Women of Hope

Today has been a welcome breather from the busyness of our ministry's preparations for Christmas. In the midst of all the hustle and bustle, we've had a new resident come to stay with us. She's just been released from the provincial prison on a conditional sentence, and although the transition from jail has been quite overwhelming for her - especially because of the controlled chaos around the house these days - she's been doing very well.

Please pray for her, she is a sweet girl but is very much in need of healing. And please pray for me as I learn to set boundaries and be firm but loving as the leader here at the house. There are issues and outside relationships this woman brings with her that could affect all of us and cause us some anxiety.

In January we will welcome another woman into the house and then all of our rooms will be filled for the first time in months. I anticipate many challenges as she adjusts to having structure and accountability in place.

Thanks so much for praying for us and may your hearts be filled with the wonder and joy that the Christmas season inspires.

Blessings

Christmas Cheer

Tonight was our W2 Christmas party at the provincial women's institution and a great time was had by all! We made up 150 plates of food and set up the prison gymnasium with 150 chairs. Elsie led us in singing Christmas songs and carols, and told a few jokes, and the women recited some beautiful poems of thanks and sang some songs for us.

They loved their Christmas bags so much that many of them opened all the gifts inside before they even left the gym to go back to their units. Elsie told them about all the many folks who are involved in making up these bags - from a group of women in Ontario (Elsie's mom's friends) who shop throughout the year for gift items and then ship them out to us, to Elsie's mother who buys the material and sews up every one of the 700 bags, to the many folks who come to the house to help us wrap up all of the items that go into the bags. She reminded the women that they are not forgotten about at Christmas time, that there are people who care about them, even though they will never meet most of them face to face.

I had a chance to visit with all four of the women I've been seeing; they'll all be gone before my next visit as they are all being released at the end of the month or early in January. Please pray that Letticia, Denise, Lindsay and Kim will all remain clean and sober and be able to get on with their lives and resume their relationships with their children and families, and that they will never again see the inside of a jail. Every one of them knows the Lord, but my prayer is that they will give their lives into His hands.

Also, please pray for Lisa and her baby girl Jordan. Lisa is fighting to keep her baby with her when she is moved to the federal institution next month and there's a good chance she'll be able to do it, but there's just as good a chance that she won't. Both mom and baby are looking radiant and healthy. I pray that the prison staff will recognize the importance of keeping the baby with her mom.

Blessings!

Jesus' Little Elves

A week ago Vancouver looked like a winter wonderland. We had a huge dump of snow. But it's all gone now and today we have sunshine! That's rare in these parts this time of year.

The Women of Hope house is a beehive of activity these days as we are busy preparing for Christmas. For the past couple of weeks we have had crews of helpers coming in on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings - and whenever we can get them working - to help us wrap the thousands of items that will be going into the 700 Christmas gift bags we will be giving out in the next couple of weeks. Tonight the first bunch will be going out to the women at Alouette Correctional Centre. Elsie and I are members of M2W2 which is a Christian organization that matches prisoners with a visitor and also promotes and facilitates restorative justice in order to bring healing and reconciliation to prisoners and their victims. The women love our parties, and they also love receiving the Christmas gift bags which are loaded! For many of them it's the only Christmas present they will receive. Tomorrow night we will be doing the same again at Homestead, a women's treatment centre run by Salvation Army.

Other folks that will receive a gift bag are those that attend our Christian Twelve Step meetings, many of them men who are in treatment for addictions at the Union Gospel Mission, and folks who join us for our Sunday dinners at the house, Immanuel Church (our church plant), and drop-in times at the Salvation Army Community Services building nearby. But, I am most excited about going carolling on Christmas Eve in the downtown east side area of Vancouver; that's the area known as skid row. We will be sharing the love of Jesus and giving out Christmas gift bags to the people who live on the streets down there, most of whom are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. Our hearts' desire and our prayer is that receiving these gift bags will remind folks who need to know, that there is a God who loves them and cares about their lives. He cared enough to send His Only Son to become one of us, so that He could save us from the darkness.

Please pray, especially for the folks on the streets, that they will see the Light shining out of the darkness, and that, if nothing else, a seed of hope will be planted in their hearts.

Sweet little Jesus boy..we didn't know who you were

I'm already excited about Christmas this year, and have been for weeks! I've been listening to Christmas music since the end of October, and have felt the anticipation and wonder of the birth of our Lord so deeply that I'm daily crying tears of joy. What's happened to me? I used to hate Christmas! I used to hate hearing Christmas music in November and seeing premature tv commercials and store displays that bombarded us with the message that Christmas is coming. Now, although I still don't like commercials designed to push us into a shopping frenzy, I love Christmas!

