I always wanted to be a doctor but my parents couldn’t afford for me to get that kind of education. I was crying about it one night because I wanted to be a doctor. I was praying about it and the Lord told me, “You will be a doctor, but you will be a soul doctor.” I wondered how I could be a soul doctor and what that meant.
He told me He would give me the gift of encouragement. About seven times in various countries I met people who wanted to commit suicide and the Lord showed me the right words to tell them and they were shocked that I knew that they wanted to commit suicide. I told them, “What are you doing? You are on your way to kill yourself, aren’t you?” They were shocked I knew what they wanted to do and the Lord used this to save their life. I was with my boyfriend in a disco and he was dancing and I was sitting down. Sitting across from me was a boy 17 years old. I was 19 at the time. The Lord told me to go and talk to him. I protested, “I don’t even know him. How am I going to talk to him?” But the Lord insisted, so I finally went. I was asking this boy, “Why do you want to die?” He was shocked. He looked at me and was silent. I asked him again. He was upset. He was drinking and said to me, “Who told you I want to die?” I told him. “Jesus”. He laughed in my face, “Oh right, Jesus.” I asked him, “Tell me why you are so unhappy?” He will reach out to you “I found my best friend sleeping with my girl friend.” “Why would you kill yourself for that, it was not your fault?” “If it was anyone else, I could accept it, but because it was the two best friends in my life I can’t.” He still didn’t want to admit that he wanted to kill himself. I started talking to him. They were closing the disco and it was 4 in the morning. I told my boyfriend that this boy needed help and we should take him home with us. After much arguing, my boyfriend finally gave up and the boy came with us. I kept talking with him. I told him about forgiveness. I believe that if people know that God forgives them, then they will feel at peace and feel a change in their life. Our visitor wouldn’t receive any talk about Jesus but he broke out crying. I put my hand on his shoulder and started praying for him out loud expecting that he would freak out. He reached his hands in his pockets and pulled out a few packets of sleeping pills. He said, he couldn’t deny it any longer, and that he did want to commit suicide. I prayed with him and told him, “The pain will go away.” I don’t know why I said that, because I wouldn’t normally say that, but I had the faith to say that to him. He received the Lord in his heart and he felt a peace. When we had coffee it was already morning and he called his girlfriend. He said, “I forgive you,” and they got back together.
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From Joe
We were living in California at the time and we needed 60 dollars to pay some bills. So as we went to a parking lot to pass out Gospel tracts after we had committed our needs to the Lord in prayer. Joe explained, “As my friend, Trina went up to one car, she heard one young man say to the person next to him, ‘Do what you have to do, man.’ The other young man that he was talking to pulled out 80 dollars from his wallet and gave it to Trina. “Thank you so much. But why are you giving me this?” Trina asked. The young man answered, “I’m not a Christian or anything, but as I was at home a kind of voice spoke to me and told me to go to the parking lot and I was supposed to give 80 dollars to someone who needed it. I can see by what you are passing out that you need help to do your work, so you’re the one.” Joe asked us, “Why do you think the Lord gave us 80 dollars when we only asked for 60? The extra 20 dollars was so that we could help someone else who needed it.” From Sirena
In 2002 I was on a missionary trip in Germany and there were festivals in the city so all the hotels were packed so there was no place to stay and it was raining. We sat down with my partner to pray and looked across the street. We were in a coffee shop and a boy caught my attention. He was standing in the rain looking straight at me. For 10 minutes I couldn’t get my eyes off him. He pulled out a key chain from his back pocket and dangled it in the air in front of him. I felt I had to follow him. I told my partner about him. We got up and followed him and I tried to start a conversation with the young man we saw but he didn’t answer any of my polite enquiries. I asked, ‘Do you speak English?” and “What is your name?” He answered in English, “I know what you need. Follow me.” He brought us to a house across town and told me, “They have a room for you.” I went ahead to the hotel desk and started talking to the