Firstly, I need to say sorry as a couple of people have been asking me when my next post was coming but things have been a bit hectic so it took quite a bit longer than I anticipated. Hopefully you will enjoy it and be blessed by reading it and will forgive me the slight delay!
Although I did not specifically talk to God about housing for Bethel it was on my mind, even before I was accepted. How do you find room mates and housing 5000 miles away when you do not know how it all works? Thankfully Papa knew my concerns and already had his immeasurably more provision ready for me.
As soon as I was accepted I went on to the BSSM housing bulletin board (I had looked a couple of times before but had not seen anything that seemed helpful). This time was different, the second post down was from a 47 year old lady looking for roomies from September. I emailed straight away and asked if we could Skype sometime. That was Wednesday night. The next morning I had an email back introducing Amy. We continued to email backwards and forwards and by Saturday morning we both knew we wanted to share and believed this was Papa's provision. Wow, in under 3 days I had a roomie!
Amy is American (Papa's sense of humour there!) and her family live in Arizona. For the last 11 years she has been a librarian at an international school in Malaysia. She has her own fab story of how Papa provided me as a roomie for her too, she gave him 3 days to provide and he did. Wow! .
On the Sunday morning I had an email from Amy including an email she had received from a lady called Lizzie. The email showed lots of pictures of a lovely house and asked Amy if she would like to share as Lizzie needed two people to share with. Amy's question to me was what did I think. NO was what I thought. I liked the idea of Amy and I sharing but did not really care to add a third. However, before I replied I thought I would think about it. As it was, Holy Spirit had it in mind to talk to me about it and in no uncertain terms too!
Firstly, he asked me how I would feel if Amy and Lizzie had met first and I was the third trying to find roomies? This made me think maybe we should consider it but I definitely was not convinced. Is three not a crowd? At this Holy Spirit reminded me of Ecclesiastes 4:13, a cord of 3 strands is not easily broken. I have always thought of this in relation to marriage but Holy Spirit said there would be tough times at Bethel and if there was 3 of us there would always be two to support and encourage the third. This made sense but...... Finally Holy Spirit said that I should just accept the provision of an awesome house that Papa had provided for his 3 obedient daughters. Wow! At this I emailed Amy and told her all of the above and by the end of the day I had 2 fabulous roomies and a gorgeous house! God is so good!
So, to introduce Lizzie a little, she is 67 and lives in Kent. For the last few years she has been looking after her grandchildren while their parents work. She too has a great story of God's hand in her accommodation, at first she did not want to share with anyone but now feels blessed by her roomies!
So, within a week of being accepted at Bethel I had 2 amazing roomies and great house provision. This is such an awesome blessing as we are already getting to know each other with regular Skype conversations and Lizzie and I have been able to meet a couple of times. Just love that Papa really does prepare our ways before us, even when we have not specifically asked him about it, he knows what we need better than we know ourselves and he promises to always meet our needs.
News on the house is that everything is under way and we should complete the sale in the next 4 weeks. Woohoo! Actually really pleased to have a little extra time as I still have some stuff to sort out in the house!
There's so many other things I want to share that I am going to try to post once a week or at least once a fortnight. The difficulty is there are background things I still want to share, like family reconciliation and how amazing Papa has been in this, but then each week God is teaching me so much more and revealing new stuff to me and I want to share this too!
So, before I finish this blog I want to share a little of the journey God has had me on over the last few weeks and some of the amazing (at least I think they are amazing) revelations he has given me. Here goes!
Papa delights in me when I do the simplest of things with joy as much as when I do amazing things with joy. Recently I was washing some walls and worshipping God as I did it. I was not being amazingly spiritual, it is simply that I do not like cleaning so worship makes it seem much more bearable! During the course of the morning I found that my heart was full of joy and I was actually enjoying what I was doing. When I stopped for lunch I continued reading Consumed by love by Duncan Smith and read the following:
'You have always been so busy thinking you are doing My work that you've had little time to hang out with Me. I want you to know that I don't need you to get the job done of saving the world. I love you and I want your friendship. That's what really counts. I want you to know that you bring as much glory and pleasure to Me sweeping these barns with your sweet heart attitude as you did when you were leading thousands to Me on that platform in Ghana.'
I stopped reading as I knew that was what I was meant to learn that day, Papa delights in me when I take joy in what I am doing, regardless of what it is I am doing or how simple or insignificant it seems to me. Wow, whether I'm saving the world or cleaning gutters Papa takes great delight and joy in me if I am doing it with joy!
I went on retreat in May as it would have been my husband's birthday and I thought a couple of days with God would be good and they were! Most of the time I was there I was chatting with others and all of them began to share the difficulties and problems they were facing. As I was praying I was saying to God that I felt like what I was doing was not enough, I wanted to bring them into encounter with Jesus. Holy Spirit immediately asked me what I thought I was doing and then said, they encounter Jesus because he is in you, that is why they open up and tell you things and then you speak God's wisdom into their lives, that is encounter. Wow, so blessed with that revelation!
Want to get this posted now so will end there but have so much more I want to share. I will endeavour to get another post out over the weekend so I can tell you about getting my visa, going to Cherish and God's awesome plans for my future after Bethel. Hope you have been blessed, I know I am!
Hi Michelle, I've really enjoyed catching up with your posts, which I find both encouraging and challenging, encouraging because of your personal relationship with God (or Papa, I know that I'm being too formal by saying God, but Papa doesn't come naturally to me), and challenging for exactly the same reason! I like the way you check things out in prayer with others on a day by day level. I also like the way that you want to be totally obedient to God and swim right in the strongest flow of the river, rather than messing about in the shallows. For me, I'm really enjoying reading the Bible Challenge (bible in a year) most mornings, having struggled to engage with the bible for over 30 years (I'm ashamed to say), with more reflective reading at bedtime (Confessions of a Lapsed Catholic' by Sheila Cassidy at the moment), which I'm able to read until the cows come home. I look forward to reading your next few posts (when you get the chance to write them). Best wishes, Neil
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