This is the deal...

     I really can't apologize anymore for falling in love with Katie Davis's book.  I know the book is nothing compared to the Scripture -that's not even an issue for me.  At the same time, I know God is blessing me through the recounting of stories which graphically show   how God has used one simple, basically untrained  person to work in a profound way in Uganda.  I know that Satan won't like this and I pray every day now that God will protect Katie, her children and the ministry and keep them all close to His heart, Scripturally  grounded as they are now, and also keep them as unscarred as possible as they fight this important battle for the lives of  victims of extreme poverty. I know there are many Katies out there on the front lines and I thank God for this. I know that, still, we need more.
    Undeniably, every time I pick up this book and re-read something, God speaks to my own heart.
    However, make no mistake:  He doesn't impress upon me that I'm supposed to be another Katie.
    What He does impress on me  is the fact that I can start off my day the way she often does -  by asking God to lead me to some person He wants to help, to someone who is on His heart for that day, that hour, etc.  Katie freely acknowledges that she cannot fix Uganda and that just the needs around her in her own village are often overwhelming. But that God has shown her that all He asks of her is to  move forward and deal with one person at a time , making herself readily available to be His hands, His feet, and His heart, to move as He prompts her to reach out to this child or this mom or this addict or this very ill grandmother, knowing that He loves each one deeply and desires an intimate relationship with them all.
   Again, I can't go to Uganda and I have never had a heart for young children the way she does.  When she was 12, she wanted to be another Mother Teresa. When I was 12, I started writing my first mystery novel.  I'm sure you can see a difference there... :)
   Over the years, I have found that God, for whatever reason, has also given me a heart for people who need encouragement or who need His mercy in their lives.  The gifts He has given me,however,  are far short of spectacular; they are actually very simple and humdrum. I can't do blood and infected wounds or handle tons of hungry people  or whatever...I can take a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to someone who is sick. (If I don't like them, I can actually cook for them.. not kidding!  Cooking is not my thing... So I always pick up prepared food or "cook" frozen casseroles from Sam's.  It always seems to work...:)
   I can also write encouraging notes or e-mails.  And I, like Tim Allen in the first Santa Clause movie, seem to attract people. In the movie, kids recognize he is Santa Claus and at ball games, line up to tell him what they want for Christmas. People don't line up to talk to me but maybe because I have a generic, non-threatening face, sometimes a total  stranger will pour out their heart to me in the most unlikely  places - the women's locker room at the Y or  in a line at the grocery store.When this happens - and it doesn't happen often -  I just listen and tell them I'll pray for them.  Once in a great while, I'll get up enough courage to pray with them.  But that's basically it.  They go their way and I go mine and  I never see them again.  Still, on the rare occasions when this happens,  I am encouraged because I know God brought us together for a reason.
   Since I've been re-reading Katie's book, I've started off a few  days by  asking God to lead me to whomever is on His heart, whomever He wants to touch that day through me.  On at least two occasions, I have seen clear evidence that, against all logic, He has led me to the right person at the right time.  What I say to them or do for them is like a band-aid on a broken leg, maybe.  Bottom line:  there's nothing I can say or do that will fix their problems just as I cannot fix my own.
    But the very fact that He leads me to someone who is hurting when I have no idea what is going on with them and in one case, didn't even know the person's name, let alone their circumstances, - that fact alone awes me. It shows me that A) He is real and He does answer prayer, even orchestrating things in a way that no one else could do.    And B) although I really can't do much for the person He leads me to, I can know for sure that that person is on His mind.  The Bible says in many places that God takes note of the distress of His children. And truly, He does.
   The deal is: I want them to see Jesus and I want them to see whatever I say or do as evidence that He is reaching out to them, that He is entering into their suffering, as Katie would say, and that He is actively working on their behalf.
   And I want to see Jesus too.
   And when I pray this prayer and He sees fit to answer it, I do get to see Him.
   And I can only trust and pray that they get to see Him too and that I don't get in the way of that.

My turn...

