This month, Donna comes first!
Donna’s Corner
Dear Family,
“Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes Me; and whoever welcomes Me does not welcome Me but the one who sent Me.” [Mark 9:37]
Last week I was praying for a children’s camp near where we live, when all of a sudden, I started to weep from the depths of my heart. I knew it was the heart of God crying out for children.
Children are so on the heart of God. From the womb until age 14—and beyond. The enemy also knows the value of children and knows that God has a plan for each child from the moment they were conceived. [Ps 139:13-16] The enemy is out to rob, to kill and to destroy them. Just think of the many ways he is wiping out children. I really don’t need to tell you.
*Did you know that 71% of Christians commit their lives to Christ before they reach the age of 15?
*Did you know half the world’s population is under the age of 20?
*Did you know that there is a 4—14 Window movement right now, reaching children between the ages of 4 and 14? Google it and see the statistics.
*As the church, how much is our emphasis on the reaching of children? How much of our money is being used to bring the gospel, bring true teaching, bring healing, to children?
*As disciples of Jesus, how much are we reaching out to children? You may not be called to ‘children’s ministry,’ but you are called to pray for the children, bless them, be a safe person for them, give finances to reach them, and to disciple them by your life—by your life-style.
The warfare is increasing for the younger generation. They are being beheaded by ISIS, while at the same time being murdered in the womb in many of our ‘civilized’ nations. When you watch the news, PRAY! Don’t let fear come in. The prayers of righteous people are powerful and effective.
Jesus said that, “He is revealing more and more to little children.” [Mt 11:25] “Let the children come to Me, and do not hinder them for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” [Lk 18:16]
“From the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise.” [Mt 21:16] And also, “In the last days your sons and daughters will prophesy.” [Acts 2:17]
I asked Jesus one day why He hates divorce, [Malachi 2:16] and He said to me, “Because of what it does to the children.”
Jesus said, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” [Mt 18:6]
May God give us more revelation about His heart for children and what we can do to please His heart.
We are told in the Word about how Jesus was conceived, how He came as a baby, was worshipped by shepherds, honored by wise men, taken for safety to Egypt, and then when he was just 12, was found teaching in the synagogue!
As we begin to celebrate God’s greatest gift to us, His only son Jesus, let’s remember His heart for children. When you are shopping in the mall, every child you see, pray a little prayer for them (you don’t have to lay on hands!)
Love and Blessings,
Maori proverb: The kumara (sweet potato) does not say how sweet he is.
Dan the Man
Dan Sneed, one of YWAM’s favorite teachers, offers . . .
*The Power of a New Identity*
on DVD
A brand new series of eight 30-40 minute sessions on DVD, have been designed for personal study as well as group and church use. Check Dan’s website www.dansneed.com
Here’s a bit of nostalgia for you. Watch the King’s Kids Klassic movie filmed in the early 1980s on location in Hawaii! You or your kids maybe in it. Ours were!
Click on the photo to watch this short movie!
The Compacted Life
Did you see Star Wars? Who can forget this scary scene?
Our doomed heroes are trapped in a space-trash compactor with the walls closing in. Still makes me shudder.
Let’s come down a bit in size and reality, to one of those trash disposal units some people have, those gizmos that hydraulically squeeze all their household dreck down to a sanitarily and convenient, disposable and dense little brick of bric-a-bac, suitably shrink-wrapped into an industrial-strength plastic bag. Very sterile. But imagine generations of archeologists yet to come, scratching their heads as they examine what we glibly jettisoned, as they pry apart our 21st century cultural and cubed claptrap.
But I digress (which may mean that I’ve lost my way . . 🙂
The TV News gets densed-down to a few pungent seconds of time. Whether it be the sports highlight reel showing a ‘walk-off’ home run, a golden goal, a 100-foot buzzer-beater, or an impossibly stupendous, gravity-defying, leaping one-handed touchdown. We get fed the highlights only. We don’t have time for the ‘ordinary’ life.
We are treated instead, to ‘mid-harangue’ sound-bytes, usually by politicians; to hairy car chases; or to some gigantic fish hooked. Now and then, we may get a full 30-seconds of grainy coverage of a potential Third World War brewing somewhere . . . but hold it! Cut to commercial! Someone’s gotta pay for this.
