever your favorite place to shop is) in the area. But, God can help you focus less on how cold it is which might divert your attention (so to speak) when you pray and ask God for His kingdom to come and His will to be done in your area as it is in heaven!

This is a fun way of looking at Matthew 5:14 from the Message:

"Here's another way to put it: You're here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We're going public with this, as public as a city on a hill.”

The Irish Worship group BlueTree says it well in this music video, God of This City. You see, we--because we know Jesus as Lord and Savior--have been called out of the darkness and been brought into God’s marvelous light, through Jesus Christ and His shed blood for you and me.Here is what it says about who we are as God's chosen people:

1 Peter 2:9 ESV

"But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light."

Friend, there is a city, town or community that needs the reality and saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.  We are the brightly shining light God is using to expose the darkness and introduce people who God loves to the Savior!

If you feel as though you live in a “God forsaken” environment, I would like to challenge you to start to pray—to pray for God’s visitation in your area. If love is what stops you, why don’t you ask God to give you a love for or deepen your love for your area and its people. A great place to start is with prayer walking. Do you frequently walk? Maybe for your daily exercise routine you are out and about your neighborhood hoofing it up and down streets, roads, etc. Try praying for various families you might walk by on your daily regimen. You might even be able to have access to a map of your community and you could even start to log the areas you have extended ‘prayer covering’ over...As you are walking, ask the Lord to burden your heart for the people in the coverage area you take in. You might walk by someone’s home that you do not particularly care for or feel that they do not care for you. Well, ask the Lord for an open heart toward that one, that family or business and I guarantee that you are going to change! Something is going to well up within you and you are going to develop a love for your community because you have started to pray for the life blood of your area, its people.

Is your area suffering from this economic downturn? If possible get to your down town business area and start praying for the Lord’s blessings and prosperity over the businesses in your community. I like to include in my prayer time the words Jesus used in teaching us how to pray, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Praying God’s will on Earth as it is in Heaven is a powerful prayer and that is what we need to be about doing! Maybe where you have been planted is specifically for this very time. You have been called to pray and walk on the hardened ground of unbelief, pride and independence. You will be amazed how your heart will turn as you exercise the loving act of prayer for your location. Do not give up! You will begin to see how God is always up to something, and it is always good!

Lord, thank you for teaching me how to pray for the area I live in and giving me hope to see that You care very much for this place. If you desire that no man should perish then how can I believe the lie that I live in a God-forsaken area? I am asking you to break my heart with the things that break Yours. Let me see the people, places and businesses with Your eyes because there is always hope there. It is pretty exciting to see things begin to change when we expend time and energy praying for our communities. And don't let me stop there. Continue to burden me with prayer for my state, country and beyond and thank You for the change that can happen when we pray in Your name!

The Prayer of Faith

Mom and her daughter in prayer...

God blesses us all the time. Sometimes in small ways and sometimes in great big ways! It seems that it is quite the same with our prayers. Although I do believe He always answers our prayers—it may just not always be the way I think that He should or in the time-frame I think that He should answer them.  The Lord is teaching me some big things about prayer as of late. Like why pray if you don’t expect Him to answer? I have done a lot of praying but honestly, I have not seen a lot of obvious answers. Now I am not saying that He has not answered, just that I do not always see the results and most often not immediately.

Recently I was reminded of a time several years ago when my daughter lost her wedding ring. She just had her first baby and they had gone swimming at David’s place of work. She took her wedding ring off her finger to shower off at the center and forgot to put them back on before she left. She was devastated! When she finally told her husband, he even put notes on the bulletin board at work with hope that the person who took it would see the note and return the ring.

A few weeks went by and we were visiting when I noticed that her ring was not on her hand. She tearfully told me the story and as we sat on her bed we prayed together asking the Lord to return her ring and even allow the person wearing it to be very uncomfortable with it on their finger. I remember very distinctly that something rose up in me as I prayed for this situation feeling certain that she would get her ring back.

It was but a couple of weeks later that my daughter’s husband David, received a package at work with no return address label. He opened it to find the stolen wedding ring. We were amazed and so grateful, both realizing that God had answered our prayer and the prayers of others who were praying with us for the ring’s return to its rightful owner. It had not so much been the value of the ring but the sentimental value considering the diamond had once belonged to her great grandmother. We were ever so thankful for this victory indeed!

