The Lord gave me abundant love and grace to live a life of sacrificial service. Loving Him with all my heart, I?could do nothing less than give Him my life to help others know Him. There have been so many people experiences since I began full-time ministry in the early 90s. Many of those people “followed” my ministry and became long-distance friends over the years. I came to recognize their names and faces for having met the same women at various meetings, and having been in some of their homes, and coming to strike up phone and email relationships with a few of them. Many wrote letters regularly (snail-mail) telling me of how grateful they were for my ministry, and generally just pouring out their hearts to me. Until email changed the way people communicate through the written word, letters from moms coming in the mail was an everyday occurence.
Recently (February 2009) I was finally able to sort through, organize and bundle these precious letters. I alphabetized and ordered by region over 3700 letters, cards, and miscellaneous token gifts sent to me by grateful moms. Because these women were trusting me with their heart’s reflections, I?had always viewed each letter as a gift to treasure. It just seemed wrong to simply cast them aside. Today, I’m grateful I kept them, because sorting them really helped me to recall some ministry memories I had lost, and some precious moms and their children I had come to know a bit. I prayed for them as I recalled their situations, their concerns, and their hearts for the Lord.
I enjoyed being available to moms as much as was possible with my work load. I?loved people with true compassion and loved helping them, encouraging them, and just being real with them. I so desired for them what the Lord had done for me—a powerful work of His love that would teach them how to love their families much and love their precious children well.
I was progressively losing more and more of my health, making computer work near to impossible. Coinciding with this, our business was drastically slowing down, and we didn’t know it at that time, but it was mostly due to my inability to continue meetings on a regular basis, which was our only way to market the Lifestyle of Learning message to more people. Our reduced exposure finally caught up with us, while at the same time, our main wholesaler who had marketed and promoted Wisdom’s Way of Learning since its publication in 1994 also went out of business. In the span of a couple of months our business crumbled. My health didn’t allow me to do a thing about it. I had already been making every effort to keep things going in spite of whole body pain and numbness.
There was little choice but to remove myself from all computer activity for what would be three years, unable to sit at it without excruciating pain and added stress to my adrenal glands and nervous system. Since there was no one who could continue my work for me, any emails that came in went away unread. If you, dear reader, contacted me during that time to ask about me, please accept my apology and know that it was never in my heart to leave my readers wondering. I entered a completely different season of activity, not just for myself, but my family as well.
(continued in part 4)