THE VIEW FROM THE FRONT PORCH

These past few weeks on television they have been celebrating the fifty years of the Andy Griffith show about Mayberry. In almost every episode you will find them out on the front porch interacting with the people around them. I think that a lot of people watch this show to reminisce about days gone by. They crave that personal interaction.

Have you noticed that the vast majority of the houses built in the past thirty years do not have a front porch? This has become a sign of our times and is reflective of how we live our lives.

In a book entitled Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putman, he did a study over the past 40 years on how we interact socially with each other. He found that we have become increasingly disconnected from family and friends. Back just 30 years ago the average person invited guests into their home about 3 times a week. Now our national average of inviting someone into our homes is once or maybe twice a year!

What really hit this message home for me this week was a conversation that I had with a gentleman who had suffered a heat stroke several years ago. He related to me about how his vision has changed since that event. He told me that the things he sees which are at arm’s length are three dimensional and real to him. Everything else beyond arms length appears one dimensional like a picture background. He has a hard time seeing those things as real. I wondered if sometimes we don’t see people in that same light.

Being an abuse survivor I cannot count the number of times that I wanted to stand on a table in a crowd of people and shout at the top of my lungs, “Does anyone know that I am here? I am a real live human being.” Abuse takes a lot out of you and you become, if only to yourself, a shell of a person...one dimensional. Or as Wanda puts it in her book The Search for Peace "...the walking dead." There is a longing to reconnect with people...to have people touch your life and to get up-close and personal. In today’s society this is especially a challenge. It is not as easy as it was back in the day.

I remember a poem, and I do not know who wrote it but this is a few lines of it:

There are times when encouragement means such a lot,


And a word is enough to convey it


There were others who could have just as easy as not


But just the same they would never say it.


Look at the people around you in a totally new light and see if you can give them a word of encouragement instead of just passing them by.

Until Next Time, Gracie

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Grace’s heartrending true life story, Family Secrets is a gripping page-turner.

You will marvel at the way God can turn even the most horrendous tragedies into a victory.

MORE INFO HERE:

 http://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=978-1-61566-133-6

A FATHER TO THE FATHERLESS

I know, Lord, that a person’s life is not his own. No one is able to plan his own course. Jeremiah 10:23~ NLT

This verse is especially true for children in their formative years. As a child I did not have a say  about the home I was placed into. I did not have a say about my name being taken away from me. But I think that more important than that... I has no kind of support system or anyone in my corner.

Over the years I was not encouraged to make friends. These things,  for the most part, were off limits to me and out of my hands. I did not have the opportunity to plot my own course and yet God has an ordained planned for my life and all children.

His plan to have them live in a loving home and go through an order of progress designed to lead them into adulthood. First they will be totally dependent upon their parents to supply their needs. Next they will go through a period where they can explore and play and know some of the simply joys that this life has to offer. Next comes adolescence that is sometimes painful as children are going through the transition to adulthood.

Man has been given free will and many times he chooses not to follow God’s ordained path. That ‘free will’ is a blessing as well as a curse depending on how we use it. Because of their parents choices and failure to provide a loving home where they can be nurtured and grow in adult ...innocent children pay a high price.
What is a fully grown child to do who may be still struggling to grow up in this kind of atmosphere?

Once while giving a partial testimony on my healing up to this point (this was prior to my full healing), I was talking about how I had lost my parents and my memory. Then I had said something that startled even me because I had not realized that early on in life exactly the full extent of what I was doing. The words that had come out of my mouth was me saying ,”Well, God I guess that right now I am nobody’s child so you will just have to become a Father to me.” Being so young and not having spiritual insights I did not realize that when I had been asking God for help to see me through this I was putting God in my life and asking Him to become my Father.

Psalms 68:5 A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.

God has promised to do that and be a father to the fatherless. For those of you who are not orphans than here another scripture.

Psalms 27:10 When my father and mother forsake me, than the Lord will take me up.

When you feel that your parents have forsaken you then the Lord will become a Father to you. God cares so very much for children and He knew that He would have to step in and become a Father to these abused and hurting children. God’s care for me was there in so many ways although some times at this point I did not have the spiritual eyes to see it. For example sometimes when things get really bad God has placed within you a point where you block out a lot of the pain until later when you start to deal with it.

In my own case years later someone told me that God showed them that during all those years of abuse I was like a little tea pot and ready to really blow and lose it but God was hovering over me and coating the tea pot over and over to protect me from losing it all together.

So if you are in a place where you were or are being abused ask God to start being a Heavenly Father to you for He is the best Father of all.

Until Next Time, Gracie

Grace’s heartrending true life story, Family Secrets is a gripping page-turner.

You will marvel at the way God can turn even the most horrendous tragedies into a victory.

MORE INFO HERE:

http://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=978-1-61566-133-6

PANTS ON THE GROUND---GOD'S PROVISION

FEAR NOT…..GOD IS YOUR PROVISION

There are 365 fear not’s in the Bible one for each day of the year. Yet there are times that we do fear. With the jobless rate increasing there are times where a lot of people fear for their provision. They focus on the problem not the fact that God is the providor.

A few years ago  my husband worked at an apartment complex. While him and another worker was cleaning out the stuff left behind by a tenant, Bruce made a comment in passing that in the eight years he had worked there nobody ever left behind a pair of jeans in his size. A few hours later he left for lunch. Driving out of the complex he ran over something dark  in the middle of the parking lot. After lunch on his way back to work he again ran over this object. This time he figured that he ought to at least pick it up and throw it away. Stooping down to pick it up, he was surprised that this object was a pair of jeans. Out of curiosity he checked to see the size and to his amazement this time it was in his size! God had made a provision for him but he passed it by twice.

I also heard a story of a missionary who was sick and was running out of food in the remote area in which she lived. She had prayed and asked God for someone to send her enough food for the next month. It was not long before she received a package in the mail. Inside was a month’s supply of gruel and canned milk.

It was not the provision that she had hoped for but she ate it anyway for that was all she had. After about a week of eating this gruel she found that she was feeling some better and by the end of the month she was no longer sick. Several months later she had an opportunity to talk to a doctor about her mysterious ailment and her having to diet on gruel and canned milk for an entire month. The doctor told her that from the way she described her ailment if she had come to him she would have been prescribed a diet of gruel and canned milk for her. Her provision was just what she needed to get well.

While I had been praying for people who needed a provision from God, I saw through spiritual eyes that a few feet above them was a chicken wire net spread out. Through this wire I could see God raining down money but all of this money was being caught on the chicken wire fence. I had asked God where this fence came from. In my spirit I felt the urgency to read Deut. 28. For first half of the chapter says if we will do this, and follow my commandments then all of these blessing will come upon us and overtake us. However if we do not do the 'IF’s'  in the Bible then the absence of blessings will be there.

We must begin to look to God for our provision and see whether or not there is an IF attached to our provision.

Until Next Time, Gracie
                                    

 More Info On The Book Family Secrets... Here

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