The Move of God

 

The whole idea behind this column is to write about what God is teaching me regarding The Whole-Hearted Life. As Gary & I have sought to understand and personally live this out, through the last number of years, God has been leading us into a deeper understanding of Whole-Hearted Living within a community of believers. In the last year or two, He has guided us into several situations which seemed to be opportunities to live in such a setting; yet each time He seemed to close the door shortly after He opened it. Not understanding, we were hurt, confused and disappointed. I have to admit that after this happened a time or two we were also even a little embarrassed that we had shared our excitement with others only to learn that it wasn’t unfolding the way in which we had anticipated. In time, the Lord revealed that whenever He opened a door, He was using the anticipation to prepare us for what would come… down the road. It was like He was saying to us, “Oh, I was just checking”; yet, each open door led us to ask a lot of questions and deep soul searching:

Are we truly ready for this?

Are we willing to relocate, if necessary?

Are we able and willing to accept others where they are?

Are we willing to adjust from being quite isolated to being surrounded by others daily?

Are we willing to consider all that He has provided for us as provision for others, as well?

The process of wrestling through it each time was being used to build a necessary foundation within our hearts for His future plans. Once we realized this, we were no longer embarrassed by what seemed to be wishy-washiness on our part. In fact, any time someone questioned us with, “I thought you were planning to ….,” we came to a point of responding, “We thought so too, but evidently God was “just checking” again. While our hearts ached for fellowship with like-minded people, finally we were resting and waiting for Him while accepting whatever He set before us as “ground work”.

As most of us know, life is full and busy which causes us to lose touch with people we’ve known though the years, including family. This was true for me and my brother, Art who is 10 years older than I. Over the last year or so, however, Art and I have had more opportunities to visit and become reacquainted as adults. We’ve learned that we have a great deal in common regarding our spiritual beliefs, institutionalized “Church”, governmental regime, approach to health, living simply and off the land, love for music, etc. With each conversation, our hearts have been drawn closer to one another, coming to a point that a day doesn’t seem complete without touching base. We began to talk about how much fun and helpful it would be if we lived closer to one another. Art and his wife, Marcia have plenty of experience living off the land and we knew that if we could pool our time, energy and resources to work along side of one another, it would be helpful to all of us. The more we talked and prayed about it, the more it seemed obvious that God had been planning this all along. I would have never imagined that this was what He had in mind.

The four of us began to look for property near to Art & Marcia’s farm. While there were acreages available, none close enough for conveniently working together daily. One day, when Art called, I answered the phone jokingly saying, “I know, you have found the perfect property for us!” He responded, “Yep and it is right here!” He was standing on 12.5 acres on the backside of his farm. He shared that he was planning to sell this property in three more years, but felt strongly that the Lord was saying, “The time is now!” He also shared that through the years as he spent hours clearing the land, building the buildings etc. that he really didn’t know why he felt so driven about doing it. He “just knew” that he was supposed to set other things aside in order to get it done. Before we hung up he said, “I can’t imagine having any body better than the two of you living back there. Please pray about it.” To Gary & me the answer came quickly, “This is what I’ve been preparing you for.”

The move of God never ceases to amaze me!

We are excited about entering into this new chapter of our lives at Marigold Acres in Lewistown, IL. I’m sure that many of my future articles will come out of what God is teaching us here. I hope you stay tuned to hear about how He continues to move in our lives.

Whole-Heartedly,

Bonnie

P.S. Please feel free to contact me with questions, thoughts, topics you’d like to ponder or to read past articles at: http://whole-heartedlife.blogspot.com/. You may also contact me at:

Bonnie Jaeckle

In Search of the Whole-Hearted Life

Diagonal Progress

505 Jefferson St.

Diagonal, IA 50845