I’m sure that at least a few of you out there are wondering, “Why isn’t she working?  Did she take an early retirement and is now just sitting around the house watching t.v. and eating the proverbial bon bons?”

When we first moved here three months ago, I had every intention of finding a job after Blake headed back to college and I had settled into a “normal” routine.  But over the course of the summer, God started revealing things that changed my thinking and planning.

He brought women into my life.  One by one, I began meeting women that are asking questions about faith or are wanting to go deeper in that faith.  Some of them are in the middle of a battle.  Some are lonely.  Some have been put in my life to reciprocally encourage me and be part of an “iron sharpens iron” experience with me.  Some challenge me and are growing me.  So many women with so many different stories and faces and dreams and abilities.

It became absolutely clear that for this time, this season, this day God is asking for my availability.  My time.   He is asking to combine my creativity with His call to be actively involved in the lives of women of all ages and walks of life.  One on one’s.  Small groups.  Over coffee or appetizers.  On my couch or in a coffee shop or restaurant or sitting in my backyard.

Yesterday I met with one of these new women in my life, this new friend.  We met at a local coffee shop just down the street from my house at 9:15 a.m.  I imagined that it would be a meeting that would last an hour, maybe two.  But it blossomed into a time of encouragement and back and forth brain and heart storming.  Every word seemed to give birth to another thought or inspiration.  We lost all track of time.  Before we knew it, it was 2:30.  No joke.  2:30.  By the time we were done, it was as if we had just run a marathon.  With all that positive energy spent, the walk home was actually a little more difficult than usual.

Tonight I meet with another new friend.  She’ll come to the house and my couch will be the spot where whatever God has in mind will happen.  She is hurting, but our goal will not be to “fix” her.  Just to get to know each other.  My job will be to listen.  To really, really actively listen with no agenda or plan for how things are supposed to go.  My prayer is that God will be obvious in letting me know when I’m supposed to say something and when I’m supposed to just keep my big mouth shut.  And hopefully, by the time she leaves my couch she will feel heard and accepted and a little bit more like there is great hope in her future.

These daily interactions that God is literally placing in my lap are happening not because I have been diligently striving to make them happen.  They are God’s idea that He has been so generous in letting me have a little part in. They are seemingly “random” (He so well understands how I am wired) and very often spontaneous.  Over and over again I find myself literally standing with my eyes to the sky and my mouth hanging wide open in wonder and amazement.  I don’t understand it fully.  It’s a ministry that seems to have come from almost nowhere but that fits so well.  Another case of God performing His miracle of creation – creating something out of nothing.

So, no, I’m not working right now.  But I have a full time job of watching GOD working, daily, hourly, minute by minute.  He is grabbing the hearts of women all around me and allowing me to gaze as He transforms their lives.  I am nothing short of awestruck at the privilege.

I share all of this only because I feel the great need to document what God is doing so that my feeble mind doesn’t forget His great work, almost a journaling to keep record of what He has done.  I also share it to ask for your prayers for wisdom, for tenderness, for sensitivity to both God’s voice in my ear and to the voices of the women whom He gifts me with.  That I would always be available, but never in the way of what God wants to do.  And that I will never, ever lose the gratitude that I feel for God offering me these opportunities.  That I might always hold this new ministry with careful, open hands.

Come sit on my couch with me.  I don’t have bon bons but I can always promise a handful of peanut M&M’s…:-)

Isaiah 43:19 – See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

Philippians 1:3 – I thank my God every time I remember you.

Ephesians 3:20 – Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,