Please, Don't Tell Me

Husbands and wives share everything.....and if you are married you know the word everything is all encompassing. We share our hearts with one another, our clothes, our bed, bathroom time, etc. I firmly believe a husband and wife should be best friends, and I am blessed beyond measure to know my husband is my best friend. We know each other better than anyone else and, after being together 20 years, we only have to look at one another to know if all is good or if something is wrong. I can't imagine not sharing everything with my husband but there are and continue to be times that I do ask him not to share everything with me.

I thank the Lord every day that He did not create me with a "need to know everything about everyone" personality. I have enough chaos in my own life to fulfill all the chaotic needs any one person could have. In fact, I'm the exact opposite and that has served me well in ministry. I can't tell you how many times people have privately talked with my husband and, assuming he has told me about their conversation, come up to me and start talking about it only to find out that I knew nothing of it. Or there are times when people will ask did you know about this or that with so and so. I'm always taken a little aback by this because it's gossip alley. Sometimes I do know what they are asking me about, however, gossip is not something I want to be a part of so I politely say no.

I was feeling torn about how I was handling these situations and decided there was only one way to resolve it. I went to my husband one day and said, "Honey, please don't tell me anything personal that people share with you". He asked me why, and I explained to him that if I didn't know about these situations or events then I wouldn't be lying when others asked me about something.

More importantly, God already knows the details of all our lives, and I am just as comfortable praying for unspoken requests as I am praying for known requests.

Blessings to you all!

Obedience and Faith

We have experienced many times in our life when faith was all we knew we had when we felt God calling or telling us something we needed to do. One of our biggest leaps of faith to date has been when God called Manley to the ministry. Manley gave up a full-time job to join what his co-workers termed "The God Squad". We take that reference as a compliment and are proud to be a part of God's Squad. We are now at another one of those points in our life where we feel God working and we hear him calling us. He's specific in this calling, relentlessly giving us confirmations we try to ignore sometimes because we are afraid. However, we are in prayer that we can be obedient and faithful.

God is calling us to simplify our lives. He is a big God and if you know us then you know this is a big calling. We have been termed the super couple and accused of being so active people aren't sure how we do it. Actually, we don't think of ourselves as being any busier than most of you are, and we know a lot of you are busier than we could ever fathom. The calling isn't going over well with our kids so we are still in prayer that God will bring them along with us. The calling to simplify has some significant impact on our lives and will create uncomfortable challenges for us. The great thing about it though is that we see God laying the way for us to be lights in a dark place and that is exciting.
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Please pray for us to follow God's will, pray for our children to have peace with the calling to simplify and pray for God to continue walking before us in this path we are to follow.

It feels good to be back blogging!