Whose afraid of the Big Bad ....Virus?

If I’m being totally honest, I will say we are at times (Or just maybe just me. Allen is almost always the calm in the midst of our storms. Love that man)! Such chaos surrounds us with closings and quarantines and lost jobs and friends/family being on the front lines and exposed daily and can’t even hug their loved ones. Most days I wake up and think It’s just all a horrific nightmare….then I turn the news on and realize, Nope! It’s real life! This is really happening and affecting the Entire World!!! Too big to wrap our minds around for sure! But you know what else is happening? God’s people are turning to Him for refuge, for protection, for mercy, for Deliverance!!! I am listening to podcasts of godly men and women urging us to turn to the Lord and trust in Him through all this. Men and Women whose lives are interrupted in all this…their speaking engagements - canceled. Their income -cancelled. Their lives - on hold! Just like all of ours. Yet they are encouraging us to Lift our eyes and Put our Hope and Trust in the Lord Almighty! Even on NBC this morning, I heard it! It was so encouraging!

I am also amazed at the scripture being shared. God has each of us in a different place and each of us reading different scriptures, yet they all are applicable to what we are going thru right now! Man! If that isn’t proof that the Word of God is Alive & Breathing!!! Speaking of…let me digress for a second…if you haven’t listened to Matt Maher’s Alive and Breathing song, go check it out here! It’s so encouraging and a reminder of what we are to be doing. What our purpose is!!! And that leads me to my whole purpose for writing this post!

Last night, I was reading in Exodus chapters 7-11 where Moses has to keep returning to Pharaoh and deliver the message that God has given him, which is “Let my people go, so that they may worship me”. I was just struck by the repetitiveness of this, which I had not noticed before. That over and over and over, this is the message God has his leader deliver to the Enemy…”LET MY PEOPLE GO THAT THEY MAY WORSHIP ME”! And it began to just connect inside my heart, as I’ve also been simultaneously reading the Book “SING” by Keith & Kristine Getty (an oldie but a goodie)…the realization that …

THIS is our PURPOSE!! TO WORSHIP THE LORD!

and TO BRING HIM GLORY!!

When we feel stuck, when we feel desperate, when we feel like we don’t know where else to turn and we don’t’ know what else to do -LET’S WORSHIP OUR CREATOR!! When we feel depressed, when we feel anxious, when we feel lost, when we feel alone, when we feel like we can’t go on one more moment or one more day, let’s just STOP! Take a quiet moment! Let’s turn our phones off, turn our TVs off, turn our busy minds off…and do exactly what we were created to do…LETS WORSHIP THE LORD! Even while we are praying for deliverance from this enemy, the Coronavirus, Let’s Worship the Lord!

Oh, how we long for DELIVERANCE! Deliverance from our sickness (AKA- CORONAVIRUS), deliverance from our QUARANTINE (yes, please!!), deliverance from our pain, deliverance from hard relationships, deliverance from our own stupidity at times (Can I get an Amen here? LOL), deliverance from our sadness, deliverance from our financial struggles…of course, I could go on forever, BUT…the best news is this.. CHRIST has already come to SET US FREE and He has already delivered us! A relationship with Christ is all we need in these dark times. We don’t need more toilet paper (Seriously? Baffling Phenomenon!) or more canned goods or more water or more snacks, nearly as much as WE NEED CHRIST!!! He is enough, yall!

