Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Campaign Leadership Teams (Eph. 3:20-21)

• Leaders will seek God's guidance and wisdom
• Each team's effort will be fruitful, honoring, and pleasing to God

In our close to 24 years of married life, we have moved several times due to jobs. Like many of you, we have always asked God for guidance in our moves. I can honestly say He has always made it very clear He was in control of our moves. Things like house contracts coming in for the exact amount we had prayed about, opening doors for job opportunities, etc. Our move to this area was no different, although I did have to wonder why we were moving far away from our support system of family and friends. We were moving for my job, and Kirk was going to start working a business from the home.

Now, I have to go back about 5 years to Emily’s birth. When she was born in New Mexico, my sister was there for the delivery. When the nurses gave her to me, I did as any new mother would do, I checked her all over to see that she had five toes on each foot and five fingers on each hand. Then I was looking at her ears, and noticed that she did not have a left ear. I think I made the comment, “Oh look at her ear.” Of course, the nurses immediately whisked her away to do some tests. When they finally returned with her, we were told she was ok except her ear. All of her other organs were fine and functioning as they should. Being young parents we did not think anything of this, but my sister, who works with the hearing impaired, was deeply affected. She immediately began talking to us about resources and things we needed to do for Emily, to ensure her speech developed on schedule. We followed through on all of these things, and Emily went to a speech therapist around the age of 3 for a year. Her speech was developing normally, and no one could tell she could only hear out of one ear.

Fast forward to our move here; other than a good job, we were unaware of the reason for our move out East. This became abundantly clear when we started looking into plastic surgery for Emily. The top expert in this field of ear reconstructive surgery was right here in DC, at Children’s Hospital. He is a brilliant plastic surgeon, with a dry wit and a down to earth bedside manner. Over two hospital stays and a few other in-office procedures, he created an outer ear for Emily so she could look like other girls when she put her hair up. Of course, these procedures required an abundant amount of prayer, which God answered. He has truly been a part of Emily’s life from the beginning, and our prayer is He will continue to be a large part of her life as she continues to grow into an adult.

God does listen to our prayers all the time. We have to listen to Him, and we just may have to wait for the answer.

Philippians 4:6-7 (NLT) says, “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.”

~Nancy Mize