Watching and waiting...

I remember 7 years ago tonight.  I say in front of the TV watching and waiting and praying.  Praying that Hurricane Katrina would slow down, change course or just plain fizzle out.  Instead it hit the Gulf Coast with a fury and shortly after that the storm surge hit New Orleans and 80% of the city was flooded.  Rob was in Colorado hunting and I sat with the boys just staring at the pictures on TV.  The rescues, the water, the Super Dome and the Civic Center. I watched as the National Guard and Coast Guard rescued people in baskets from helicopters from their roofs.  I watched and I cried.

Hurricane Katrina, 2005

 Tonight I sit in front of the TV watching and waiting and praying.  But my prayer tonight is one more of praise to my Heavenly Father for the storm not going higher than a category 1.  Praise for an amazing team of TouchGlobal friends that are sheltering in place in New Orleans and the surrounding area so that they can be first responders to a wind blown and rain soaked city in a few days.  Praise that Our God heard our prayers and for the most part spared our friends in Haiti from this storm.  And praise that I know for sure that God can and will use every event for His glory,  even hurricanes and earthquakes.

Will I cry over the next few days as I watch the damage reports or possible hear about lost lives?  Absolutely!  But compassion and mercy are part of who God made me to be.  That's OK.  I look forward to the time when we are in the field and I can be a part of that first responder team going in to see if everyone is OK.  When I can go in and pray with someone and tell that about the life giving blood of Jesus Christ.  Our Lord and Savior can and will help us through any storm.

My friend and teammate Katie had this verse on her blog and I wanted to share it with you.

"Lord, you are my God;
I will exalt you and praise your name,
for in perfect faithfulness
you have done wonderful things,
things planned long ago.
2 You have made the city a heap of rubble,
the fortified town a ruin,
the foreigners' stronghold a city no more;
it will never be rebuilt.
3 Therefore strong peoples will honor you;
cities of ruthless nations will revere you.
4 You have been a refuge for the poor,
a refuge for the needy in their distress,
a shelter from the storm
and a shade from the heat."
Isaiah 25:1-4 

This is a different storm than Katrina was 7 years ago.  That storm caught me at a time in my life where I was looking for a place to serve.  Looking for what I was going to do when I "grew up" so to speak.  Today I know what God has for me.  I have grown into a daughter of the King.  A daughter that just wants to love and serve her King and expand His Kingdom.  Hurricane Isaac has opened my eyes a little more to what God has in store for us.  And I have to tell you all....I am so joyful that He has chosen us for this work and so joyful that He is a shelter from the storm.

Jackie

My Brother Jeff

Tonight as I reflect on the last few weeks one thing keeps coming to mind.  My brother Jeff.  Jeff is 14 months younger than I am.  Did you ever have a sibling that whenever your mom and dad would ask any one of the kids in your family "who did that" you would answer "so and so did it!"  Well in our house it was always "Jeff did it!"  While sometimes it was Jeff who did it, he was usually our scapegoat and after a while I think our parents knew that the answer they were going to get is "Jeff did it!".  Did they know that the first person to say "Jeff did it!" usually was the culprit?  I'm not too sure but I can place dollars to donuts that they did.  We weren't pulling the wool over their eyes at all!

To say that Jeff had a rough life is an understatement.  He soon fell into a life of drugs and alcohol that would continue until just a few years ago.  At that time Jeff had met some people at work that invited him to church.  They loved him for who he was, embraced him for who he was and led him to a spirit filled life with Jesus Christ.  The change in Jeff has been like watching a caterpillar morph into a butterfly.  The love and light of Jesus shines through him.

So many people hear about Jackie and Rob's travels and Jackie and Rob's road to the mission field.  I learned recently that many people even from our family don't know that Jeff has made a huge move in his life also!  On Memorial Weekend Jeff came over for dinner and told us all that he had applied for a medical missions training program in the Philippines and if accepted he would be selling everything he owned, giving his dog to friends and moving to the Philippines for training this July.  Imagine our surprise!  But also our overwhelming sense of God's goodness and mercy.

Well, Jeff was accepted into the training program and on July 6 he left for the Philippines.  He is working each morning doing some building, gardening and other things to help build character and then in the afternoons they are doing training for a medical mission.  Jeff is the embodiment of a missions minded servant of God.  He has sold everything he owned and moved to the other side of the world to do the work that God called him to do. 

I love my brother Jeff so deeply.  I admire him and what he is doing.  And I give all the glory to God for Jeff and the miracle he is.  Amen to that!

Home...It's relative thing

Home...where is home?

Home is where the heart is.  Home is where you hang your hat.  Home Sweet Home.  Welcome Home!  Carrie Underwood says in a song "This is my temporary home, it's not where I belong, windows and rooms, that I'm passing through. This is just a stop, on the way to where I'm going. I'm not afraid because I know, this is my temporary home."

We stayed in lots of "homes" along the way this summer and then we got "home" and we were there for 5 days and left again for training.  All this moving around gave us the feeling of, wow, this is what it's going to be like when we go into ministry with TouchGlobal full time.  Away from our "stuff", friends, family and what we know as normal.   But then we got home and it didn't feel right.  It really made the word home feel a whole lot different than I had ever felt before.  Temporary, fleeting, just a stop along the way....

This is just our temporary home here on earth.  Some day we will all live eternity somewhere.  My home will be in heaven singing praises daily to my sweet Jesus.  I won't have to worry about my stuff.  Won't miss my friends or family and normal will be far greater than anything we could ever imagine here in our temporary home on earth.  It makes me wonder why I missed my house so much when it isn't really my permanent home.

Soon we will be moving to Louisiana and we will have a different house.  Same stuff, different house.  We will be in and out of that house too.  Where ever God calls us we will go.  Hurricanes on the gulf coast or Pacific ocean, earthquakes in Turkey, Japan, Haiti or another unknown location, flooding in Brazil or North Dakota or fires, tornados or drought.  God will call us to those locations and again we will leave our temporary home to live in another temporary home.  People ask...aren't you afraid?  You will have no idea where you are going...how will you prepare?  We say...no we're not afraid and God will prepare us.  He has been preparing us for such a time as this since the day we were born.  We will be ready.  God will provide the Ministry Partners in His time and that time will be when He feels we are totally ready to serve Him and not a minute or a day sooner.

So as we prepare for a new home and a new life over the next several months we will keep in mind that this home too will only be temporary.  A temporary home here on earth that is preparing us for our permanent home in heaven, serving Him and singing praises to Jesus.

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."  2 Corinthians 4:18