receptionist. I turned around to say thank you but the young man was totally gone. Then I asked the lady how much it would cost. She said, “It is already taken care of.” Before I went to sleep I prayed to meet the young man again, Nuremberg is a small town so it was a good chance I could see him again. I wanted to thank this man as I was so appreciative. That night I had a dream and in my dream the same young man who had led us to the hotel appeared and said, “I am an angel.” In the dream I didn’t see his face anymore. I couldn’t see his eyes which were beams of light. His face became light but I knew the voice was the same. The Lord knows my heart and allowed me to meet him again, even if it was only in my dreams. I tried to describe the young man to the hotel receptionist to see if she knew him but she said she didn’t. I asked her who paid, and she said, “It was paid through the internet,” but we didn’t have bank cards at the time so there was no way it could have been us. From Sirena
I had a Christian volunteer project at the government hospital and orphanages doing clown therapy, and I was fainting all the time. I asked the Lord about it. He told me that I had leukemia but not to worry as would be able to witness to doctors and meet people. So I went to the private hospital and asked if they could help me find out what was wrong with me. “Do you have insurance?” the director asked me. According to the law you have to have that. I said. “No, I am a missionary.” He called a doctor and explained to her that she should run some tests on me. She was not a cancer specialist she was an endocrinologist (specialist in the endocrine system). She gave me an appointment but what was interesting was that before the tests, the Lord told me to witness to her. So, I did. I told her, “Jesus loves you.” When I walked into the office, she turned her head and burst out crying. I waited as she cried for a short time and she looked at me and said, “I know you are a child of God. I really needed to hear this today. I was going through a big depression.” I didn’t know this as she was always smiling. She moved to that city recently and had studied in the States and just came back and was very lonely. She continued, “I was praying for a Christian friend. This morning before I went to work God told me that I would meet the friend I was praying for. When you walked in and said that, I knew that you were the answer to my prayers.” She took very good care of me and we did become friends and are still very close friends to this day. After a few doctors looked at the results from the tests taken from my bone marrow samples, they couldn’t believe it. They said, “You don’t look sick, but your results are worse than any of the other patients in the hospital and they look very bad.” I needed to be hospitalized immediately. The director told me, “I am sorry, I can’t give you free treatment.” But the doctor that I mentioned before, paid for everything for me. She bought the medicine and stayed up all night with me. I was treated like a queen. The whole ordeal was a test of my faith. I saw so clearly that, when we call, He will answer. It was incredible. He did a miracle and provided a private room with a whirlpool bath for free. The staff asked me, “How can you smile and have peace when you are so sick?” I told them about the Lord and they prayed with me to receive His love. The doctors told me that I would need 10 months of therapy for one week per month. I only had to stay for 4 months. The Lord healed me. It was a miracle because my body was deprived of all nutrition. I had no magnesium or other needed minerals. The Lord told me He was using this to meet people, so I had a peace about it. It was a miracle that they caught my leukemia so early. I am fine now. I could have died but He saved me for a purpose. I meet people and they tell me, “I don’t believe in God.” I tell them, “Ok, let me tell you about my life.” Recently there was a major storm and rain that caused landslide and flash flood on the east side of Indonesia. We went to Alor to help with basic supplies packages, toys, clothes, sarong and many more. I will send more pictures.
Love, Daniel and Terry I was on the way to the university. I was in a trolley bus. A strange young man with blonde hair and who had no color in his irises—his eyes filled only with light—sat directly opposite me. I couldn’t ignore him no matter how hard I tried. I thought he was really weird and I was scared of him as he didn’t look like a normal human being. He kept smiling and staring at me. Two stops before I was supposed to get off, he got up and held my hand. When he touched me I was warm all over. I felt the same way later when I received prayer for healing.