     I've had a super-easy day. So far I've not had to cook:)  Instead, I could just reach into the refrigerator and get food already prepared.  My electricity  blinked out a few times earlier in the week due to a weird wind and rain storm that came up suddenly but the outage was so instantaneous that the only hardship it caused was to make us reboot the computer :)
    We are often stunned now when we fill up the car but still, we can afford it and I've been able to take my niece to school this week every day, go to West Little Rock to shop several times and go to my old stomping grounds of Benton.  So although it seems to take a lot more to fill the tank these days, it hasn't slowed me down much if any.
    I've been cleaning out our spare room (sort of... sigh...)  and so far I have a couple of boxes of old clothes to give away.  Honestly, culling out those few items didn't make much of a dent in what we had...  Basically, we are blessed.
   But that's not what this blog is about.  It's about some women in Uganda (no, I won't mention the book Kisses from Katie again.. promise ;)  - a group of women from a slum village who also happen to be refugees from Northern Uganda/Southern Sudan. They are despised by the other tribes and villages around them.  However, Amazima Ministries has started an industry - a women's beading group - and the ministry buys these necklaces and then sells them.
   This is huge.  In a village where most don't have enough food or a bed to sleep on, let alone extra clothes or electricity, most of the women make their living by prostitution, by scavenging among the garbage for scrap metal, or by making home brew to sell. Katie said that one mother would take the home brewed mash that she could not sell and give it to her children, making them drunk so that they would forget their hunger.
   That's mind-boggling to me.
   At any rate, Katie has formed a beading group and in order to participate, each woman has to agree to give up the three traditional ways of sustaining life in this village.  The women take recycled paper and fold it into traditional African beads. Then these "beads" are coated to stiffen them and make them shine.  The native beads are interspersed with glass beads.
   It takes quite a while for the women to make them and each Friday, they have a Bible study time and then Katie pays the women for their necklaces. And then she takes the women  to the bank where they put half their money  in savings and they keep half to live on for the rest of the week.
   The necklaces are then sold here in the states, shipping from Tennessee.
   They cost 19.95 plus shipping.
   Today, even though our time zones are different, I'm thinking about these precious women who spent their Friday beading, praying, studying the Word and laughing a lot, I'm sure.  Or maybe singing a lot. Or maybe both.  Because God has given them hope and with hope, comes laughter and singing, don't you think?
   Just knowing what God is doing in the lives of my sisters in Christ way across the ocean - just thinking about that  has blessed me today.  And so now I need to bless them, I think.

   How about you?
 

What's on my mind???

       First thing this morning, I learned that a dear friend is facing cancer... again.
       It's never been far from my mind since.
       Off and on all day long, this has flashed through my mind:  I HATE cancer.
       I know that God can and does bring good out of bad circumstances when we love Him and trust Him.
       Nonetheless, I HATE cancer.
       I know that this world is not our home  and that we will like the next one so much better.
       But this is where I am here and now and this is where my friend is and this is where I want her to stay.
       And through the grace of God and the skill of the doctors, this is where I believe she will be for some time to come.
       Nevertheless.... I HATE cancer.

       Which brings me to my second point.
       I'm not too crazy about thieves either...

       I always try to be upbeat on these blogs.
       But tonight I sat here, staring at the eternal query on Facebook:  What's on your mind?
       And honestly, these are the things that are on my mind.

       Today, I have been distracted. I went through Wendys' drive through thinking it was McDonald's.  I'm supposed to be fasting .. but I didn't.   I forgot to charge my cell phone even though I knew it was almost dead.  And I mentally talked back to a lifeless question on Facebook of all things.  "What's on my mind???  You don't want to know what's on my mind - that's what's on my mind!!!"  
      But in the final analysis
         this is what's on my mind....
                I HATE cancer.
                  And right now, thieves are a close second on my bad list, right up there behind dread diseases...
                     

       Thankful tomorrow is another day...
   
     
     

Light Streaming Through Broken Windows...