It is interesting how James talks about the “prayer of faith” being enough to even heal the sick.

James 5:15 NKJ

"And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven."

James 5:13 NIV

"[The Prayer of Faith] Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise."

James 5:15 NLV

"And their prayer offered in faith will heal the sick, and the Lord will make them well. And anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven."

The various versions show that it is possible for a few different things to happen here in regard to the “prayer of faith”:

• The sick will be saved
• The sick will be healed
• Those in trouble should pray

It is interesting however, that when those prayers appear to go unheard that we are still to trust that God does answer them, whether big and small, but in His way not ours.  This should serve to increase our faith for the next time. (Kind of like filling for reserve.) For even when it doesn’t look as if something is happening, we have to believe that God has heard and is applying Romans 8:28 to our situation.

Let me leave you with another amazing little story of my own. For about four years I was unable to find a mate to an earring. It was one in a pair of simple hand crafted opals set in sterling silver, that were a gift from my mother. (I should never wear French hook earrings with out stoppers on them and have since tried to remember to do so when wearing that type of earring.) These were a lovely little pair--probably not extremely valuable but they again have sentimental value being handed down from my mother. I had no idea when or where I could have lost the earring and I looked high and low (literally) around work, my car, etc. all to no avail. I never dared to tell mom, as she would have been terribly disappointed. I did pray though and I asked the Lord if He would help me find them so as not to upset mom should she ever ask. And I always believed that they would show up.

So then somewhere around a year or so after that, the earring still missing, I toyed with the idea of having the jeweler see if I could get a replacement. This could not be done without knowing the company who made them. Well that was out because I would have to ask my mother and then she would know the story. So I just let it rest.

The following fall I found myself vacuuming the floor of the radio station studio as my husband and I ripped out carpeting to prepare the floor for the new carpeting that was to be installed the next week. I was naturally amazed at the dirt that showed up after the carpet was ripped out. I was on my hands and knees with my husband’s big shop vac, giving the final touches on the nooks and crannies way underneath the console. I bent down low to the floor to look under a computer that sticks out on a low shelf and to my utter amazement there was my opal earring! There is no logical reason for it to have survived the carpet rip-out, and the shop vac’s super suction to be found sitting there on the floor, but for God!

Once again, God answered a small “prayer of faith” and it served once again to bolster and fill my faith reserve once again. A reminder to pray with the expectation of getting the right answer, at just the right time!

Matthew 17:20 NKJ
“So Jesus said to them, "Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Father, you absolutely amaze me when you answer our prayers. I know that there are many that we do not see and I am thankful that You are the one Who sees the big picture. I would ask that You continue to remind me that when I ask, I am to ask in faith, believing for Your perfect answers every time! I want to exercise the “prayer of faith” when I pray for one to be healed and or saved or simply to find a lost something of importance to whomever! In Jesus’ Name!

A Fortune Cookie?

Many years ago while in a spiritual growth spurt I remember being extremely frustrated that in my dreams it seemed as if I wasn’t a christian.  There is probably a doctor of something who has studied this kind of stuff and would be able to tell me why this happens...but that being said, I almost felt like only part of me was saved but not my subconscious.  It really began to bother me in the dreams I remembered.  (I typically don’t remember many of my dreams.)  If I belong to the Lord then I am His conscious and unconscious!  No split personality going on here!  So I began to pray and ask the Lord to please let me know that I am 100% his, through and through without wavering, asleep and awake!

It was but a few weeks from my intense request of the Lord when I had a dream that was incredibly vivid and even in color!  I think most of my dreams are black and white but the few real God-dreams I have had have been in technicolor--vivid and very intense.  I don’t remember who it was that I was with but that we were running and hiding out as if we were being pursued by someone.  I remember scenes of running up and down back outside staircases like on  apartment buildings and then suddenly I was with many others who were being ushered on a train.  I then realized that I had been taken captive.

Suddenly, soldiers were one-by-one taking people like me and executed us with machine guns.  It was soon to be my turn and I remember being grabbed roughly and as the gun was placed to my head and told I was next that I started to sing the chorus to “I Am Not Ashamed of the Gospel”.

I am not ashamed of the gospel, the gospel of Jesus christ,

I am not afraid to be counted, but I’m willing to give my life...”

And suddenly I woke up, completely amazed at what had just taken place in my dream.  You might enjoy listening to this powerful song yourself at the end of this post.