So while we seek his deliverance from this nasty virus, let’s take a moment and PRAISE THE LORD as Matt Maher’s song says. I’ll leave you with the lyrics to the song and please, please if you get a sec, head on over to youtube (or Spotify or however you listen to your music) and give his song Alive and Breathing a listen. It will bring you so much hope and encouragement in the midst of your quarantine (or maybe you’re still working and exhausted and need encouragement even more than the rest of us stuck at home. This is for you too!). Be blessed, yall! (my comments are in italics beside the lyrics. Can’t help myself. (ha-ha)

ALIVE & BREATHING - BY MATT MAHER

What holds your heart
What stirs your soul
What matters come to mind
The cares you keep
The thoughts you think
It's not all wasted time
Seek and you will find

Joy still comes in the morning (OH yes it does!!)
Hope still walks with the hurting
If you're still alive and breathing (If you’re reading this, that includes you! Heehee)
Praise the Lord
Don't stop dancing and dreaming
There's still Good News worth repeating (YES! So much good news to repeat!)
So lift your head and keep singing
Praise the Lord

Years roll by
We wonder why
We lost our way from home
Our Father finds
The child inside
We had left for growing old
Awake, awake, awake my soul (Can you just feel it? Can you feel God trying to awake our souls?)

Joy still comes in the morning
Hope still walks with the hurting
If you're still alive and breathing
Praise the Lord
Don't stop dancing and dreaming (OOO! The dancer and dreamer in me loves this line!!)
There's still Good News worth repeating
So lift your head and keep singing (Come on! We can do this!)
Praise the Lord

Let everything, let everything, let everything
Praise the Lord
In the working, in the waiting (We are all in the waiting season now…waiting on this virus to release us)
Praise the Lord
In the blessing, in the breaking
Praise the Lord
In the dying, the rising
Let it praise the Lord
Let it praise the Lord
Praise the Lord

Joy still comes in the morning
Hope still walks with the hurting
If you're still alive and breathing
Praise the Lord
Don't stop dancing and dreaming
There's still Good News worth repeating
So lift your head and keep singing
Praise the Lord

Let’s hang in there together and do what we were called to do…Worship the Lord! And if you don’t know the Lord, we beg of you to reach out to us via email or social media and we would be absolutely elated to introduce you to our Deliverer, King Jesus!! He will change your life, as he has done for us!

Worshipping thru quarantine, ;)

Allen & Carol

Doing the Impossible!

Downtown Marianna Florida

My heart is so full now that if I don’t begin getting this down, it may just burst!  Oh that moment when you know you are involved in something so much bigger than yourself or anyone else. So much bigger than man can fathom or do alone.  That moment when  you realize the almighty God who created this entire Universe and keeps it in motion loves you so personally and cares about every single detail of your life and others lives.  It is so mind-blowing!  Couldn’t resist sharing! 

So this past week, some precious friends of ours have begun relief efforts for Hurricane Victims.  The devastation is so wide and so deep you guys!  Each time you help someone you see the depth of the disaster caused by Hurricane Michael!  The restoration is way beyond our scope of reach! Way beyond any of ours…alone that is!  But together!!! Now we’re talking!  And with God’s help…The Impossible is Possible!  It really has been absolutely amazing to watch God work in providing for needs.  People are donating money, supplies, time, generators, trailers, whatever is needed to help others!  Oh these people whose lives were turned upside down in this storm…oh if they could somehow know how they are loved and how often they are thought of and prayed for! But wait…maybe they will…one small group at a time!  And that’s where our friends come in.  They began the Country Bumpkin Disaster Relief Group. Whoop Whoop! Just a couple of humble servants desperately wanting to help.  And these people have the gift of influence and have contacts everywhere!!!! That is so helpful and needed in a time like this!  Allen and I (and many others) want to help but don’t always know how or who.  That’s where our friends come in again.  They just reach out to people and God puts these needs in front of them. Then they ask for help and people step up! It’s just a chain reaction.  Then others hear about it and want to do something so they either give or organize their own group and go serve as well! It’s so cool!!!!  It is the most beautiful thing to be a part of!  Words can’t describe it!  It’s exhausting and exhilirating at the same time!

