Josie Update & Village Prayer

I cannot thank you enough for interceding for the healing of baby Josie! She is alive! And continually getting BETTER.
This is a medical amazement, isn't it? Who could heal someone with non-stop seizures, who had a total body central nervous system infection, severe purulent bacterial meningitis, blood sepsis, severe pneumonia and liver infection????

And ONLY Him. Not Buddha. Not Ancestors. Not the medicine man.
Only Jesus Christ, son of the Most High God can!!!
And that's what I want you [to continue] to pray for: the hearts of those in the village to be OPEN to the Truth.
Just last Friday, they all felt STRONGLY that Josie was about to die. Every villager left what they were doing and came and stood with Josh and Penny (Josie's parents.) And they waited.
And waited.
But Josie did NOT die.
She began to eat a little again from the bottle. Not just mama's milk, but also congee!
Amazement rippled around the village!!
The next report I heard was that Josie was now nursing directly from her mama! (And the other miracle is that Penny still has milk after so long!!)
So today, (May 26, 2105) my friends are going into the village to deliver medicines. And they will check up on how new believers Josh and Penny are doing and call the others to faith in Christ!
This will be done in their heart language. How much better could it be? Evangelism done by their own people. 
God knew.
Please join with us in holding this special time up in the village: that God will show off and that they will SEE clearly the emptiness of their sacrifices to stone and mere pictures and realize the vibrant truth of a faith in the Almighty Creator God who can HEAL!!!
All of these circumstances are truly incredible. There are precious people who have worked for decades trying to bring Truth to them...and couldn't do it. The time was not right. The barriers are thick. The villagers need to see God in action. That God is for them. And here, in this amazing display of God's glory...they are! 
Keep praying for faith in this village!

URGENT: 5 yr old Josh fighting for his life!

My dear friends, we must pray.

My friends' precious little boy is in bad shape. He needs the prayers of us all.

This is 5 year old Joshua Wilson.

He's so cute, isn't he?

He is a twin and a beloved son of my friends, Roger and Renee Wilson. They live here in our same small town in Ohio.

Last weekend, he fell and hit his head. He was life-flighted to the University of Michigan where they performed emergency brain surgery.

Yesterday, he couldn't stop seizing. They escalated into full body seizures, they intubated him, medicated him, performed bedside surgery (who knew?!?!) finally put a central line in and finally had to resort to forcing his body to rest by putting him into a coma.

The news this morning is that he will be kept in this comatose state for another 3 days. He's also had another blood transfusion!

O friends, can you IMAGINE how his precious family must be feeling?

Roger and Renee have an abundant life with 6 sons! These are dear Jesus-loving people who have adopted 4 of these boys from the US foster care system. Josh and his twin are two of them. These are the real deal kind of people. Hearts as big as the God they serve.

And now, this family needs our love, prayers and encouragement!!

Please please join together with us in asking for TOTAL healing of Josh.

Please pray for Roger and Renee's hearts to rest in God's amazing peace during this storm of life.

Pray for all his brothers who wait at home and are apart from their parents.

Pray for the wisdom of the doctors who are handling Josh's care.

Do you want to have a hand in encouraging this family? Their church family will be assisting them with meals, but I KNOW their medical bills will be piling up and feeling insurmountable.

Please consider giving a generous donation to help this family pay for medical expenses. Please use the "chip in" widget on the side of the blog underneath Josh's picture. We will keep this fundraiser up until the 4th of July (next week!)

"The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results."   ~James 5:16

"The Lord protects them and keeps them alive.

He gives them prosperity in the land and rescues them from their enemies.

The Lord nurses them when they are sick and restores them to health."

               ~Psalm 41:2-3

And please, share this prayer need and fundraiser on social media! SHARE SHARE SHARE!!!

O the things he says...and says and says!

As with all of my children, I love to write down the cute things they say. I keep little books of them and we love to go back and read them and laugh our silly heads off.

With Zareb, it's really no different. Well, maybe a little bit. The things he says, he often repeats them 5-20 times in a row. I was a little unsure if this was simply deepening his grasp on the English language (he is bilingual--for now) or what was going on. Sure enough, I learned that his repeating phrases that require my affirmation or answer over and over again is a way of connecting with me. It is a common thing among children with traumatic pasts or children who have lived in orphanages.

I am learning to be patient.

I am learning to smile and softly answer, "Yes, mommy is sitting down," for the 20th time in a row.

I am learning that it is his way of connecting deeper with me. Seeing me as his primary caregiver. (Remember, in an orphanage of 50 children, there are only hired workers and volunteers (God bless them ALL!) and they are only present in his life for certain hours before another set of people come in and take over.)

He often will tell me the obvious. But he forms it as a question.