     Writing comes easily for me. And normally the more deeply I feel about something, the easier it is for me to write about it.  But that is not always the case.
     On Wed. evening, my husband stood in the pouring rain, in the dark, under an eave of the roof with water cascading down on him while I stood inside my sister-in-law's house, just on the other side of the wall from where he was working. He was stapling black plastic over his sister's  broken window. I was sweeping up shattered glass on the other side.  There was a brick lying on the floor beside the window fragments.
    It was a defining moment for me in some ways.  And one that caused me not to want to blog for several days, while I processed what had happened.
    The day itself started  well.  I took my niece to school - we were pretty much zombies like we normally are first thing in the morning but had a good morning prayer accompanied by a Mickey D. sandwich. As I recall, she quietly worked on her math as I drove through light traffic.
   At one point, she realized she  had left her purse at home - we discussed it and decided that she could make it without it. All she really needed was her house key and I had an extra key to her house so I told her I would pick her up after school and take her home. At the time, we had no idea that she'd lose all the valuable possessions in her purse before the day was over.
   Sometimes big things hinge on small decisions.  Now, knowing what happened later, I wonder if we'd make the same judgement call.  I have had to come to the place where I realize it doesn't really matter; hindsight may be 20/20 but... it's also pretty useless. Paul, in Philippians,  talked about forgetting the things that are past and moving on to what is ahead.  And I think that applies to both big things and small things as well... So we are moving on...
   On the way home from school that afternoon, we were more animated, laughing about nothing, having a good time.  I pulled up in her drive and handed her the extra house key.   She opened the door and brought the  key back to me with a smile and a "thanks!" I drove away but two minutes later, she called and said someone had broken into their home. I immediately turned around and was back at her home within seconds.
  She's 16 and the thing that has not faded from my mind in all this time  is not the brokenness of the window or the scattering of their personal and private possessions all over the beds and floors but rather the brokenness in her young voice as she ran to me and sobbed out the story of what she had discovered.
   Years ago a woman wrote her account of being diagnosed with breast cancer and this was the title of her book, First, You Cry.  I realized last Wed. that sometimes crying is the wisest thing you can do.  It's honest and it gets to the heart of the matter.
   She also had the presence of mind not to stay in the home and to avoid touching things as she retraced her steps back to   the front porch.  Within seconds, she had called her mother who left work immediately, asking her co-workers to contact the police, which they did.
   My sister-in-law arrived within minutes after I did and so did the officers.  I was impressed with the way my sister-in-law handled things.  She had been reading a book about a family going through tremendous suffering - living with a quadriplegic child - and yet, finding God's grace was sufficient.   She said that on the way home, she kept thinking that if God could get that family through their  crisis with their child, He could  get them through this situation which was mild in comparison.
   I was also impressed with the police. They were courteous, efficient but also used some humor (appropriately) to lessen the tension of the situation.  Before much time had elapsed, we were all fascinated with the finger print process and at the same time laughing at some of the more ridiculous situations they had encountered in the past.  (Like calls insisting that someone had wiped out their entire living room, taking every stick of furniture,  to which the officers automatically want to reply, "Really???  So...where are you renting your furniture from and how many payments have you missed?")
   In the end, the burglars didn't take much of value in the physical sense.
   But they did rob a young girl of some of her innocence.
   And that is what I don't like at all.
   As I was re-reading Kisses From Katie, I saw where she wrote about the dichotomy of adopting children. ON the one hand, she loves having her Ugandan daughters and being able to mother them. On the other hand, she grieves for them and what they had to go through in order to get to  the point of being adopted.  Yet, she takes all that a step further - she writes that she fully trusts the experiences her girls went through were part of God's plan for their lives and that He will bring good out of all of it.
  And that is where I am, still, several days after holding my niece in my arms while she cried over the reality of a broken, sin-cursed world.  I grieve for what she had to go through in those few minutes when she discovered the violation of her home.  But I trust that this is part of God's permissive will, part of His plan for her and that He will bring good out of it.
  And in a way He already has.
  An uncle coming straight from work to stand for over 40 minutes in the pouring rain to cover the broken window, a mother who was calm, comforting,  and who  modeled a logical, yet faith-filled approach to the situation.  And now, within days, she is seeing others come forward to replace some of the things that were taken.  And each time that happens, she sees the hand of God and how He can provide in miraculous ways.. through ordinary people.
  In this world, thieves do break in and steal.
  But in God's kingdom, which is the realm in which His children move and have their spiritual being  - a sort of dual existence in that our feet are planted on terra firma but our hearts are often unfettered- the good far out weighs the bad - and brokenness just allows His light to shine a little brighter into our hearts.

I love this painting by Ron Dicianni and I think the title pretty much says it all: Never Alone...
So thankful this is true...

Neighbors...