So what about the fortune cookie you are thinking?  About two weeks after this vivid dream that I believe was an answer to my request of the Lord, I found a fortune cookie placed on my desk at work.  We had a youth radio station and it was manned by young adults and they were such a blast to work with and have around and I was pretty certain that one of them had put it there.  so I opened it up and read it and was in total amazement as to what it said (I have to print it out because it is too faded to read from the picture above)...

You begin to appreciate how important it is to share your personal beliefs.

Okay, you may say whatever you want but have you ever seen a fortune with a message like that?  Not me!  And that was a confirmation for me that God not only heard my prayer but he answered it in a very dramatic way!  For some reason I needed to experience what He allowed me to live out in my dream and then it was as if He was said to me that I was His through and through!  Whew, the content of my dreams began to change after that and I no longer doubted whose I was!  And that old, yellowed and faded fortune remains taped to my computer screen at work!

Enjoy and older Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir presentation with Damaris Carbough...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECtCB7XqIO0

Divine Appointments...

I was involved in the Bible Study, “Battlefield of the Mind” by Joyce Meyer and we had an assignment to respond in obedience to the nudging of the Holy Spirit--in other words, to act upon the promptings we can get that may seem a little ‘out there’.  You may have had those promptings like I have and you may have received incredible blessings from being obedient to the call.  However, I have also sometimes ignored them and not responded to that nudging with the justification that “I can’t do that” or “What would that person think if I did that”.

When I sing “Here I am to Worship...,” I know that to worship God is to revere, adore and acknowledge Him for who He is.  But there is also another part of worship that encompasses what we do with our life on the horizontal plane.  My mantra continues to be “Love God and love others” but I need help with all that entails.  I do not necessarily need to round up the troops to head over to India to be on the mission field.  That could be the call to some but I have a mission field right here in my own backyard.  Wherever I am and whatever I am doing provides an opportunity to make a difference in my “sphere of influence”.  However, I want to take this to another extreme only because every time I have let an opportunity go by without sharing the gospel when the door was planted and opened right in front of me, I knew that I blew it!  I felt such disappointment with myself and had to ask the Lord to forgive me for cowering away from such a prime moment.  I am reminded in the book of Esther when Uncle Mordecai admonished Esther that if she did not respond in obedience to the call placed upon her to confront the evil plot against the Jews God would raise up someone else to do the job! And, Esther herself might perish with the rest of the Jewish people that she had been called to rescue.  Strong words! Well, Esther did heed the warning, asking the people to fast and pray for her opportunity to go before the king.  It was her obedience that saved a nation!

On a recent return trip to Minnesota with my daughter, we did not have a direct flight and I was grateful that we could just be casual about the extra hours of waiting and flying without having to run to catch our last leg of the trip.  We finally boarded in Dallas and, since I fly a little bit more often than she, I gave her the opportunity to sit by the window before I sat down.  The isle seat remained open until the gentleman in the row ahead of us (after helping my daughter stow her carry on) was booted out of his seat because he mistakenly read his seat number when someone came to claim the seat he was in him in our row.  He was a quiet man who busied himself with reading the newspaper.  I waited until after he had read his paper, because there is nothing more annoying than being interrupted by someone asking you questions when you are reading!  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a rather large ring on his hand which I soon discovered had Vikings imprinted on it.  Hmm...and, of course, I got my daughter to notice without too much fuss.

We began our conversation by my asking about cab service out of the Minneapolis airport.  I have never needed to take a cab before, but our Monday return had our friends working and unable to pick us up and take us to our car.  I will spare you the details of a two hour conversation, but I have continued to thank God for opening up a door to share a message of hope to a man who had some stuff going on in his life from serious physical issues, a pending divorce and some personal stuff he was trying to work through.  I was able to share Scripture with him because I could sense some uncertainty about his future.  Philippians 4:6,7 is certainly where I go camping when things look obscure, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; then the peace of God which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds through Christ Jesus.”  I also encouraged a relational walk with Jesus.  He seemed like so many of us who find ourselves at the end of our rope with no way of turning things around and wondering what the point is in going on!

I have since prayed for this man, his health and marriage and I can only thank God for the fulfillment of this Scripture in 1 Peter 3:15 “...but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect...”   Peter makes it very clear to me!  Now, on to my next assignment. So simple; just take the step of obedience instead of wondering if you should because God has already paved the way!