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(By: Dorene J. Zuege)
To lay a little background, over the years, with retirement in mind, I have been picking up jewelry here and there at rummage and garage sales, as well as in resale shops if I can get it cheap enough. wanted to have something to do with my spare time after I retired. I have also been picking up small table top trees of all kinds, including ceramic and metal shaped Christmas trees - all with the purpose of someday decorating the trees with jewelry and then donating them to people in nursing homes at Christmas time.
I have already just since this summer, (2009 - my first year retired), completed and given 35 trees to the nursing home in which my mother resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The activity director was so pleased with them that she asked me to make as many more as I could before the holidays arrive. They plan on using them to raise money for their remodeling/updating of the nursing home. This nursing home is run by a group of Catholic nuns and it reminds me much of the orphanages I was in when I was young. The place is so clean you can eat off the floors, and you never ever smell urine in it, no matter the time of day or evening you visit there.
About a month ago I bought about 60 pieces of jewelry, along with a bunch of vases, etc., that I use as bases for some of the trees. (I dismantle old artificial Christmas trees and use the branches in the pots and vases to make small trees.) Anyway, I've got boxes of all this stuff all over my sun porch, which has been converted into my craft room.
When I got home from my last trip to Milwaukee, I unpacked all my boxes and could not locate the jewelry I had just bought. I was planning on going back down in another week and go back to the store to get refunded the money I paid for that jewelry, thinking that they had forgotten to put it in one of the boxes. Off and on throughout this past month, I kept on looking in boxes, just hoping that I'd find them somewhere, all to no avail.
I awoke extra early this morning (10/14/09), and was thinking about that jewelry being lost and decided to ask the Lord to just bless the person who found all that jewelry -- that maybe they could use it to even better use than what I had planned for it.
"Maybe Lord, they can't afford to buy gifts this year for Christmas, so just bless them with it."
I couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and went out into my sun porch and unpacked a box that I had forgotten to go through, and PRAISE HIS HOLY NAME! There was the bag of jewelry! And not only did I find that bag of jewelry, I also found another bag of key rings that I had also lost and had been planning on using on the trees. PRAISE GOD! I was at my wits end about how I was going to get the rest of those trees decorated that the nursing home wanted.
Isn't God gracious? But He was just waiting for me to really give them up and not hang onto them, before He allowed me to find them.
I'm learning that sometimes God doesn't always answer our prayers so quickly (or at all) the way we would like Him to answer them if they are prayed always with a "selfish slant". In fact, as each year passes in my relationship with God, I'm inclined to believe that the more we become motivated to pray unselfishly for others and their needs instead of always just praying for ourselves ... our prayer life becomes even more energized.
I also believe that the more we try to help encourage others in their prayer lives, the more confident we'll become in our own prayer lives. (That's the main reason I've taken the time to write this Prayer Praise Report and allow it to get published. Finding jewelry is way down the list of importance. Satan fights so hard to discourage us in our prayer lives. It's a weapon God has given His children to use against Satan's relentless attack against Christians [See: Ephesians 6:18], so Satan is extremely motivated to try to get us to not use this weapon effectively. Selfishness [asking God for things we lust for rather than things we truly need] is his most effective means of hindering our prayer lives. Impatience is his second. Selfishness and impatience greatly aid to help destroy faith, and faith [praying confidently] is very important in seeing God answer our prayers).
If you would like to read Dorene's born again testimony, please click: HERE
Dear Reader - are you at peace with God? If not, you can be. Do you know what awaits you when you die? You can have the assurance from God that heaven will be your home, if you would like to be certain. You can even have that assurance RIGHT NOW! Either Jesus Christ died for your sins, or He didn't (He did!). Are you prepared to stand before God on the Judgment Day and tell Him that you didn't need the shed blood of Jesus Christ on the Cross to have your sins forgiven and get in right-standing with God? We plead with you...please don't make such a tragic mistake.
To get to know God, to be at peace with God, to have your sins forgiven, to make certain heaven will be your home for eternity, to make certain that you are in right-standing with God right now ... please click here to help you understand the importance of being reconciled to God. What you do about being reconciled to God will determine where you will spend eternity, precious one. Your decision to be reconciled to God is the most important decision you'll ever make in this life, because in Christ, it is impossible to put a value on the worth of your soul in light of eternity.
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Remember: All that we do in this life comes back to our God-given purpose which is to serve and glorify God. The money and assets we accumulate, the fame and power we've attained or seek to attain - all of the things of this nature will one day pass away, but those lives of others we impact for Jesus Christ will last for eternity, and we will be rewarded for the part we helped play by impacting those lives ... for eternity. (Matthew 6:19-21 is our assurance)
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