     I don't know if you ever feel like you've just "missed it" - like when the rest of the world was turning right, you somehow went ... left... and got ... left...
     When I was in my twenties, I thought everything would be great - I would teach until I married, then I would stop work and have children and they would grow up to be doctors, lawyers, or whatever and get up every day thanking God that I was their mother... ha!  And my house would be large and beautiful and always clean....
      Somehow, I didn't envision marrying late in life, having one child, working until I could take early retirement only to find that when my days were finally free, my knees creaked and my feet dragged and my mind almost always has something on it but... sometimes I only know that by faith because I can't remember what was just flitting through my mind ten or fifteen minutes earlier:)
    This morning I woke up early but just lay in bed, thinking, which is not always a good thing.
     First, I thought about how, comparatively speaking, I haven't done much with my life. Then I thought about how it's not a good thing to be living in a tiny house in a declining neighborhood as we approach our sixties and that somewhere along the way - many times along the way probably - we should have done things differently.  In short, we had "missed it".
   And then I remembered something I heard 23 years ago on a Sunday morning: the phrase "gossiping the Good News".  That morning I was impressed with the phrase and the idea - I'd never been one to want to beat people over the head with the Gospel but I felt I could just be myself, hang out with my neighbors, and when the occasion arose,  chat about the Good News, about what God was doing in my life.
  The man who lived behind us was pretty wild and at that time, we had no fence around our property. When I married, my husband warned me that *Joe (not his real name) was rough, had women over a lot, and rode his motorcycle right up a ramp into the living room of his small house. Also that this big burly guy had two Dobermans who had been trained to attack and they also  lived inside the house with him (which was smaller than ours).   Phil cautioned me that one night, before we married,  Joe had  let these dogs out and they had come running across property boundaries towards Phil as he was watering the backyard, not barking but intent on doing bodily harm.  All Phil could think to do was to pull out his pocketknife and charge them, yelling.  It did the trick thankfully.  After he warned me about this, I was always careful to watch for the dogs, especially at night -  but I never saw them so I figured it was all good.
   This particular Sunday afternoon, I was fired up by the "gossiping the Good News" sermon and when I saw Joe come out into his yard, I felt God was  nudging me to go introduce myself to him.  I told Phil what I thought and he said he would go with me but I told him it was okay - I felt I could go by myself.  So he cautioned me to be careful and not to get out of his sight.  (Phil was working in the yard at the time.)
   I did go over there and introduce myself, wondering how I would broach the topic of Christianity ev-vurr with this guy, thinking a lifetime of chatting with him over the proverbial fence would not be enough time to get my courage up. And then,  to my surprise, he asked me if I knew the Lord!  I stammered out  a "yess...." and asked him if he knew the Lord also.
   He did!
   It turned out that  a year or so earlier, he had become deathly sick.  His party friends just left him alone in his house and didn't send any help his way - why I don't know. He lay there for two days, unable to help himself at all.  Finally, his mother came to check on him, found him in terrible shape, and had him transported to the hospital. While he was there, the doctors told him  there was basically no hope.  But one night, he said that Jesus spoke to him, distinctly, clearly, and with authority. And the message Joe got was "This is your last chance to believe and repent."
   I've never had an experience like that myself but I figure the proof is in the pudding and there was proof in Joe's life that something radical had changed him. To the doctor's surprise, he got well and walked out of the hospital on his own two feet.
   The Sunday I met him there were no Dobermans around. Instead, he brought out his cat which - honest to goodness - was named Fluffy!  When I talked to Phil about all this later, he was astounded but then we both got to thinking and realized that there had been no wild parties or vicious dogs  over there for months and months. In fact, I had never seen any evidence of any of that since I had been married to Phil.
  Over the years, this man would greet our son often over the fence we did eventually put up - not to keep Joe out but to keep our small son in and away from the street traffic.  David would run to meet Joe whenever he heard the guy drive up in his truck and we would hear Joe telling David, "Son, whatever you do, listen to your parents and do what they tell you to do. I didn't do that and I messed up my life. But God has put it back together again."
  What a great encourager he was to our son!
  And what a tragedy it would have been had he died alone in the house just on the edge of our property. This first attempt to "gossip the Good News" with a neighbor  spurred me to continue to do that  over the years.
  As I lay there this morning and thought about the neighbors we've been friends with - some very much like us - some very much like Joe who owned the Dobermans or worse - I knew that we've been right where God wanted us to be all these years. I really felt that God was saying to my heart that He kept us here (and a few other families like ours) to establish a beachhead so to speak in an area that needed one.
   Bottom line, I woke up this morning feeling like "we'd missed it" and I got out of bed knowing that we hadn't...

I come broken...

