Thank you

Well today WAS a tough day. As you all know Todd was out of work for 6 months. And if you were like us, we thought that once he got a job everything would be ok. Well, being unemployed for so long takes awhile to come out of. And Todd and I have been feeling the pressure of that lately.

Being sick, having one rainy day after another doesn't help matters either!

Our prayer group was today and my dear sisters in Christ prayed for me and I left feeling better. But imagine my surprise when I checked my emails and I got a message from God. (thru another dear friend) I wanted to share with you because it really helps put things into perspective. Maybe it will minster to you as well!

Hugs Kristina


Making the Decision to Live by Faith

By John Paul Jackson
When it comes to our Christian faith, we have two options: We can choose to walk out our faith without faith, where everything makes sense and we have perfect control — or we can open ourselves to the possibility that maybe God is bigger than we are. And maybe, just maybe, He plans to prove it on a daily basis, if we let Him.

For most Christians in the Western world, the reason our faith lacks signs and wonders is not that God wants us to be sick or that He uses sickness to prove a point; it is that we sincerely don’t know Jesus. We know portions of who He is. We’ve had enough of a glimpse to want Him in our lives. But we don’t open ourselves to all the possibilities, because that’s dangerous, and most of us are afraid of what that would look like. It would change everything. It would change our day-to-day existence; it would change who we are as individuals.

In Matthew 8, Jesus and the disciples are out on the Sea of Galilee, and a huge storm rolls in. And Jesus — being the Word of God and Protector of Man — was sound asleep in the bottom of the boat. The disciples panicked; they thought they were going to die. “Don’t You care?” they demanded (John Paul’s personal translation). “We’re going to drown here!” Jesus got up, rebuked the wind and the waves as if they were misbehaving children, and the sea became like glass, perfectly calm. Instead of realizing the truth, the disciples whispered, “Who is this? Who can this Man be?”

And that’s where most of us are today. We are still undecided about who God really is. Is He able to keep us safe? Is He as good as He says He is? We think, If He really cares about us, then why do people still get sick? Why did He not keep my friend from losing her job? Why did He not heal my cousin of cancer? How could I have gotten into that accident yesterday if He’s really all-powerful?

These seem like honest, logical questions to ask, but they are straight from our soul — our human logic is trying to figure Him out. We are still undecided about Him, and we want to leave a back door open so that we can escape if necessary.

The days are coming when indecision will no longer be an option. Either we trust Him, or we don’t. Either He is who He says He is, or He isn’t. It’s a risk. It could really, really hurt — not because He will fail us, but because it will completely wreck our borders and boundaries. It will force us into the battle as nothing else ever has. We will become the generals and leaders God has called us to be.

So we need to decide what we truly think about Him, but this decision cannot be something we just make in our heads. That is called the human will, and our human will by itself is not strong enough to get us where we need to be. Our decision must come not just from our head but also from our heart. We have to know that we know that we know that we know that He is the best thing that has ever happened to us, that He is God in every sense of the word, that He is who we want to spend the rest of our lives with, that we want Him badly.

When we know these things, we come into agreement with Heaven. Nothing will be impossible for us, and the enemy will not be able to derail us as we travel this road to our destiny.