"Are you buckling me in?" 


"Yes, I am buckling you in."


"Are you buckling me in?"


"Yes, I am buckling you in."

X 20!

Now, there are times when his phrase will stop my heart in it's tracks.

Like this one, spoken at random times (when he's full of love?):

"No mo offanage!" (that's "No more orphanage" if you don't speak Zareb!)

You hear that repeated about 20 times and you start to remember what all this hard work is for...and you smile and cherish that sweet little one.

Another common thing he does is repeat things he hears me say (yikes, right?!). One he's latched on to is:

"Mommy, I so pwoud of you!" (proud)

He'll pull that one out of thin air and at times where I am at my wit's end. I truly hear the voice of God speak to me through his little high pitched Ugandan accent.  I hear God say, "You are doing exactly what I called you to do. Hang in there. This is serving Me."

Today as I was snuggling him and kissing his toes I said something I don't usually. I said,

"I love your feet-sies." (Okay, it was weird.)

You know what i heard back?

"Oh Mommy, I love your feces!" Complete with looks of great love and waiting for me to affirm him!

Um..."Mommy loves your FEET, Zareb! Your feet!"

"Yes! I love your feces, Mommy!"

x 20!


...and one just has to laugh! We got one for the books! :)

Life after Losing a Child

Everyone has pain.

Not everyone heals and shines afterwards. So, what is the difference? How can some come through life-altering tragedies with a song in their heart and a spring in their step while others are broken, bitter and angry for life?

The depth of the pain, the reality of the experience, and the joy of the healing--it's all REAL. And I want to tell you about it.

After our first child died (Anneli's twin, Timothy, at 22 weeks gestation) I recognized the need to walk through grief. I had been given the name and telephone number of a woman who had also lost a twin child while still pregnant and proceeded to give live birth to the second twin. I dialed the number and listened as this woman recounted her story. Our losses were similar. But something was different...she was the most bitter person I had ever come into contact with.

"How can I not be bitter?" I asked myself and God. The biggest thing I learned from this woman was that I didn't want to be like her.

Shortly before I became pregnant with the twins I had read and prayed a verse from I Corinthians chapter 3. It talks about building up on your foundation of Jesus. It says,

"If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person's work." verses 12-13

I noted how gold, silver and costly stones were not readily available. But that wood, hay and straw were. Anyone could just go for a walk and pick up those latter three for free along the way. It is much harder to acquire gold, silver and costly stones. They aren't just lying around for the taking! This makes them precious.

So I prayed that I would have a faith full of

gold

silver

and costly stones.

And then my dream of twins came crashing to a tragic end. He was gone. There was nothing we could do but watch his body get smaller and smaller on every subsequent ultrasound. It was painful, of course, but for a girl who'd prayed to have twins since childhood, it was pure torture.

This bitter woman showing me what I could potentially look like two years down the road. I didn't want to be like her. Enter the verse from Isaiah...

I will give you the treasures of darkness, 

riches stored in secret places,

so that you may know that I am the Lord,

the God of Israel, who summons you by name.

                                             Isaiah 45:3

I realized that those costly stones were the very same "treasures of darkness" and that they were as good as "riches stored in secret places." If I wanted to have faith that was marked of such things as gold, silver and costly stones, then I needed to go digging. Digging/mining into the tragedy God allowed into my life.

I truly believe that God has gifts for us in our tragedies. No one will escape pain in life. It's true. Jesus said so!  I went after those gifts hidden in the darkness of tragedy as if my life depended upon it. For me, this meant reading books about others' losses, crying extensively, journaling, writing poetry and talking with trusted friends.

Each time we lost a child, I learned more. By the time of Oskar's homegoing, I was a well experienced griever. I already had hammered through the question, "Why is this happening to me if God is good?" and I knew He was with me. Because of my prior experience in grief, I got to skip through some of the initial stages.

Grief is a cyclical process. You can study the different stages of it, but you will realize that they do not come to you in any particular order. And once they've gone, this doesn't mean they won't be back. But here's what I found encouraging: each time the same stage revisited me, I was different. Greater amounts of gold had been added to my foundation. I was newly equipped with what it took to rise to the next level in the cycle. Like a winding staircase that keeps passing "north," my grief had been here before, but felt a little different. I was a little different. I saw change. I saw growth in myself and this was encouraging.

If you are going through something painful in your life, what are you doing with your grief? Are you choosing to chew on it like a cow chews its cud? Are you letting bitterness fester in your heart? Are you slamming the door on your faith because you cannot fathom how God could let this happen to you?

I cry out to you: come in your pain to Jesus.