   
   This morning we had a guest pastor and he did a great job.    The preacher talked about a man named Mephibosheth - not your standard name, I guess. And certainly his story is as unusual as his name.  He was born into royalty and privilege, the grandson of King Saul.  But when Saul was on the run and his rival, David, was gradually amassing his own power, Mephibosheth's nurse grabbed him and ran. She knew the new king would most likely kill off everyone in the old dynasty and that meant the child was in danger. While she was fleeing, however, she fell with the child and both his legs were injured. He never walked again.  After Mephibosheth was grown, King David, in an extraordinary display of grace, sent for  him,  had Mephibosheth brought to the palace and insisted that the paralyzed man  be seated daily at his own table.  The grandson of the man who had once tried to kill him.  Grace.
    That's what the preacher preached on this morning and he made the story come alive.   Now I'd like to transition to another story and hopefully tie it all together at the end.
    The other story is from  the book Kisses from Katie, which I am still reading and still in love with.. more so than ever.  The book delineates Katie's  desire to "live Jesus" in front of the Ugandan people as well as  her deep need to bring as many orphans as she can to her "table" to eat.  This week I've read of so many hopeless cases, of kids who had less than nothing, kids who were near death, kids who were abused and hated, kids who had never known love at all, in any shape, form or fashion.  And although it's hard, she and her workers love and feed and minister to hundreds of children with amazing results. As if that isn't enough, she herself has adopted 14 girls - they are her girls in her mind as much as if she had carried them herself. She is their mommy.
    All of her stories have touched my heart but there is one in particular that came to mind this morning during worship.  After Katie had adopted 11 children, she told God that was enough, that she didn't need to adopt anymore.  During this time, an old grandmother walked 7 miles to Katie's house with her granddaughter tied to her back. The granddaughter, a two-and-a-half-year old, could not speak, walk, or use her hands to feed herself.  The grandmother wanted Katie to take the child but there was no way Katie could add another child to her family, especially one with special needs.  So she sent the grandmother away with some food. This happened three or four times.
   By this time, Katie was dealing with hundreds of children each day in addition to her own girls so over time, the grandmother with the little paralyzed child faded from her mind.   Then God began to burden her in the middle of the night and in the small hours of the morning. Katie would wake up and begin to pray fervently, knowing God was trying to tell her something but unsure what it was. She would read her Bible extensively, wondering what God was trying to say.  After several nights of this, God impressed on her in an unmistakable way that her next child was named Sarah.  She already had a Sarah and didn't feel she could handle a "next" child so she was confused. But again, God whispered that Sarah was her next child.
  She accepted this and  began to pray for "Sarah" until she reached the place where she actually longed for this unknown child. Finally she told God that she could not stand knowing there was a girl somewhere who was supposed to be her daughter and yet  being unable to find her. Would God please bring Sarah to her door?
  The next day, the grandmother showed up at her house with the two-year-old tied to her back.  Katie took the girl in her arms and asked the grandmother what the child's name was. Her name was ...Sarah.
    This was to be her 12th daughter, the one God had prepared her heart for, the one she felt she could not mother on top of the other daughters she already had. The one who could not walk, talk, or feed herself.  But when Katie took the girl in her arms that first time, after mentally realizing this was "Sarah", the little girl held onto her hand, looked at her and said, "Mamma" much to her grandmother's shock.
  Then the grandmother got down on her knees and begged Katie to take this child, saying that God had prompted her several times to bring the child to Katie, telling her that this foreign woman would be able to care for her sick grandchild. She added that she didn't know what was wrong with the girl and had never been able to take her to the hospital but God had told her this Mommy of so many girls would be able to help her granddaughter.
  The rest of the story is nothing short of a miracle. But I won't spoil the book by telling you what God did through Katie and her other girls to help this child.  You will want to read it for yourself.
  Going back to the service this morning, after listening to the story about Mephibosheth, who could not walk at all, I kept thinking about Katie's 12th daughter, who also could not walk.  A child who had nothing, a child who  had to be carried everywhere, a child who was broken in so many ways.
   Yet she was adopted into this family of plenty (by Ugandan standards) and seated as an equal at their table.
   Then, as this graphic picture went through my mind,  the choir began to sing the chorus:
    “I come broken… to be mended
I come wounded… to be healed
I come desperate… to be rescued
I come empty… to be filled
I come guilty… to be pardoned by the blood of Christ the Lamb
And I’m welcomed with open arms
Praise God…just as I am.”