I'm so grateful that I know the true meaning of Christmas now. My heart is filled with love, joy and gratitude because of what our Saviour has done for us. To think that He would come into this world as a helpless baby born to poor parents who didn't even have a bed to lay Him in, and that He would subject Himself - as a man - to the anger and hatred and evil that is in men's hearts. This anger, hatred and evil was what killed Him, and it was trying to take Him out from the very day of His birth. We witness it in the motive and actions of King Herod who had his soldiers kill every boy child under two years old in order to try to kill Jesus.

My prayer this Christmas is that the light of the truth of God's mercy and love would shine through the story of His Son's birth into the hearts of hurting and lost people. May more and more people hear the story of Jesus' birth this Christmas and come to know the freedom and the joy of knowing Him as their Saviour. Oh God, let Your glory shine! Let your faithful love be known. Let the heavenly hosts declare the Saviour's birth for all to hear and see this Christmas season.

The Wonder-ful Story of Christmas

This Christmas we will all read or hear once again, the old familiar stories of Jesus’ conception and birth. Some of us have read the nativity story every Christmas throughout our lives; for others it may still be a fairly new experience. But the wonderful thing about scripture is that no matter how many times we may have read or heard a passage, God, through His Holy Spirit, always wants to speak to us in a fresh way and to reveal to us something new that we didn’t see or hear before.

This will be my seventh Advent and Christmas season in the Lord, and as advent approaches, I am reading and rereading the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke with an open and expectant heart. Advent is a wonderful time of anticipation as we celebrate the coming of Christ into the world as a baby. It’s also a time of looking forward to His coming again. But what I love most about advent is that each year we have the opportunity to invite Christ to come into our hearts and our lives in a new and deeper way. That is my prayer as I read the nativity stories. I feel a sense of excitement and wonder and my heart swells with love for the Baby Jesus, our Lord, and with joy at His coming into the world. I also feel a sense of admiration for the woman who bore Him and raised Him, and for the man who was used by God to protect her and the newborn Christ child.

Why did God choose Mary and Joseph above all other people to be the earthly parents of His One and Only Son? From a human perspective there was nothing special or extraordinary about either of them; they were poor and simple people. It’s obvious that God looked on the hearts (1Samuel 16:7) of both Mary and Joseph and favored them greatly (Luke 1:28). From the text we can assume that some of the character qualities He saw in them were faith, righteousness, obedience, vision, and most of all humility.

When God called to them through His angel, both Joseph and Mary believed Him and obeyed. Although the text doesn’t tell us much about their thought processes, they must have considered the cost. Mary’s untimely pregnancy would have raised an outcry among their family members. They would certainly have been the subject of gossip, scorn, and perhaps even ridicule among their neighbors. Yet, for both Mary and Joseph, their reputation and what others thought of them was not the main concern. Although they were unable to understand what God was going to do through this strange and seemingly scandalous plan, they chose to obey God and to trust Him. Their hearts were completely surrendered to God and to His will for their lives. Mary’s response to the message the angel brought was, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” Luke 1:38 (KJV)

We would do well to imitate the character qualities of Mary and Joseph, for we too have been given the life of Jesus Christ, the One and Only Son of God, to carry within us, to nurture and to raise up to maturity. And, like Mary and Joseph, God has a plan to use each one of us. But if, as the world teaches us, we are always looking out for our own interests, we render ourselves unusable and ineffective for God’s Kingdom purposes. I love the way Rick Warren starts his book “The Purpose Driven Life”. The first line is short and shocking - “It’s not about you.” It shocks us because we are so used to thinking of ourselves first, and our motive for reading the book may be self-centered. The question that’s uppermost in our minds is often, “What’s in it for me?” or perhaps it is, “What can I do for God?” Neither Mary nor Joseph asked these questions. Their first thought was not for themselves.

Philippians 2:4-11 tells us what our heart attitude should be: that of Christ’s. If we were to live our lives with this heart attitude; if we were to imitate Mary and Joseph, being filled with faith and humbled by the majesty of God; if we were to wait and watch for the Lord to direct us and respond to His guidance with obedience instead of taking the initiative ourselves, He would be able to use us in amazing ways to reach those who are still lost. This is His plan and His purpose for every one of us: to be used by Him to reach out to the lost. It was His plan and His purpose for Mary and for Joseph. Although they could never have imagined the impact their obedience would have on the rest of the world throughout history, they did understand that it wasn’t about them. They were in the habit of praising and glorifying the Living God, and The Magnificat, or Mary’s Song, gives witness to this (Luke 1:46-55). As we behold God in all His glory and majesty, we are humbled. The more we time we spend beholding the glory and majesty of God, the more we want to worship and to praise Him and the more we want to serve Him and obey Him; our lives are transformed into Christlikeness (Philippians 2:4-11), and people will be drawn to us because we reflect His glory in an ever increasing degree (2 Corinthians 3:18).

