Eagle's Wings

Exciting times to be helping three teams minister in disaster relief during the summer months!  My role previously was always to stay home with Mom.  We were the invisible team members who prayed from afar.  Now we have become visible as Mom and I go with the teams and participate in additional ways.  Sometimes our job is to eat strawberries.  Sometimes it is to carry bags of dirt and other things to grow the strawberries.  Sometimes it is weeding or digging or just smiling and encouraging.  Often these jobs are not jobs in my set of skills, not in my gifting, not in my fun category.  Yet, I have learned that when the time comes to do the work, God lifts me above my skills, gifts, and likes.  He enables me. I so often learn much more by leaving the comfortable and doing that which I was sure I could not.  I am not always successful at these new endeavors, but I learn and am stretched by them.  Some of these new tasks will never again come my way.  Some will repeatedly knock at my door.  I could either complain and carry on about doing them, or I could pull up my socks and do them.  In the end God has put me to the test.  Will I obey His call to strike out into new adventures for Him?  Will I resist and try to stay comfortable?  I have found that once I have tasted these wild adventures, comfortable can get boring.  I am an introvert who likes being at home.  However, God keeps calling me to come out of my comfort into His adventure.  He calls autistic Jeffrey to soar on eagle wings to places where often there is no comfort.  Then I learn that in those places at that time the only comfort is in obedience to God’s call.  Then I find I must obey with all I have to the glory of God.  I, then, find safety, joy, and excitement on those eagle wings.

Eternity - Home

This summer I lost a friend at church.  She was an older lady who was in a wheelchair from the time I met her.  She had been afflicted by a stroke which imprisoned her in that wheelchair.  Through her disability she met a member from our church.  Consequently, that prison of a wheelchair wheeled her to the cross, and to her Redeemer.  She was cheerful and faithful in encountering me.  We became friends.  Before she met Jesus she was an artist, using bits of paper to create beauty.  As a result of her stroke she could no longer make the pictures, but she created beauty by combining her pictures from the past with Scripture.  Her artwork became complete as she now knew Jesus, the ultimate Artist.

I am sad to see her place empty at church.  It is a selfish sad, however.  At her funeral I wept, but then God reminded me to see the whole picture.  She has shed the wheelchair, and is kneeling in awe before her Redeemer.  How joyous!  She stepped out of a body broken by cancer and a stroke to ultimate healing. How marvelous!  She passed from a dim, dingy world into brilliant, vibrant beauty.  How amazing!  My weeping turned to joy as I imagined her ecstasy in the presence of Jesus. I could not help rejoicing at that funeral.  She was in joyous, marvelous, amazing eternity. She is face to face with Jesus.  She is home!