    And that's when it hit me:   I am the spiritual special needs child who can't do anything for herself and God is the one who has brought me into His home and seated me at His table; I'm the one who has been mended, I'm the one who has been filled.  And yes,  I am the one who has been "welcomed with open arms."
    More than that, I am the one who is learning from some of the neediest children in the world - children who truly know brokenness and who, because of that, as they come under the protection of Amazima Ministries, also know, fully know, the power and love of God.
   WE have a saying in the States, "If it isn't broken, don't fix it."
    I think God was saying to me this morning, "If you don't understand, really know,  that you were once broken, you'll never really know or  understand the love I lavished on you in order to raise you up and seat you at my table."

   One of the kids that Katie cared for over a period of time, a little boy who was starving, abused, and clearly dying of malnutrition and who is now healthy and actually loved by his family - this little boy runs after Katie's van whenever he sees it yelling something like, "Auntie Katie!  I love you! I am fine!  I am well!!  I love you!!!"  
   Today I left church in tears, knowing that I should be running  after the hem of God's garment  every single God-given day, crying out, "Abba! I love you!  I am well!  I am fine!!!  I  love you!!!"
   As Katie puts it in her book: God loves us...
        We
             love
                  Him
                      Back...
 
 

Dead Sea Salt Oatmeal....:)

     Our church is doing the Daniel fast for 3 weeks - it's up to each individual and family to decide what they want to do in the way of fasting, if anything.  Phil and I decided we would do most of the fast with slight alterations  and we wouldn't get hung up on legalism, that we would keep in mind that the whole idea is to draw closer to God, not to lose weight or become nit-picking,  prideful, critical, or even guilt-ridden.
    We are now on day 4 and I've cheated every day.  But not to worry - it hasn't helped much and I'm still hungry much of the time - the Daniel fast is healthy but somehow, not satisfying to a junk-food addict like me.
    Our son is fasting from caffeine but he's also been trying to eat what we eat when he's home because he didn't want to drag out the cheese burgers and Hersey bars in front of us.   He's had a major headache for three days and when he came home yesterday he had some valid questions about fasting - questions that have often entered my mind as well.
    How does fasting help us draw near to the Lord when, as the day creeps by, all you can focus on is food, cokes, chocolate, food, and more chocolate?
    How does fasting help if the change in blood-sugar, etc causes you to be tired, irritable and since we're being honest  - not very nice???

   I don't know if these are partial answers - or even no answers -  but it's what comes to mind as I think about our current experiment.
 A) The first part of a fast is a food-fight, literally, or at least that's how it seems to me.  It's after the fight has been won and victory maintained that something besides a two-liter Coke Icee can flit through your conscious mind.. .ha! (Not to mention Chocolate pudding cake, eggs and bacon, and... hmmm.  Probably best if I quit there...)

 B)  Also, fasts bring the scum to the surface. I think they are meant to do that.  What I mean is this:  the stuff I keep hidden down deep, waaayyy  behind a big smile and a "How are you doing???  Isn't this a beautiful day???" tends to come to the top during a fast. Irritability. Impatience. Selfishness.  Laziness. Pride.  Being judgmental.  Those things are probably always near the surface in my case but doubly so when I don't have my comfort food, I'm quickly finding out!

 C)  Fasts also bring priorities to light.   Take away my fun food and it soon migrates to the top of my list of things that I want, demand, and feel I can't do without.  Yet Jesus Himself is referred to as the bread of life and the Bible as words that are sweeter than honey. But I can skip quiet times frequently and feel no pangs of withdrawal whatsoever.  My priorities are clearly delineated when I try to fast (which I don't do often - trust me on this!)  Food fast?  Bible fast?  I now know which one gets my attention the quickest...

D) Fasting, at least today, has brought me to heartfelt, cut-to-the-chase, on-my-knees-before-God real time prayer. Wasn't prolonged prayer because it didn't need to be. As soon as my knees hit the floor, my heart was aware of His Spirit working deep within me, dredging up sin from the depths within me before leading me to  intercession that, unlike most of my prayers, was, I think, wholly in tune with His.    Monday and Tuesday my prayers were normal - dry toast type of prayers, spiritual laundry lists, formulaic.  Yesterday my mind wandered all over creation, mostly in search of a burger. Today God broke through and business was transacted.  It wasn't the way I normally think prayer should be but when it happened, I knew it was the real thing. Which told me a lot about most of the prayers I normally pray.