But actually, life is lived in a continuum, minute-by-minute, hours and hours of minutes-by-minutes, strung together in the chain of time. Life can actually be boring, tedious, repetitive, even monotonous—and when it is—we do everything we can to speed up time, to make events interesting and exciting. And failing that, “I’m outta here!”
But in real life, the score sometimes ends up 0-0, the fish gets away, the batter whiffs and the traffic is gridlocked. Oh yes! Hairy car chases . . . One stands out, not in its brevity, but in its longevity. Do you remember, a few years ago . . .
. . . that sadly-memorable, all-consuming, live-on-TV, hyped-and-happening, two-hour, slow-speed car chase? The eyes of the world were riveted on TV screens for hours and hours, as a formerly-famous footballer flummoxed us all as he cruised the freeways of L.A. with a gun at his own head. The media loved every strung-out, commercialized minute of that soapy opera. And didn’t we? Be honest!
(CNN is so gifted at this sort of “news,” that they may very well have prolonged wars, ‘majored on a minor’ incident in Timbuktu, and always seem to have at their beck and call, several hundreds of experts who give several hundred opinions on several hundred conceivable cataclysmic catastrophes, happened, happening and about to happen.)
Despite these boring people who drone on and on about their trivial pursuits, outside in the real world, we contend with the ’90-second Big Mac,’ scarfing it down and then wondering why we need Tums, Gaviscon and a myriad of other antacids for immediate relief, each with various possible side effects that may give us worse symptoms than what they were intended to cure.
But all-an-all we’ve become a very instant and on-demand people. Not only cars become obsolescent the day they leave the lot, but the concept of time, of patience, of waiting, of lingering, of anticipating, of hoping, of pondering, of tarrying—now there’s an old one!—all these seem to have become fruitless time-wasters.
Where is God in all this?
There’s just no time to live life the way it was designed to be lived. One minute, one day, one week at a time . . . smelling the roses, savouring the sunsets, languorously lounging around a magnificent (home-cooked) meal, surrounded by family, with prolonged chewing of the fat, and the opportunity for intimate kinfolk communication.
But no, someone always seems to have something on, somewhere else. And even when the family gathers together, the TV must be on, and the ever-present ‘hand-held,’ handy. We’ve become a busy, distracted, impatient, tolerant-of-anything, class of people. In truth, and in our striving for new and better—to be original and different—we have morphed into relationshiplessness, tastelessness and blandness.
But very compacted. Is God in there somewhere?
How can we—you and me—put the brakes on the screaming clock, unpack ourselves, and in a small way, take time to really savor a little bit of each other, each day? If we choose to, we can de-compact and un-complicate our lives at least once in 24 hours.
Who knows, maybe God will show up.
Perhaps we’ll look at that in the coming months . . . like Family-Dinner-Around-The-Table. Together. Every night. (Exceptions permitted. Occasionally.)
And not just at Thanksgiving.
Blessings
Next Summer
May 24-30 Rostrevor, Northern Ireland
July 5-11 Restenäs, Sweden with Edwin Fillies
July 12-18 Sighisoira, Romania
July 20-25 Skjærgårdsheimen, Norway
Aug 2-8 YWAM Champagne, France
For details go to http://www.intouchcamps.net/ywam-associates-europe/
and Finally . . .
Food for Thought
The Maori of New Zealand have a saying . . .
“We walk backwards into the future, with our eyes firmly fixed on our history, and the lessons we learn from it.”
The Hebrew word ahariyth (translated as future), is unusual because it literally means afterward, backward or ‘after part.’
So, how can it be about the future?
H.W. Wolf says that the Hebrew concept of time is like a man rowing a boat.
This picture has some very powerful theology in it. Only God can see “behind” us.
The man sees where he has been, but the future is behind him (toward his back). He backs into the future.
It is entirely unknown to him because it is behind him.
We have as our guide what we see, the course we have been following—the past. We see the past because we are facing it. The past is in ‘front’ of us.
No wonder our history with God is so important. It is not just about where we came from. It is the visible guide for the course of our future.
Till next time . . .
The Small Print
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