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Hello all! We wanted to shoot out a quick reminder to lift up Jay, Matt, Adam and Kristi this week as we give presentations at our local denomination’s conference. The focus of our talks will be moving beyond the walls of the church to reach the community. Every afternoon from 2:30 to 4 we will be presenting on different aspects of this. We very excited to be invited to participate. We pray that we can help ideas flow between churches and that communities will be impacted. Dear Prayer Team, We are enjoying springtime in Minnesota! The green is almost so brilliant it hurts your eyes. Maybe that’s because we’ve seen snow and sleeping trees for so long we have to get readjusted to life. It is so beautiful! We are praising God for the people who came out to our Weekend Bible Conference at the beginning of the month. Several people came because of the mailers they received. We had a small turnout for the National Day of Prayer but such a meaningful time worshipping and praying together for the community of Shakopee. We enjoyed hosting it and working together with other pastors in the community. We also are praising God for all of those praying for us. We have seen answers to prayer in our personal lives as well as in our ministry. One of our prayer team members felt led to pray for us on a particular Sabbath and her prayer was that we would have 25 people at our worship service. She called later to let us know she’d been praying for us and what her specific prayer was. She asked how many had been at the worship service and, praise God, there were exactly 25! God does hear and answer us! We ask for prayer that we would have God’s peace and guidance as we move forward in this adventure. Also a humility and acknowledment of God’s sovereign authority over our lives and this church. We ask for continued prayer for our upcoming seminar at the Minnesota Campmeeting, June 15-19. Thank you for your continued prayer. Kristi
I believe it’s true that God shows His face everywhere in this world to try to draw us out of ourselves and see Him more clearly. I was thinking of this over the last two weeks as we’ve been working on clearing up our crazy yard after a too busy fall made it impossible to rake up the leaves before the snows fell. The experience has been one of frustration:
This is such a mirror of my spiritual life in times of stress and busyness:
I’m sure this is a large part of why God calls us to prayer and meditation. How can He ever hope to teach us and bring out the person He created us to be unless we are willing to spend time capturing the spiritual nuggets instead of letting them fly with the wind? I’m thankful He reminds me again and again how patient He is and how I need to be patient with myself. I’ll try again tonight to sit in the stillness of the moment and bag what He sends my way. Praise the Lord with uplifted hands:
Pray with us and for us:
Enjoy your week and pull out your yard bags, no matter how long it’s been! Kristi
Dear Prayer Team, We have had an exciting month! Our Weekend Bible Conference, held March 14 and 15, had the best turnout yet. Nine people attended and it was so awesome to see them forming relationships, sharing contact information, carrying on spiritual conversations about the information presented! Our worship service attendance continues to grow and we are thrilled to see more people coming who want to share their gifts and talents by worshiping God with us. Word is starting to get out about our community prayer room and we have had the privilege of sharing the room with several community members coming in during a break at work throughout the week! Finally, there is a growing sense of momentum and comraderie that is lifting us up and carrying us on to whatever God has in store this spring. We ask you to praise God for these things:
We ask for prayer in:
Not mentioned in our regular prayer newsletter are some upcoming and ongoing events that we would like to ask specific prayer for: Weekly: our weekly worship service and classes that started a few weeks ago are always in need of prayer cover. We start the worship service at 3:00 cst and finish with classes at 5:30, if you’re interested in praying during the actual time we meet. This month: we have a weekend Bible conference coming up on March 14 and 15. This will be our third conference. The first one we had four participants, the second one five came. We ask for prayer for the participants, possible participants, Adam as the presenter, Jay as the break-out session facilitator and Matt as the worship coordinator, and the event itself. Matt recently put an add on Craigslist for musicians. We ask God’s guidance in whatever may happen in the days and weeks to come. I am feeling strongly led to begin a house of prayer/community prayer time on a weekly basis. This is all very new to me and I need a lot of prayer as I seek guidance as to how it will look, what form it will take, the different formats to be used, how to get the word out and just surrendering the whole process to God. Thank you so much! Dear friends in prayer: We welcome you back from the prayer newsletter hiatus of the last few months! For those of you who were unaware of the events these months have brought, Adam and I welcomed a new baby into the world at the beginning of December. Due to normal baby busyness and the craziness of hospital stays as our baby received much needed medical aid for a myriad of issues associated with his birth defect of spina bifida, I took a break from the church newsletter. I am happy to be back and thankful to be in touch with you again. A beautiful thing seems to happen when we are faced with trials outside of our control. We tend to throw ourselves at the mercy of Christ much more then we do in our day to day lives. As I searched for strength and endurance over the last weeks, I was convicted about the power of memorized scripture. I had many times before tried to start some kind of program to memorize scripture but for some reason or other would ditch the plan within a day of starting it. I don’t think I ever succeeded in remembering anything! But this time, maybe, my heart was really into it. I was ready. And I learned something I never could have understood before, how much my prayer life could be revitalized by being able to speak God’s word back to Him! This last week I was memorizing 1 Peter 5:6-9. Verse 7, I’m sure, is very familiar to you. It says, ‘Cast all your anxieties on Him because He cares for you.’ I was curious, as I prayed this scripture throughout the week, what ‘cast’ really means in this verse. I learned that one meaning of the word ‘cast’ in Greek is the same as the use of ‘throw’ in ‘throw out your garbage’. So we could say, ‘Throw all your garbage on God because He cares for you.’ What a word picture that was for me! I imagined God with rotten tomatoes, stinky fish, dirty diapers being tossed into His lap. But He loves us so much that He welcomes the refuse, He nods His head, says, ‘That’s right, bring it here, right here!’ Is there anything more humiliating then being the receptacle for someone else’s garbage? But the verse right before this, verse 6, says, ‘Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand,’ as if to say before we can toss our garbage out we must be humbled otherwise it won’t work. We won’t be able to get rid of our garbage. I think that’s why I love praying together and being connected through prayer families like this one. When we give you our prayer requests we are utterly and totally human. There’s no hiding behind some mask when I ask you to pray about something I’m struggling with. There is beautiful humility and healing that happens in prayer. So here we are, to show you all our praises and a bit of garbage too, so that together we can throw it on God. Why? If you read the whole scripture segment there are some awesome promises: He will lift us up, we can stand against the wiles of the devil, and we connect with our brothers and sisters ‘throughout the world who are undergoing the same kinds of suffering’. Perrys
Kendra:
Segebartts
Breiners
May God humble us all this month and lift us up in His mighty hands. Kristi |
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