Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Testimony

Praise the Lord! We have a washing machine!!!! We were given 2 separate gifts of $200(so $400 total) to put towards this purchase. We were able to buy a machine comparable to the one I killed instead of a lesser one. We had to pay less than $50 out of pocket. WooHoo!!! Isn't God good!

When I went to the store to make my purchase I felt like I was supposed to share this testimony with someone there. I completed my purchase and mentioned in passing how we were given the money, but I did not attribute it to the Lord. While I was walking out I was berating myself for being such a poor witness. Then a man at the front bade me a good afternoon and said "God Bless You." Then he noticed the twins so I stopped to chat with him. I said, "since you said God bless you, let me tell you how he has blessed me today." So I told him how the Lord had provided the amount of money we need for the washing machine. Then I told him about our van. We chatted and then he thanked me for sharing my testimony. He had been in an accident right outside his workplace and his car was totaled. He said he had been thanking the Lord for keeping him safe and that my story had really blessed him when he was feeling kind of down. So you never know what good your testimony will do. So instead of a question this week, share with me something good the Lord has done for you. It could be a financial blessing, a healing, how you got saved, etc.

Here's one more from me.

I was healed at the age of four after falling out of a moving car. They were planning plastic surgery on my face because much of my skin had been scraped off. Within two weeks I had completely new skin. The doctor did not recognize me and asked what had happened. I told him that Jesus had healed me, and he said, I guess he did(or something like that).

So share as much as you want. It is important to remember what the Lord has done for us. And if whoever sent the anonymous gift is reading, thank you so very much, the Lord blessed not just us, but also a total stranger.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I got two wonderful baby boys when I was only expecting one. I also was blessed with a wife that is rarely overwhelmed by two babies.


You know who I am.

Scott said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Grats on the new washer! Ours died one year at Christmastime. Either Stephen or Jonah was a baby, so we had lots of messy baby clothes to wash.

It died the day before Christmas Eve, which was also the last day of the 3-year extended warranty we had bought. The repair guy came out on the 23rd and worked on it for a few hours, then came back on the 24th, worked on it for about half an hour, checked the language in the warranty, and said, "How would you folks like a new washer?"

We said "That would be just fine, sir," and he went home after calling in the old washer as a complete loss.

Becki said...

After starting our own business 4 years ago, we never thought we'd be going to WDW anytime before we could sell the place and retire. It seems like an absurd thing, but this is how the Lord knows the "desires of your heart": He has provided for us to to to WDW, not once, but twice within 4 months of each other and enjoy the trips by getting to go with our grandchildren. Our second trip will be totally free. This is just one of the many ways the Lord has blessed us this year.

Valerie Comer said...

Thank you for reminding me how good God is. I think my coolest story of God's blessings and MIRACLE happened when my son Joel was 15.

He was walking to the high school after lunch hour one October day and some kid lobbed an apple at him and struck him full in the right eye, so directly that he never got a black eye. The eyeball itself took all the force. (Joel was not innocent in this exchange!)

Now Joel had always had a lazy left eye and so the right eye was used to functioning as his ONLY eye. And now he couldn't see. We spent hours in emergency and waiting for the opthamologist, etc, and the upshot was that his eyesight would possibly increase a little over the next six weeks, but not to expect much. He would likely be legally blind.

I was devastated. This for a boy who was looking forward to his driver's licence soon, who had been making big plans for his future career. I was a mess, a total mess.

Later that evening Joel was laying on his bed in the dark and I went in his room, asking if he wanted to talk. He said, no, he was okay. I thought maybe he hadn't understood what the doctor said, but he interrupted me. I still remember his words clearly (7 years later): "Mom, God could have made the apple miss my eye, right? So, it hit. And so it must be okay with God, and if it's okay with God, it's okay with me."

(I'm crying writing this.)

Joel had not been particularly walking with God for the previous year or two, so that statement shocked and, yes, rebuked me.

We prayed. Our church prayed. The relatives prayed. Three of my sisters are missionaries, so people in tribal stations around the world prayed. When Joel had his final checkup six weeks later, the opthamologist said he had to doublecheck the chart to see which eye had been injured.

I told him that people had been praying for Joel around the world, in fact as far as I knew he had been prayed for in at least 7 languages. The doctor leaned back and said, "Well, it worked." There had been zero medical chance that he would have a full recovery, but he did.

