What has the Lord been doing with your plans and purposes lately?

So much is going on in our ministries and lives that I think that sometimes the Lord pulls us back...Just to let us catch up with what He is doing to move us closer to our destiny.

Anyway, that has happened to me recently for about a month's period of time that has had my head spinning to keep up with the changes God has been making in me and my destiny.

Once I had the pleasure of having a little 8 or 9-year-old girl along with two adults give me a prophetic word at a Graham Cooke meeting in Maryland.

I was truly touched by her candid, little-girl style of giving a prophetic word to me. She said, "You're like a top spinning on a big coffee table and you're going this way and that way...but Jesus has His hands down at the end of the coffee table and is helping you to not miss Him as this top that you are spins right into His arms."

As I mentioned how lately God had pulled me back, it seems, from everything. Yet I felt myself spinning right into Jesus' arms despite the uncertain times I've been going through.

There have been some others in ministry sharing with me how they are sort of on "Hold" and how hard it is to not just continue in the way they are used to. However, when they try to start out in what is familiar to them, they get that Holy Spirit check to "just cool it" and wait on Him.

We have to give up "all" only to get it back again from the Lord... but in a different way along with a lot more. This seems to me to be a way of following Jesus.

On top of the hard times we are weathering (not only with the hurricanes here in Florida lately) - but also with the closest of relationships betraying us, we are made candidates for love-hearts if we make it through.

It is sort of like making it through the hurricanes where I live to make us more likely to have compassion on hardships of the people in the world everywhere.

Besides, we have to take the test of persecutions with flying colors of forgiveness and love while guarding our hearts during these times of trials, or we will not find ourselves in Jesus' arms at the end of the spin on the coffee table.

There could not be anything worse than that to me and to you, could there? So let us all go spinning in our "whatever" we are going through right now with THE PEACE OF JESUS...AS WE ENJOY THE RIDE.

WHO KNOWS IF WE WILL NOT REPLY AT THE END OF THE RIDE WE ARE ON AS THE SNAIL REPLIED AT THE END OF THE RIDE ON THE TURTLE'S BACK WHEN THE SNAIL SAID,"WHEEE!!!"

Keep the Ha-Ha, Ho-Ho, He-He, Joy, Joy, Joy, for the Joy of the Lord is our strength for such a time as this.

Joan Ann