{"id":29336,"date":"2020-12-04T03:30:15","date_gmt":"2020-12-04T11:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/?p=29336"},"modified":"2020-11-30T16:43:53","modified_gmt":"2020-12-01T00:43:53","slug":"december-4-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/2020\/12\/04\/december-4-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"December 4, 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"\"<\/p>\n

Please continue to pray for Sally as she is continuing to battle weakness and infection after her recent cancer surgery. <\/em>She wrote these thoughts a few months ago.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>“In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.”\u00a0<\/em>Proverbs 16:9<\/p>\n

Adventures<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In a “season”\u2014or journey\u2014like I’m walking through, there is lots of time to think. I have thought back through all the years of our lives\u2014from meeting at a YWAM Easter outreach in Las Vegas, to being married when we were SO young, to having our first home in Afghanistan, to living on a houseboat in Amsterdam with a toddler and a puppy while expecting baby number two, to raising our children in the red light district in Amsterdam, to training leaders in the Colorado mountains while caring for our daughter who was sick for a number of years, to pastoring a church in the middle of America, to starting over and pioneering in a new country when we were just about to hit the age that everyone retires. There have been very few “dull” moments!<\/p>\n

We were speaking in a church in Canada one time that was pastored by some friends.\u00a0As Floyd was introducing me, he made the statement that “I’m not very adventurous.”\u00a0The pastor and his wife burst out laughing! The list above speaks for itself I think. And that doesn’t include some “adventures” I had before we married!<\/p>\n

I heard the statement recently: “Usually\u00a0<\/em>is the enemy of adventure.”\u00a0My first thought was that Floyd and I haven’t followed the “usually” in life\u2014and we have certainly had lots of adventures!\u00a0Sometimes it has scared me to death, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.\u00a0Growing up in Galveston, Texas, I knew God had a plan for my life. I knew that it was going to be “different” (not what everyone usually did), but I had no idea of how it would unfold into the life I’ve had.<\/p>\n

It’s made me realize how grateful I am that God is in control!\u00a0We’d make a mess of things otherwise.\u00a0But when He’s in control, He has so many wonderful things in store for us.\u00a0Even what we’re walking through now isn’t “usual”\u2014battling cancer over and over while my husband is lying in a hospital bed unable to speak or move\u2014well, even this has been an “adventure.”\u00a0Not one I would want necessarily, but certainly one where I’ve seen God’s goodness and faithfulness.\u00a0I would hate to have missed all the beautiful lessons He’s brought into my life during this time!<\/p>\n

As I look back over our life together while I’ve had this time to think, I can see how God has grown us, prepared us, strengthened us, and gotten us ready to face perhaps the biggest adventure of our lives.\u00a0It fills my heart with gratitude to Him for how He’s had His hand on us all these years.\u00a0And it makes me love Him for His care. I wouldn’t want to have missed out on any of the adventures He’s had for us. We can relax when we’re in His sovereign hands.<\/p>\n

I guess what I’m also saying is that it’s important to “embrace” the adventures that come\u2014both the good ones and the hard ones.\u00a0We may not like them, but if we’ll embrace them and trust the Lord in them, there will be good in the hardest situations.\u00a0No, I’m\u00a0not<\/u>\u00a0saying that God brings the hard things.\u00a0We live in a fallen world and hard things will happen to all of us. But we have the opportunity to trust God in the hard things, and allow Him to bring good through them.<\/p>\n

There is much I could say about embracing what comes our way. There is a sweet adventure in walking with Him through everything that comes our way!<\/p>\n

Lord, help us embrace what You allow in our lives.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>

<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p92wjD-7Da","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29337,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29336\/revisions\/29337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}