PAULE, OUR NEIGHBOR

So many of you have prayed for so long for our friend and neighbor, Paule.  As I write this, Paule is in Cox Hospital. He told a neighbor last Monday that he was not feeling well.  On Tuesday the neighbor went to check on him and found that he had fallen and was not able to get up.  He has been in the hospital since then.  They really do not know what is wrong with him although he was having some blood pressure problems and an infection, both of which are cleared up now.  He is extremely weak and exhausted, along with spiking a fever at random times.  Other than that there are no real symptoms and everything they have tested for has been negative.  (At least he knows what is NOT wrong with him!)  He has not been able to get out of bed for about 6 days. Tomorrow they want to do a spinal tap to check for meningitis.  Obviously prayer for recovered health is in order, but of course the bigger prayer would be that Paule would recognize a need for a Savior.  He is a very strong man, needing something or someone has never entered his mind.  As far as I know, there is not one single believer anywhere in Paule's family. I have been asking the Lord for the opportunity to talk to Paule again, but that door has not opened yet.  Please pray with us as we continue to try to bring Light into a dark place.
Pray for Peggy (Paule's daughter), Clancy (granddaughter), and Alex (grandson).  We have a good relationship with all of them, but have never really shared Christ with them.  We usually only see them in times of crisis, like now. 
Thank you so much for your perseverance in prayer,
Mrs H2O

PRAYER FOR JERUSHA'S FRIEND

I would really, really love it if you wonderful H2O people would pray for my friend Nate. Nate and I work together and go to school together, so I see him almost every day of the week. Since meeting him, I really felt like I was supposed to witness to him, but I wasn't sure how to go about doing that. 

Several weeks ago, I felt like I should simply ask him what his life story was. He hesitated, and then shared with me about the last 5 years of his life, when he had attempted suicide twice, been married and divorced twice, and had multiple family members divorce or die. I was instantly grateful that the Lord had led me to ask about his story before trying to broach the topic of his relationship with God! After we talked for a while about the divorces and suicide, I asked him about his relationship with God. He immediately replied, "I knew you were going to ask me about that... I don't know why, I just knew!". He then told me that he had grown up in church and had called himself a Christian for many years, but had recently decided that God just wasn't "working out" for him. 

We've been able to have a lot of conversations about religion, morality, and our perspectives on life based on our worldviews. He has finally been getting his life back on track in a lot of senses, but has definitely been distancing himself from God. I have a list written on a marker board on my wall of things I have been praying for in relation to how to pray for my coworkers -- specifically Nate. I have been praying for the chance to share Christ continually, for me to be always ready to give an answer, for discretion, for words, for patience, and for God to prepare the hearts and minds of my coworkers. 

Thank you guys so very much! 

REVIVAL OF THE BLOG...

Well...as you can see, it has been years since we have used the blog.  Rachel and I decided to look it up again, wow, check out some of the old pictures!  It all started because I was thinking of the last time we took a picture around the fire, it's on one of the posts, and went from there.  I am now searching my memory to remember who all those strange names are in the comments section!  Some of you were pretty creative. 
I was also reading through some of the prayer requests and answered prayers.  It is amazing what God has done.  One was about Mary having a poem published for the first time-now she is going to New Zealand to meet her book publisher!  One was about Jessica getting her RN degree-now she is in Cameroon using her medical skills for those in desperate situations.  It should encourage you to read through some of those posts and see the hand of God through the past few years.
If you would like to post something on the blog, or leave a comment-Please DO.  (Everything is filtered through my e-mail, so I will receive it first and then send it to the blog.)
Hopefully we can encourage one another between the H2Os.
Praying for all of you,
Mrs. H2O

PARTAKERS OF HIS SUFFERINGS

"Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings." 1 Peter 4:13

If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a multitude of experiences that are not meant for you at all, they are meant to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to understand what transpires in other souls so that you will never be surprised at what you come across. Oh, I can't deal with that person. Why not? God gave you ample opportunity to soak before Him on that line, and you barged off because it seemed stupid to spend time in that way.

