Prayer

Hi everyone!

If we’re not friends on Facebook and you didn’t hear – I was fully funded for my outreach!!! Thank you again to everyone who helped make this possible. I am beyond grateful. God is such a faithful provider and your generosity showed me this. THANK YOU!!

I am writing to you from Ireland!

I am absolutely loving it here.

We have jumped straight into it and started plugging into churches, homeless ministries, doing projects to help different christian ministries with the renovation of their buildings and, street evangelism.

There are so many homeless people in this city, at almost every corner there is a homeless person sitting and begging but we are finding that they are super open to talking – they’re just lonely. We talked to a guy that opened up about having depression and just feeling totally hopeless. We got to tell him that there is a God who loves him and we got to pray for him! It was so awesome. His name is Kevin – send up quick prayer for his salvation!

Praying for people on the streets in Dublin

We also get to help out at this amazing homeless ministry called Lighthouse.

It is such a blessed ministry and sees so much fruit – it is so cool we get the opportunity to serve there. I got to hang out with a homeless couple, Dan and Jenny for about an hour and a half. They opened up to me that they were both heroin addicts and I just got to sit and listen and chat with them. It was so amazing. They told me that at all the other food shelters they’ve been to, they always felt judged and like no one valued them or even wanted to talk to them. They said that at Lighthouse they always feel loved and valued – so in other words, they can see Jesus in us! I so believe that God is moving in their lives and I am excited to get to know them more.

PLEASE pray for them as Jenny is starting Teen Challenge, a Christian rehabilitation center and Dan is going to a different treatment center in about a week. Pray for the power of God to move in their lives and that they would be healed from all addiction and more importantly, know that God loves them and has a plan for them.

Feeding the homeless , and looking fab in a hair net.

It is seriously such a blessing to be here. I have found it pretty stretching as a leader but I feel the Lord guiding me all throughout the day, which is such a beautiful thing. I have never done something so challenging and rewarding. I feel so close to Him and it gives me strength and courage as a leader when things get hectic. God is teaching me to have grace with my students as they are still learning and growing so much and this is a whole new thing for them.

My prayer is that God’s word would be so engraved on my heart that I would live and love out of a place of truly understanding the way God lives and loves.

I just want to be the woman that God wants me to be and in every stretching moment, I feel refinement happening – taking steps closer to understanding what it means to be a woman of peace and love. Praise God for the strength that truly only comes from Him. He is way too good.

PRAYER POINTS:

– Pray for unity in my team – that we would show Christ by the way we love one another.

– Pray for me – for wisdom, humility and the Lord’s guidance. I want to lead like Jesus would.

– Pray that we would see tremendous fruit in the relationships we are building.

Thank you all for taking the time to read my updates – it means so much to me.

Please let me know how I can be praying for you.

God bless!

Jasmine

I am a planner – always have been and most probably always will be. I believe this is a godly attribute as God himself is a planner 🙂

I do life happily by having something to aim towards – some of my goals are little and some are ridiculously huge.

As a couple this was how Mark and I worked as well. We got married with the plan to do missions. When we were out on the mission field we were always planning the next tour, the next gig, the next adventure.

When Mark got sick and we were told it was cancer and he was going to die I continued with my planning. This time it was not happy planning but planning for a future that involved Mark getting sicker, dying, a funeral and then life after as a young widow with four small girls. It might seem morbid – but I had a plan.

As most of you know life doesn’t often go to our plan and of course life didn’t with Marks illness taking a very unexpected turn with the diagnosis of brain damage caused by the radiation treatment. When this happened we found ourselves in no man’s land. There was no plan! And what was worse there could be no plan! The neurologist, the oncologist and we ourselves had no idea how this illness could evolve.

I was lost! This among other things caused me to cope very badly with Marks illness (I won’t elaborate because it is in my book). I had to let go of my natural instinct to plan and have a goal and instead blindly trust that God, my heavenly Father, had a plan and he had it all under control despite the fact I didn’t.

Yes I learnt a lot of things through that, and yes I did learn to trust in God.

So why am I bringing this up? Well I had a plan – yep I had a plan for how I was going to do the next few years of life while I still had one daughter left at school. I thought my plan was in line with what I felt God was leading me into and so thought it was all sorted.

But last Sunday after some time spent alone with God asking him about some issues that needed to be sorted out to keep my plan working, God said, “Drop it, this is not my will for you to continue to pursue this. It is useless to me and therefore useless to you. Let it go.”

If there is one thing I have learnt to be good at it’s obedience to God’s voice. I knew he had said it and it actually confirmed what I had started to figure out because what I was pursuing was simply not working out.

So here I am with no plan. I have no idea what I am supposed to do next. I am trying to learn about marketing my book because God told me to write it so I figure I better work at selling it. But other than that – there is nothing!

All I want to do with my life and my days is tell others about Jesus. I want God to use me to encourage people to know God or know him better. That was the vision statement behind the book.

I am very blessed in my job to work at a Christian Medical Centre and I get to talk to people about Jesus, pray for them and try as much as I can to show God’s love in between the very busy phone and the administration required to run a doctors clinic.

But I know God is getting me ready for a change but I have no clue what that is.

God says in the well-known verse in Jeremiah 29:11

So even though I don’t have a plan – I can trust that my Saviour does, but there is a condition to me knowing that plan and it is found in the following verses in Jeremiah 29 Verses 12-14

So at present this is what I am doing. I am calling on God, I am praying to God and I am seeking God, both to draw closer to him but also to discover his plan for my future and what he wants me to do next. I am trying not to get frustrated (which is my natural tendency) and I am trying not to force anything. And I am waiting.

God has a wonderful plan for EVERY single person’s life. A plan that you can’t possibly imagine, and it will fulfil all the desires that are in your heart. But the condition to finding this plan and living it is like the scripture said, it’s calling on God, praying to him and seeking for him. When you discover God, which he has promised you will if you ask, then you will also discover the plan and the steps to that plan. Sometimes you will have to wait and trust for the next step, like I am at the moment, but it will come if you just keep following Jesus.

And so I wait in eager anticipation for the plans and the next steps he has for me. I’ll keep you posted!