I can’t explain why I went with him, but I followed him. As soon as the trolley bus left, he let my hand go. I turned away and he was gone. In a few minutes I heard people screaming and the ambulances coming. I found out later that the trolley bus was cut in two and had a short circuit and some were severely injured. I might have been among the injured if I had not gotten off early. By Henry Drummond
Patience. This is the normal attitude of love; love passive, love waiting to begin; not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its work when the summons comes, but in the meantime wearing the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. Love suffers long; beareth all things; believeth all things; hopes all things. For love understands, and therefore waits. Kindness. Love in action. Have you ever noticed how much of Christ’s life was spent in merely doing kind things? Run over it with that in view, and you will find that He spent a great proportion of His time simply in making people happy, in doing good to people. There is only one thing greater than happiness in the world, and that is holiness; and it is not in our keeping; but what God has put in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that is largely to be secured by our being kind to them. “The greatest thing,” was once said, “a man can do for his heavenly Father is to be kind to some of His other children.” I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are? How much the world needs it! How easily it is done! How instantaneously it acts! How infallibly it is remembered! How superabundantly it pays itself back—for there is no debtor in the world so honorable, so superbly honorable, as love. “Love never faileth.” Love is success, love is happiness, love is life. “Love,” I say with Browning, “is energy of life.” Where love is, God is. He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God. God is love. Therefore love. Without distinction, without calculation, without procrastination, love. Lavish it upon the poor, where it is very easy; especially upon the rich, who often need it most; most of all upon our equals, where it is very difficult, and for whom perhaps we each do least of all. There is a difference between trying to please and giving pleasure. Give pleasure. Lose no chance of giving pleasure; for that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly loving spirit. “I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.” Generosity. “Love envieth not.” This is love in competition with others. Whenever you attempt a good work you will find other men doing the same kind of work, and probably doing it better. Do not envy them. Envy is a feeling of ill-will to those who are in the same line as ourselves, a spirit of covetousness and detraction. Humility: And then, after having learned all that, you have to learn this further thing, humility—to put a seal upon your lips and forget what you have done. After you have been kind, after love has stolen forth into the world and done its beautiful work, go back into the shade again and say nothing about it. Love hides even from itself. Love waives even self-satisfaction. “Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” Humility is love hiding. Courtesy Is the fifth ingredient is a somewhat strange one to find in this summum bonum. This is love in society, love in relation to etiquette. “Love does not behave itself unseemly.” Politeness has been defined as love in trifles. Courtesy is said to be love in little things. And the one secret of politeness is to love. Love cannot behave itself unseemly. You can put the most untutored persons into the highest society, and if they have a reservoir of love in their hearts they will not behave themselves unseemly. They simply cannot do it. You know the meaning of the word “gentleman.” It means a gentle man—a man who does things gently, with love. That is the whole art and mystery of it. The gentle man cannot in the nature of things do an ungentle thing, an ungentlemanly thing. Unselfishness. “Love seeketh not her own.” The most obvious lesson in Christ’s teaching is that there is no happiness in having and getting anything, but only in giving. Half the world is on the wrong scent in pursuit of happiness. They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. It consists in giving, and in serving others. “He that would be great among you,” said Christ, “let him serve.” He that would be happy, let him remember that there is but one way—“it is more blessed [it is more happy] to give than to receive.” Good temper The next ingredient is a very remarkable one having a good temper. “Love is not provoked.” Nothing could be more striking than to find this quality here. We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a harmless weakness. We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take into serious account in estimating a man’s character. And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a place; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive elements in human nature. You will see then why temper is significant. It is not in what it is alone, but in what it reveals. It is a test for love, a symptom, a revelation of an unloving nature at bottom. It is the intermittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease within; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath; a sample of the most hidden products of the soul dropped involuntarily when off one’s guard; in a word, the lightning form of a hundred hideous and un-Christian sins. A lack of patience, a lack of kindness, a lack of generosity, a lack of courtesy, a lack of unselfishness are all instantaneously symbolized in one flash of temper. Hence it is not enough to deal with the temper. We must go to the source and change the inmost nature, and the angry tendencies will die away of themselves. Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but by putting something in—a great love, a new spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ interpenetrating spirits, sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only can eradicate what is wrong, work a change, renovate and regenerate, and rehabilitate the inner man. Willpower does not change men. Time does not change men. Christ does. Therefore, “Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” Guilelessness is the grace for suspicious people. The possession of it is the great secret of personal influence. You will find, if you think for a moment, that the people who influence you are people who believe in you. In an atmosphere of suspicion men shrivel up; but in that atmosphere they expand, and find encouragement and educative fellowship. It is a wonderful thing that here and there in this hard, uncharitable world there should still be left a few rare souls who think no evil. This is the great unworldliness. Love “thinketh no evil,” imputes no motive, sees the bright side, puts the best construction on every action. What a delightful state of mind to live in! What a stimulus and benediction even to meet with it for a day! To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to influence or elevate others, we shall soon see that success is in proportion to their belief of our belief in them. The respect of another is the first restoration of the self-respect a man has lost; our ideal of what he is becomes to him the hope and pattern of what he may become. “Love rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth.” I have called this sincerity from the words rendered in the Authorized Version by “rejoiceth in the truth.” What Paul meant is a quality which probably no one English word adequately defines. It includes, perhaps more strictly, the self-restraint which refuses to make capital out of others’ faults; the charity which delights not in exposing the weakness of others, but “covereth all things”; the sincerity of purpose which endeavors to see things as they are, and rejoices to find them better than suspicion feared or calumny denounced. So much for the analysis of love. Now the business of our lives is to have these things fitted into our characters. That is the supreme work to which we need to address ourselves in this world, to learn to love. From Sirena
I was fund raising in Germany and it was the first time I had done something like this alone. I was unsure I could do it, but the Lord encouraged me by telling me that: where He guides He provides. On the last day, I headed home and it was snowy and cold on the way to the bus. On the zebra crossing there was a young man named Günther on the other side. He had a hood pulled up over his head and his hands were in his pockets. The Lord told me to go to him. I always have a battle in my mind of why I should go and talk to a stranger but I went anyways. I asked him, “Do you speak English?” “Yes, why?” “Where are you going?” “None of your business.” “What are you planning to do?” “What do you want of me?” I was praying what to say to him next and the Lord told me, “Ask him ‘what do you have in your pocket?’” When I did, he got mad and said, “Leave me alone.” I said, “You have a syringe and heroin.” “What?” “Take your hand out of your pocket.” When he did, he held a syringe and a packet in his hand. He was mad at me and wondered, “How did you know?” “God told me.” “I was going to shoot up an overdose.” “Why?” “One of my friends got sick and I couldn’t take it.” It wasn’t the truth. He told me, “I need to go now.” I asked him, “Can we go for a hot drink?” We sat in a coffee shop and we started talking until the morning. He asked me for my phone number and I gave it to him. The next day he called me and asked if we could meet. I met him again. He told me the truth. It wasn’t that his friend was sick but that he had stolen a lot of money from his parents to buy a car for his friend so that he could impress his girlfriend. His father had found out that the money was missing and he knew the apartment was not broken into. That day when Günther met me and told me the truth he invited me to visit his parents and I went to his place. He didn’t want to stay, but he had to introduce me to his parents. I told the father how I had met his son and the whole story. Günther couldn’t lie to his father and told him that he had stolen the money and he had tried to commit suicide. The father started crying and he forgave his son. I asked them to pray but they didn’t want to and everyone was very shaken. My friend who I was staying with heard what had happened. He was touched by the story and was so amazed at my persistence in my efforts that he paid for my ticket back to Romania. By Henry Drummond
After contrasting love with eloquence, prophecy, faith, charity, and sacrifice, Paul gives us an amazing analysis in three short verses of what this supreme thing—love—is. It is a compound thing, he tells us. It is like light. As you have seen a man of science take a beam of light and pass it through a crystal prism, and you see it come out on the other side of the prism broken up into its component colors—red, and blue, and yellow, and violet, and orange, and all the colors of the rainbow—so Paul passes this thing, love, through the magnificent prism of his inspired intellect, and it comes out on the other side broken up into its elements. In these few words we have what one might call the spectrum of love, the analysis of love. Will you observe what its elements are? Will you notice that they have common names, that they are virtues which we hear about every day, that they are things which can be practiced by every man in every place in life; and how, by a multitude of small things and ordinary virtues, the supreme thing, the summum bonum, is made up?
We hear much of love for God; Christ spoke much of love for man. We make a great deal of peace with heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion is not a strange thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme thing, in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day. (See post on May 11 for these treats expanded on.) Dear Friend,
Thank you for the gifts you sent to our field last month & the dear people here with your love gift. As you probably know, Ramadan is here, and is the month where the cultural tradition is to feed, encourage & reach out to the poor. From the 12th of April to the 12th of May we are focusing on feeding the poorest of the poor with food packages & bread. Our goal is 1000 food boxes, or approximately 6,000 people. Thank you for helping us to feed the hungry and lift their spirits. Some photos attached of the village and area in south Jordan. It's one of the poorest areas in Jordan. Thank you again. And claiming the verse for you, "And I will bless them that bless you." I've been studying about "blessings", & blessings had much more meaning in Bible times than they do now. But whenever someone blessed their sons, family, or anyone, the Lord did it.--It's actually a promise, when we ask the Lord to bless someone He will do it and He's committed to fulfilling it and it's actually something that stays with the person. Jacki Scott | Founder & President e: [email protected] | w: handsonhope.org m: +962 78 748 4445 Follow us on: Facebook | Instagram P.S. Read more about their work in Jordan here: https:// /hand-on-horadgiving.weebly.compe-jordan.html |
AuthorThe goal of the blog is to provide interesting, motivational, soul feeding material. All to help remind us that God loves us all and wants a personal relationship with each of us and will take care of us in times of trouble. I aspire to be a force for good by providing you with positive input. I encourage you to share the blog with others. Archives
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