So much has happened in the last 8 days, but let me share a tiny bit about yesterday!  I (Carol) went to Panama City with a  friend to visit her parents and take some supplies.  She had not seen them since the Hurricane and had very little contact with them, due to lack of cell service and power and such.  We are finding that most people we talk to literally have not left their neighborhood in a week. They are just trying to dig themselves out and put tarps on roofs and figure out how to survive until help comes.  It’s really that desperate!  So after delivering a few supplies to her parents who faired well (it’s all perspective…their “well” is this: huge trees uprooting and lifting up their concrete patio in front of their house - so it now sits at an unsafe 45 degree angle that they have to walk across all day long; massive trees down in their back yard and  almost resting on their house, wind and trees that demolishing their steps to their canal in their back yard that they just built, major water damage in house, no power for at least a month, etc…and they’re the lucky ones!).  So …after seeing them for a bit, we went on to deliver supplies to some other harder-hit areas of Panama City.  We weren’t really sure what to expect but what we found what heartbreaking!  Houses demolished…nothing left but the foundation…and a wooden rocker that survived. That image will forever stick in my head! Ugh!  As we delivered supplies, everyone was so grateful for small items like a small bag of ice, a loaf of bread, protein bars, cereal, peanut butter.  Most of these people have not been to the store since the storm or if they have, they realized the stores will only take cash. So then there’s the realization that they just wasted their precious gas to go somewhere that was in vain.  Can’t imagine.  So that was yesterday. Feel free to see my facebook post for more details.

Today, yall!!!!  Today is my day at home to homeschool, wash laundry, dishes, cook dinner for my family, clean up, and get ready to do it all again when the Lord provides the opportunity.  I was so excited when a friend called and needs help delivering supplies again soon. How grateful I am to have time to do this.  She texted saying she needs lots of “trash bags”.  This seems to be the big need right now.  Ice, Gas, trashbags, baby food, bread.  Does it seem desperate only to me that those are peoples biggest needs in our surrounding communities?  This alone should help us understand the magnitude of disaster this area has faced.  So as I was doing my “housewife/mommy” stuff around my powered, AC, comfy home (so so blessed), I just thought, well I don’t really know how I will gather a ton of trashbags today.  Let me just do what’s in front of me (breakfast, lunch, dinner for my fam, etc) and then figure it out.  Said a quick prayer (should always be my 1st response to a need but duh!  I totally forget sometimes. LOL).  A few minutes later, I get a call that  a church nearby wants to be a resource for us and actually has…wait for it….trashbags!!!!  Oh my goodness yall!  I had to finish my conversation quickly so I could hang up and ugly cry with thankfulness!  I was so very grateful!  The church also said that the Red Cross Workers they are housing said the way we are helping is the best way to do this…one contact at a time!!  I cried over that affirmation too, as so many of us wonder if we are making a difference or even putting a dent in the devastation.  These communities need us and we will keep loving them and giving to them!  Yes, we all have families and jobs and schooling and every day life, but these are people in such desperate situations.  Here it is a week after the storm and some of them are still needing to be cut out of their homes.  Absolutely Unbelieveable.  But I had to take a few minutes and share how good God is and how NOTHING is IMPOSSIBLE with our GOD!  He is an abundant God and not limited by this storm or resources or anything else! 

Our prayer is that He will be Glorified in this and that those affected by the storm will not only have their needs met but thru these supplies and hugs and smiling faces and prayers, they will FEEL the tanglibe love of Jesus Christ and KNOW that their lives matter and that they are loved and cared for!

So…with that said…let me encourage you that you can help too. No matter where you are or how small your resources are…every little bit helps.  My friend said in the beginning, not to overthink it. Just get out and do something to help if you were spared and your area is not a disasaster zone,  like so many are around us.  It’s amazing how just making yourselves available opens up so many doors of opportunity to love on others.  So just give a small donation (ummm…or large if you prefer :-), say prayers nightly for these people (and for the safety of those helping), and/or come help. There’s so much to be done: Handing out supplies, organizing donations, cutting people out of homes, cleaning up debris…the list is endless.

And thank you, thank you, thank you to all who have helped already by giving, praying and going! Seeing the gratitude on the faces of these people as you hand them a bag of ice or loaf of bread is the greatest reward!