JOYful Blessings from Westside

Yesterday I mentioned that I'd been invited to speak last night at a wonderful church in a Fitzgerald...Westside Baptist.  Once again, God "awed" us with His JOY and His care to "details".  Though I knew very few of these ladies, I immediately felt "at home" with them.  That's how God works!  When our hearts are in tune because of our love for Him, then we have that "supernatural" bond and experience the JOY of Christian sisterhood.  This sweet spirit was evident from the time I pulled into the parking lot throughout the whole night of fellowship and Bible study.

I gave you a summary yesterday of the message God had laid on my heart. We "planted" our fall gardens last night, talking about the kinds of seeds that God wants us to grow in our daily lives.  I used the passage of scripture in Luke 8 in which Jesus tells the parable about planting the seeds. WELL......what I did not know, but God had perfectly orchestrated, this was the passage they had used in VBS this summer and still had their walls decorated down the hall of their Sunday School wing with "gardens".  They were familiar with the passage, but God shed a new perspective on the verses....from a woman's point of view.  He had prepared our hearts and our minds to receive His message! Ain't God good?!

As I was leaving, two of the sweet ladies were walking me out and I had to laugh out loud when one of them said, "That was the kind of message where I wanted to look around and point fingers, but then I realized that the finger would be pointing at ME!" :)  The other quoted one of my illustrations and said, "But God, I didn't hear you calling those first three times!"   God can use such simple examples to speak to our hearts, can't He?  BUT we must be willing to listen...and obey!  This dear lady had "heard" Him!

What JOY floods my heart to know that God spoke to the hearts of each of us last night!  All of us could use some help in planting the right seeds in our gardens, right?  Let's call on the Master Gardener to help us harrow away the weeds and bad seeds, to prepare the soil and choose carefully the right seeds, and then depend on Him to give us the JOY JUICE with which to keep it watered. That's when our gardens will produce an abundant crop of JOYful fruit....the FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT!!!

Thanks, again, Westside Sistas, for such a sweet time of worship with you last night!  And thank you, Father, for bringing more JOYful sisters into my life. I'm looking forward to "gardening" with all of them!