As we journey through this advent season, we can make a commitment to behold and experience the majesty and glory of God anew; and as we do, the life of Christ with which we have been impregnated will grow within us. When we humble ourselves before God and allow His Spirit to work in our lives; when we obey Him and trust Him even when we don’t understand what He is doing, God will use us to advance His Kingdom here on earth. He will send people to us, just as He sent the shepherds to Mary, Joseph and the Christ child, and like the shepherds, they too will be encouraged and transformed by the life of Christ in us.

The story of Jesus’ birth fills us with wonder each year because it is so astonishing. To think that God would send His One and Only Son into the world to be born to poor and lowly parents and then laid in a manger for His bed! To think that the people God sent His angelic host to proclaim the news of Christ’s birth to were poor shepherds – the lowest of the low - watching over their flocks on the hills around Bethlehem! Because of His action through these events, it’s obvious that God sent His Son into the world for the sake of those who are poor and despised by the rest of the world; that He loves and blesses and even uses those who are humble and lowly. In His Sermon on the Mount, the first thing Jesus teaches is that the poor in spirit are blessed of God because the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them. This is the story of the first Christmas. It was for people who know their “humble estate”, as Mary’s Song calls it, that God sent His Son into the world, and it was people of humble estate that God chose to birth Him and raise Him to manhood.

What an awesome God we have! May we remember daily to surrender our wills and our lives to Him and to give Him all of our worship; may we always remember that it’s not about us; and may we all be filled with wonder at the glory, the majesty, and the goodness of our Father in Heaven and His perfect plan to save that which was lost (Luke 19:10).

"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!" Luke 2:14 ESV

(This is an article I wrote for our church Christmas newsletter.)

Praise report

Last night was my biweekly visit to Alouette Correctional Centre for Women. The women I have been visiting in the past few months have all been released and so I began new friendships with a couple of women who have requested a visitor through W2 (Woman to Woman, see link for M2W2). As always it was truly a blessing to get to know them better. They are both women I have spoken to in the past when I've been visiting other women, and one of them I have prayed with before.

It's so amazing how God works. With every relationship I have formed through my prison visits I sense that it is God's plan to bring us together. I am able to see where God is working in their hearts and lives and, by His grace, to speak words of encouragement. Of course, the reason I am there is to point the way to the One and Only who can heal them and comfort them, and transform and redeem their lives. What a privilege to represent Him there in that place! Although many of the women feel undeserving because of the crimes and the behaviour that put eventually landed them in prison, I know that God passionately loves every single one of them! He sent His only Son to die on the cross in order that they could be forgiven and set free.

And thankfully some do get set free and manage to stay free. As I was talking to one of my new friends last night, she gave me some news about Denise, a woman I was visiting over the spring and summer months who was released a couple of months ago. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, I gave her my contact information and encouraged her to stay in touch but she hasn't done that yet. However, according to the news I heard last night, Denise has managed to stay free! She's still clean and sober! Praise God! I know that she has Christian friends and relatives and that she was planning to go back to a spiritually alive church family when she returned to her home town. Thank God she hasn't been sidetracked by the lures of the enemy or the unhealthy relationships of the past. God has a wonderful plan for her life and I'm so happy that she is continuing to walk in it.

Thanks to all those who lifted Denise up in prayer. I know that it is only by the power of God that Denise has been able to stay on the paths of righteousness and all of your prayers have helped to give her strength.

He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.
Psalm 40:2

Hallelujah!!! Our God is great!

Peace like a river

I'm so thankful that although Elsie, the director of Partners in Hope, is away on holiday this week, all's quiet on the western front. It's been a busy time as I've had to lead a couple of meetings in her place, but it's not more than I can handle. The last time she went away one of the girls relapsed and another went awol. As Elsie said it was a "trial by fire" for my first time being in charge of it all.

It's so exciting to see what God is doing in the heart and life of Kelly, our new resident. She really "gets it" and is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. It's a beautiful thing to see. Her heart's desire is to follow Jesus, and I can see that He has big plans for her. Andrea is doing well. Still somewhat resistant to the "Christian thing" but I see changes in her too. She has such a good heart, and she loves people fiercely. Mabel has been working several jobs, and although that's a good thing, she is not getting much rest as one of them is a night shift. Mun Hee is a blessing as always, and God is doing a wonderful work in her heart - and in mine too.

God is so good, and I am so grateful for His love, His protection, and most of all, His peace.

Thanks to all those who are praying for us. I would be especially grateful for your prayers for my sister Heather tonight.

Shalom