Snow and promises....

Yesterday on my way to evening service it snowed. I was so excited!!! I thought about all the worries that we have about the environment, global warming and feeling the earth is somehow self-destructing...but I saw the snow as a promise. God is in control, and He is big enough to take care of things, big enough to make it snow in Phoenix, Arizona. Who would even imagine? I was quite impressed!
Church was filled with promises as well. Can I just say right now that I love the Gathering and I feel so blessed that Tim and Holly (and my baby Jude) have come to teach and lead there? They are amazing people and I have never left the service empty. I know that it is God, that He does the work, but I believe it takes a leader that is listening to God to allow God to speak those words into our lives...so mad props to Tim Miller! Okay - back on track here...so Tim has been teaching from the book of Joshua.
It is in Joshua that the children of Israel finally cross over the Jordan river. They had been wandering for forty years and now they are right across the river from the promised land. Tim connects this to trusting God and following His directions, believing that He will be faithful in His promises...a passage stood out to me from Joshua 3 vs 3 and 4: "and they commanded the people saying, "When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests, and Levites, bearing it, then you shall set out from your place and go after it. Yet there shall be a space between you and it...do not come near it, that you may know the way by which you must go, for you have not passed this way before." In this journey I have wondered, why Africa? I have never even been there before so how can I follow Jesus to a place I have never been, FOR A YEAR no less...but this passage brought peace as I thought of God leading them as "they had never passed that way before". God was needed because it was unfamiliar. They were put into a place that required deeper trust in His directing. Same with me. If Africa was familiar, I may have a tendancy to trust my past experience and the people I know out there rather than fully trusting God's leading.

I was immunized for Rabies, Menengitis, and got my second series for Hep A&B today...fun times getting ready!