Since I became a Christian I have been struggling with explaining to my friends. Not my friends back home, my friends down here. The brilliant thing about Stornoway is that everybody, whether they are a church goer or not, understands what you mean when you say “I’ve become a Christian”.
The church is part of the culture up there, it’s a way of life.

Down here if you say to someone “I’ve become a Christian” they say, “well weren’t you one already” or “we’re all Christians in this country” and if you tell them you’ve been born again they look at you as if you’ve joined some weird cult!

How do you explain to someone that has no grasp whatsoever of the concept without them thinking you’ve completely lost their marbles.
Obviously you can do it but I’ve just been a coward. I’ve been making excuses why I can’t go out drinking with them and avoiding situations where I would have to come out and explain to them. A few weeks ago one of my really good friends called round and I was watching the God channel on TV and she laughed and called me a geek, that would have been the perfect opportunity to explain but I just shrugged it off and said nothing.

Tonight I was browsing You Tube. They had showed a video clip of Richard Wurmbrand in church this morning and my baby girl had been a bit grumpy so I had taken her out into the foyer and missed it. I thought I’d search for it and whilst doing so I came across some clips posted by Voice of the Martyrs. It was powerful stuff.
They were telling of the thousands of Christians being persecuted all over the world for their faith. Right now. As I’m typing this. A Christian is martyred every 3 minutes.
I saw a clip on there of a ten year old boy in the Sudan who had been thrown on top of a bonfire and left to die because he wouldn’t deny Christ and turn to Islam. I heard storied of people locked in prison cells underground for 15 years suffering unbearable torture all because they wouldn’t deny Christ.
Christians in China are being arrested and beaten for attending church, they could easily avoid these horrors by denying God and they won’t!

And I can’t even stand up for his name to my friends.

I will NEVER make excuses or shy away from telling anyone about my faith EVER again and whilst I’m doing it I will thank God that he’s put me in the position that I can do it without having to fear the horrific consequences that so many in the world are suffering today.
Jesus didn’t deny me when he hung upon that cross and I will never deny him.

But the amazing thing is that no matter how pathetic, shameful or cowardly I am, God still loves me, he still holds his arms out to me and offers me sweet salvation.
His capacity for forgiveness is amazing and his love is never ending.

People need to know how much God loves them, there are so many broken, empty people in the world today, if only they realised what amazing love and comfort is within their grasp so many hearts would be healed.

God is always with us

I have been getting a bit disheartened recently, there's 9 weeks till hubby goes away for 4 months and I'm just dreading it, 4 months is a long time to be away from your family and when you have a 10 year old who desperately misses his daddy and a baby who won't even remember him when he gets back, it's hard. Anyway, I suppose I've been feeling a bit sorry for myself and when he left on Sunday for 3 days I just couldn't stop crying because I knew next time we said goodbye it was going to be for such a long time.
So really, I've just been feeling sorry for myself!

But then the wee man came home from school yesterday and he had a little figure (a person with their hands raised in the air) made out of pipe cleaners. I didn't really pay much attention to it until he was going to bed last night and he out the figure on his shelf in his bedroom and he said to me "this is to remind me that when you praise God you get strength".

What a message!

I know God will get me through anything and I just am so grateful for this amazing little man who encourages me in so many ways, don't get me wrong, he's a perfectly normal little boy, an hour earlier he'd been sulking in his bedroom because I wouldn't give him ice cream but he can be so wise sometimes. he really amazes me with the things he says and the knowledge he has.

Yesterday afternoon I watched an interview on Revelation tv, a woman who had been into spiritualism was giving her testimony, she told of how spiritualism led to occultism and eventually withcraft, she told of how she had been converted and it was an amazing story, some of the things she had seen and been through were really scary.
When I went to bed last night I couldn't stop thinking about it and to be honest I was a bit freaked out. Hubby is away so I decided to leave the hall light on and i was laying in bed I looked at the blind on my window, right across the centre of the blind was the shadow of a cross.

I looked around the room and I couldn't find or figure out where this shadow was coming from. It was amazing really, I went to sleep last night looking at this cross in my window, knowing that God was with me and protecting me and I woke up this morning with this incredible sense of love and comfort.

God is always with us.

The WOW Factor

Church yesterday was fab.

The pastor was talking about how God has the "wow factor". In my daily readings I've reached Acts chapter 8 and when the pastor asked us to turn to the portion of scripture he was going to preach from I opened my bible and went WOW. He was about to preach from Acts chapter 9, the exact passage I had marked to study next.
How amazing.

Hubby is due to go away in July for 4 months, something none of us are looking forward to. When the wee man came out of Sunday school he said they had been reading a verse that he thought was for his dad so last night at after tea he read it to him. It was Joshua ch1 v9, "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go".

It brought a tear to my eye but how amazing! God speaks to us in so many ways.