I'm so thankful to God for his healing. Joel is now in his third year of university and remembers clearly what it was like to be blind for over a month.

Anonymous said...

This is a really good game. This is a really good question. It is grand to share testimonies of God's Faithfulness. Thanks!

We live a life that by nature makes it necessary to trust God for all our needs since we depend entirely on the gifts of others for our paycheck. Yet (call us stupid sheep) we still wander through the day forgetting how much God has done for us. It is important to re-focus, and I thank you for pushing us to do so.

We have had many "neat stories" (some would say "coincidences" but the law of averages alone would cause me to question that so many "coincidences" could be possible in one family's life.

Lately we have had a whole lot, as we set off on our missions venture. We have received several Surprise supporters, usually at the end of a long discouraging day when we don't know how we are going to make it financially or emotionally.

They are always little bits of reminders that God really does know where we are and will take care of us, even if it is not in our timing or to our specifications. All of these are little "Testimonies," and it would be difficult to pick one to share over another, but here's one of my favourites from when we first got married, just because it was so weird.

When we got married we lived in a little one bedroom apt. on a really main road in a fairly yucky section of town. I was really depressed. I had just left Berry, the largest campus in the world (really!) where I spent almost every afternoon hiking through the woods for an hour or two.

My new front yard was a parking lot where lots of Mexicans repaired cars and on the other side of it, Peachtree Industrial Blvd. My address actually had the word "Industrial" in it! Any who know me will attest that this was not a good thing for my mental stability.

After about 6 months of this and of my husband being very discontent in his job, God plopped an opportunity to return to Rome into our lives. The news station where my hubby had worked before we were married needed a new reporter. We quickly dropped everything and sped north, finding a roomy 2 bedroom duplex right on the border of the backwoods of Berry! Right at the old dirt road I had traipsed for years!

When we moved I contracted this nasty stomach virus that just would not leave. We were poor. We were in a lot of debt from moving costs. I was really sick. It was the longest stomach virus I had ever had.

After a few weeks of this, I began to get suspicious. I of course could not be pregnant, because the dr. had let me know in no uncertain terms that I would probably have a very difficult time getting pregnant if we ever wanted kids (I now have 4). But still, there were all these symptoms.

We were so poor that I drove from Rome to Douglasville to get a preg. test from a friend who had an extra one in her 2 pack because she WAS pregnant and wouldn't be needing the other one anytime soon. I had a Texaco card. I could fill up my car easier than I could lay down $9 for a test.

The night before I took the test we were nervous wrecks. We had about $1400 worth of debt from the move and we had no insurance with the new job for another 30 days.

Suddenly, I remembered the mail. We had not opened the mail! This was unusual because I am a mail-a-holic and if we get something other than bills I rip into it like there's no tomorrow. I was very interested in the mail because there was something to my husband from "Moose Jaw, Canada." Was this a joke?

It turned out to be from "Uncle Wally." Uncle Wally from Moose Jaw! I didn't even know we had an Uncle Wally. And I certainly didn't know there was such a thing as Moose Jaw.

Uncle Wally was going into an old folks home. He wanted to distribute his wealth before he died instead of after. He didn't have any kids, so he was sharing with the nephews. It was a check for about $1400.

We figured and figured what that might be in US funds. The Canadian dollar was pretty bad then (not like now when we live almost dollar for dollar here). We figured we might see around 60 percent of that, minus the fees to exchange.

Wow! That was a lot of money! That would really help! Uncle Wally! Go figure.

The next morning when I took the test, we discovered that our "Little Virus" would be coming along sometime the next summer.

If we had found this out a week before, in our tiny one bedroom apt. it would have been really scary. The check came in just perfect timing to remind us that God WOULD take care of our finances. He is so faithful.

We felt like Gideon when God so kindly showed him over and over that he was going to be taken care of. God is so very patient with our lack of trust.

Incidentally, when we took the check to the bank after looking at it for several days, lovingly feeling of it, patting it, being in awe of it, thanking God for it, etc, we were again blown away when the teller pointed out a tiny detail in the writing of it that we had somehow missed in all our careful observations of it. It was US FUNDS!!!

$1400. That would be almost exactly what we needed to pay for all the moving costs.