E)  Finally, fasting helps me to identify with people in the third world, which I think encompasses billions of people on the planet.

And that leads me to a quote from the book that I'm currently reading,  a book that I highly recommend. It's called Kisses from Katie and it's about a young woman who had everything and left it all because as she puts it, "Jesus ruined my life...":)    She said that as a young girl, about 12 years of age,  she began to really study the Scriptures.  She writes:  "As I read and learned more and more of what Jesus said, I liked the life style I saw around me less... Slowly but surely I began to realize the truth.  I had loved and admired and worshiped Jesus without doing what He said.... So I quit my life."  (P. XVIII).

She did indeed.

Straight out of high school, she packed up her things and moved from an affluent neighborhood in Tennessee to a small village in ... Uganda.  And I'm reading this book after an evening of complaining about the Daniel Fast.  Coincidence? I don't think so.  At midnight Tuesday night, I'm reading  Katie Davis's description of their main food in the orphanage, which she said tasted a little worse than Elmer's glue, and recalling half-joking complaints I had made earlier that evening about not having the foods that "normal people" eat all the time.  Hmmmm.... I think God got me on that one. What do you think?

Another passage really gripped me:
   People often ask me if I think my life is dangerous, if I am afraid.  I am much more afraid of remaining comfortable.  Matthew 10:28 tells us not to  fear things that can destroy the body but things that can destroy the soul.  I am surrounded by things that can destroy the body. I interact almost daily with people who have deadly diseases, and many times I am the only person who can help them. I live in  a country with one of the world's longest-running wars taking place just a few hours away.  Uncertainty is everywhere.  But I am living in the midst of the uncertainty and risk, amid things that can and do bring physical destruction because I am running from things that can destroy my soul: complacency, comfort, and ignorance.  I am much more terrified of living a comfortable life in a self-serving society and failing to follow Jesus than I am of illness or tragedy.  (P. XIX).
After reading that, there wasn't a lot more left to be said.  The very reason I was annoyed over the call to fast was because it disrupted my complacency, my comfort and now, in conjunction with her book, was challenging my ignorance.


But those are actually not the quotes I wanted to share with you:)   This is the passage that riveted me in the wee hours of Tuesday night/Wed. morning, brought tears to my eyes and a deeper understanding of why it pays to fast from everything but Him and His call on your life - as this sweet girl has done.

   The next few weeks [her first weeks of settling into her new home] were full of joy and frustration.  I slowly settled into my room, no bigger than three-by-six feet, in the back of the pastor's house.  His home was on the orphanage compound, where 102 children, ages two to eighteen, lived.
   I can't really explain in words the love I felt for these children or why I felt it.    I think many people would have looked at them and seen only their filthy clothes, the ringworm on their heads, or the mucus that ended up in a crust around their nostrils.  They would have looked around at the dormitories of the orphanage with its smooth, hard  cement floor where rats and cockroaches made themselves at home and been a bit disgusted.  By the grace of God, though, I didn't see those things.
  The truth is, I saw myself in those little faces.  I looked at them and felt this love that was unimaginable and knew that this is the way God sees me.  The children would run to me with gifts of stones or dirt and I saw myself, filthy and broken, offering my life to the God of the universe and begging Him to make it into something beautiful. I sit here in a broken world, small and dirty at His feet, and He who sits so high chooses to commune with me, to love me anyway.  He blinds Himself to my sin and my filth so that He can forge a relationship with me. And this is what He did for me with those precious children. He blinded me to the filth and disease, and I saw only children hungry for love that I was eager to share with them. I adored them, not because of who I was, but because of who He is.  I just sat right down on that cold, hard floor and snuggled my nose into their dirty necks and kissed their fungus-covered heads and didn't even see it. I was in love.  (P. 7).


And she was. Still is, judging by the joy that emanates from her book and from her face in the pictures.  As she lives the ultimate fast no less.

As I look at my bowl of no-frills tomato soup for lunch, I realize that everything is relative and that until I've lived in a third world country, I really don't know what a fast is.  And maybe, perhaps, I really don't know what complete joy is either.

Just thinking out loud...

By the way, her blog is www.kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com and her ministry is called Amazima. And the book is truly awesome.