He is bigger than you, and therefore He does not need to explain His choices to you. This is so hard for us, because we rest on our logic. We have this thing for needing to understand. But sometimes, in the economy of God, we simply cannot. Give that "right" over.

He is more loving than you can possibly imagine, whether or not you believe this. His love is so deep and long and wide and high that no angel or demon or sin or tragedy can divide, pull, remove or dissolve God's love for us. (see Romans 8:38-39)

As crazy as it may seem against the backdrop of your tragedy, God has a plan for your life.

Listen to these sweet words from Isaiah chapter 35:

Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.

The burning sand will become a pool

the thirsty ground bubbling springs.

In the haunts where jackals once lay,

grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.

I love that!! In the very place where your pain now resides, God will redeem it with good things. Has He given my babies back to me from the dead? No. Has He given me another set of twins? Not yet. But He has done something beautiful--

"To all who mourn in Israel, He will give a crown of BEAUTY for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair." Isaiah 61:3

Delight in the hope and promise from this Scripture from Psalm 126:5-6 as well:

Those who plant in tears will harvest with SHOUTS OF JOY. Those who went off with HEAVY HEARTS will come home LAUGHING, with ARMLOADS OF BLESSING." 

Come view your tragedy as an opportunity. An invitation for you to come and mine in the secret places. This is off the beaten path. It's a place that not all will dare to go. But you will. You will not allow this tragedy to crush you. You will NOT allow this wound to mar you so that you permanently limp.

Not everyone will emerge with deepened faith. 

But some do. Will you?

Lord, I want to SEE!

Luke 18:35-43... A dirty cast-off man cries out to Jesus and others try to crowd him out, to shush him up. No way. This guy's serious--he is blind and has been forced to live his life as a beggar. He has heard about this Jesus guy, and he's heard that He heals! So he shouts all the louder and makes himself a bigger nuisance to the crowd. But not to Jesus. Jesus has this way with people. The very ones we ourselves are annoyed with. The ones we sorta just wish would leave us alone, the very ones we ourselves would be tempted to just walk on by.  But here's what Jesus does--he stops and he has the beggar brought to him. Wow. Then he asks him a simple question, "What do you want me to do for you?" The blind beggar's response always causes me to stop and ponder.

"Lord," he said, "I want to see!"

Two things have come to my mind as I've pondered this passage lately. I wonder if you might think on them with me.

The first: this blind man, though a beggar and clearly disliked by the population, did not assume that his blindness was a permanent condition. (But we certainly know that it is, don't we? haha) I LOVE that he didn't accept his blindness when he saw the chance to ditch it. Would I? If I were blind in the year 2011, I am quite sure I would have found ways to make peace with it. I would not be bitter, but I would have learned to master Braille (as completely impossible as it seems to my fingers!) and I would have probably joined a blind mother's support group. I would have learned to do life as a blind woman. Would I be constantly pounding on the door of heaven to be healed? No. I'm pretty sure I would not. I would accept my lot in life and figure, "This is how it is. I'll just have to make the best of it." But here is a man who seeks after Jesus to have his reality CHANGED. Matthew 7:7 tells us to keep on asking what we're asking for. Don't give up! Even in this same chapter of Luke Jesus shares the story of the persistent widow. Why? To emphasize the importance of persistence in prayer! Justice will be given to His chosen ones who plead with Him day and night. Now I am sure that I can rile up people by what I've said just now--because we should make the most of our current situation and we should avoid bitterness...but how do we fit that with this man's refusal to accept his blindness as forever?

The second thing I have pondered is the fact that the blind man clearly identified what he wanted. "Lord, I want to SEE." He didn't hem haw around. He was serious and straight to the point. I have echoed this man's prayer often in my life. But I'm not blind, right? Hmmm. I daresay I am though. I have eyes that show me my physical surroundings, but so often are blind to the spiritual realities that co-exist. I love the Old Testament story of the battle where God reveals all the heavenly fighters up on the hillside! If only we could SEE!!

So often I only look at my circumstances and ignore that there might be another perspective on them. My selfish perspective causes me to give way to my fears, doubts and worries. When I hear the Lord ask me, "Amy, what is it you want me to do for you?" I am careful to imitate this beggar's prayer: "Lord, I want to see." Rather than, "Well, God, could you please fix this problem for me...."  I ask to see. Gaining God's perspective on my life is often what I need far more than the actual thing fixed. Why? Because the next time something comes up (it will you know!) I want to still have my heavenly perspective in place to deal with it all. If I merely ask for a problem to be fixed, then I am no further ahead in my character.

Let's choose to SEE. Ask Him. The view might be overwhelming, but we'll for sure join the blind beggar: "Instantly the man could see and he followed Jesus praising God. And all who saw it praised God, too." Luke 18:43