The sufferings of Christ are not those of ordinary men. He suffered "according to the will of God," not from the point of view we suffer from as individuals. It is only when we are related to Jesus Christ that we can understand what God is after in His dealings with us. It is part of Christian culture to know what God's aim is. In the history of the Christian Church the tendency has been to evade being identified with the sufferings of Jesus Christ; men have sought to procure the carrying out of God's order by a short cut of their own. God's way is always the way of suffering, the way of the "long, long trail."

Are we partakers of Christ's sufferings? Are we prepared for God to stamp our personal ambitions right out? Are we prepared for God to destroy by transfiguration our individual determinations? It will not mean that we know exactly why God is taking us that way, that would make us spiritual prigs. We never realize at the time what God is putting us through; we go through it more or less misunderstandingly; then we come to a luminous place, and say - ' 'Why, God has girded me, though I did not know it!"

THE AUTHORITY OF REALITY

"Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you." James 4:8

It is essential to give people a chance of acting on the truth of God. The responsibility must be left with the individual, you cannot act for him, it must be his own deliberate act, but the evangelical message ought always to lead a man to act. The paralysis of refusing to act leaves a man exactly where he was before; when once he acts, he is never the same. It is the foolishness of it that stands in the way of hundreds who have been convicted by the Spirit of God. Immediately I precipitate myself over into an act, that second I live; all the rest is existence. The moments when I truly live are the moments when I act with my whole will.

Never allow a truth of God that is brought home to your soul to pass without acting on it, not necessarily physically, but in will. Record it, with ink or with blood. The feeblest saint who transacts business with Jesus Christ is emancipated the second he acts; all the almighty power of God is on his behalf. We come up to the truth of God, we confess we are wrong, but go back again; then we come up to it again, and go back; until we learn that we have no business to go back. We have to go clean over on some word of our redeeming Lord and transact business with Him. His word "come" means "transact." "Come unto Me." The last thing we do is to come; but everyone who does come knows that that second the supernatural rush of the life of God invades him instantly. The dominating power of the world, the flesh and the devil is paralysed, not by your act, but because your act has linked you on to God and His redemptive power.

A BOND-SLAVE OF JESUS

"I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Galatians 2:20

These words mean the breaking of my independence with my own hand and surrendering to the supremacy of the Lord Jesus. No one can do this for me, I must do it myself. God may bring me up to the point three hundred and sixty-five times a year, but He cannot put me through it. It means breaking the husk of my individual independence of God, and the emancipating of my personality into oneness with Himself, not for my own ideas, but for absolute loyalty to Jesus. There is no possibility of dispute when once I am there. Very few of us know anything about loyalty to Christ - "For My sake." It is that which makes the iron saint.
Has that break come? All the rest is pious fraud. The one point to decide is - Will I give up, will I surrender to Jesus Christ, and make no conditions whatever as to how the break comes? I must be broken from my self-realization, and immediately that point is reached, the reality of the supernatural identification takes place at once, and the witness of the Spirit of God is unmistakable - "I have been crucified with Christ."
The passion of Christianity is that I deliberately sign away my own rights and become a bond-slave of Jesus Christ. Until I do that, I do not begin to be a saint.
One student a year who hears God's call would be sufficient for God to have called this College into existence. This College as an organization is not worth anything, it is not academic; it is for nothing else but for God to help Himself to lives. Is He going to help Himself to us, or are we taken up with our conception of what we are going to be?

I am sure that most of you will remember that at the last H2O there was a prayer request given for a man the went to Mexico to hire some people and then disappeared. His family, after not hearing form him, believed him to be kidnapped or killed and was doing everything they could to find him. After 5 or 6 days of this, the man called his brother, and told him to sell his part of the farm and give the money to his wife because he wasn't coming home, he found someone he liked better in Mexico.
Please continue to pray for this man's family. After the trauma of searching for him and thinking of all the horrible things that could have happened to him, to have this be the reason that he "disappeared", is heartbreaking. Pray for their comfort in the Lord, and the strength to not become embittered.
Also pray for the man, that he might repent of his sin, and walk with the Lord again.