Everyone Needs a Miracle

What Miracle Are You Seeking?

In the United States and around the world, countless numbers of people are looking for miracles in their lives. When some people say, “I’m praying for a miracle,” they are really talking about wishful thinking or a vague hope that things will get better. Others, however, mean that they are asking God to intervene in their lives based on the reality of His promises. There’s a big difference! Over the years, my ministry has received numerous reports of miracles that have come through prayer and holding on to God’s Word, miracles such as:

My eight-year-old son had leukemia. I called for prayer for strength to go through the treatment. That wonderful prayer partner rebuked the disease and prayed that he be healed in Jesus’ name. Now my son is healed! There is no leukemia in his body! It was such a testimony to the doctors and nurses.

***

I had a nervous breakdown [and when I was feeling the worst I would] listen to you say, “This is the best day of your life!”…Little by little the joy I felt began to increase.…I want you to know that my mind is healed now. I was sick for seven years. I feel the peace of God and the joy of the Lord again.

***

I recently requested that you agree with me to lose weight because I had reached a whopping 203 pounds. Well, praise God, the Lord has done a miracle for me. I went on a diet and have lost 53 pounds, and I’m not through yet.

***

You prophesied that a child who had been kidnapped by his father was going to be returned to his mother. I claimed that word as mine! I had stood in faith for 2 1/2 years before that word; and in less than one month, my son was returned to me. I was tired and weary…ready to give up—your word from God renewed my strength to stand.

***

Everyone needs a miracle of some kind, whether it is one of healing, financial provision, restoration of broken relationships, open doors of opportunity, favor with another person, or another intervention of God. I have experienced many miracles in my life, and I am still experiencing them. Miracles are available to us today because God’s Word promises them. What miracle are you seeking?

Our heavenly Father is a God of the miraculous. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is a miraculous book. It is a supernatural gift, a revelation from God, which He has given for our instruction, comfort, and guidance in life. It tells us of many miracles God has provided for His people over thousands of years. Yet the Bible doesn’t talk just about past miracles; it tells us how we can experience miracles in the present and the future. God hasn’t changed. He desires to do miracles for us, too!

For I am the Lord, I do not change. (Malachi 3:6)

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)
A Miraculous Sign

A miracle is something that, without the intervention of God, would never have happened to the person who received it. A miracle may also be defined as something that occurs outside the natural processes of life that we would ordinarily experience in our physical world.

In October 2000, I took a group of travelers on a ministry trip to La Paz, Bolivia, and held a series of citywide meetings in the stadium there. There are many indigenous people in Bolivia whose cultural roots are steeped into idolatry, witchcraft, shamanism, and the like, and who need to hear the life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ.

One of the travelers accompanying us told me she’d had a unique dream. “I dreamed that there were three rainbows in perfect arches in the sky,” she said. “I don’t know what it means, but it could be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit or some special visitation while we’re in Bolivia.” I didn’t share this conversation with anyone but kept it hidden in my heart.

While we were in Bolivia, we would hold three nights of healing meetings in the stadium, as well as two days of meetings with Bolivian ministers, because we like to pour the knowledge of God’s Word into the hearts of ministers. We had brought books printed in Spanish, and we had special times of instruction and fellowship with them.

The president of Bolivia invited me to join a breakfast meeting he was sponsoring, and I was asked to speak to some of the key leaders in the government. This was an unexpected and wonderful open door for ministry.

Little did I dream what God the Father would do to prepare the hearts of the people for that breakfast and our healing meetings. The first morning of our ministry training school, we were in downtown La Paz teaching the local pastors. About one thousand Bolivian leaders were there, plus the one hundred and twenty-five people from the United States who had accompanied us on the trip. One of our staff people passed a note to me while I was speaking, saying that there were crowds in the street and that traffic was stopped because there were three rainbows in perfect arches over the building we were in. I said to the people, “There is something very unusual happening outside. We must go out and look.”

We walked outside, and, as had been reported, there were three rainbows in the sky above the building. All three were shaped in perfect arches, and each one was a different color. We were able to capture this sight on video. No one knew what to think. I was shocked that God would perform such an unusual miracle right then and there.

We went back to the meeting and praised and worshipped God. Following the meeting, we boarded our buses to go back to our hotel. When we arrived, we saw that the three rainbows had followed us and come to a stop over the hotel. We also found that witches had gathered outside, protesting by ringing bells and banging pans. The president of the country had called a leadership conference of witches, and these witches were very upset with our being there and with the rainbows that were positioned over the hotel, and they had come to speak curses against us. But let me tell you something: You cannot curse what God has blessed.

In both the Old and New Testaments, the Bible says that Jesus took the curse of our sins on Himself on the cross so that we could be blessed. (See, for example, Isaiah 53:4–5; Galatians 3:13–14.) Knowing this, we rebuked Satan and asked God to bring these witches to salvation in Jesus.

When I went to the breakfast, oh, what a breakfast it was, because of all the news that had been on television and in the newspapers regarding our visit and the manifestation of the rainbows. What timing the Lord has! He had given a woman on our team a dream and then brought it to pass as a sign to us and to the people of Bolivia. Because the three rainbows had appeared over the city, I knew what to say to all those attending the breakfast. I asked them, “What is God saying? He wants to bring revival to La Paz, Bolivia. God wants to move on this country, but He can do it only as we surrender our lives to Jesus Christ.”

The breakfast was a wonderful opportunity to praise God. He had already sent a sign of His presence in the form of the three rainbows. The Bible says that miraculous signs will follow those who believe. (See Mark 16:17.) That was a time when signs both went before us and followed us! I built on the sign God had sent by calling the people to repentance. Then, at the stadium meetings, people were Spirit-filled, and literally thousands of people were saved and healed. There were an unusual number of people healed from growths and tumors. People also came and threw their eyeglasses onto the platform because they could see perfectly without them.

We were able to broadcast these meetings over satellite to all the Spanish-speaking countries in the world. It was an awesome time, a time when God showed up and “showed off.”

Why Miracles?
Why does God do miracles in the lives of His people and in relation to situations that concern them? Our experiences in Bolivia draw attention to five significant reasons God does miracles.

1. God’s Miracles Reveal His Power as Creator-King

When God created the earth and everything in it, including human beings, it was a miraculous event that reveals to us His power as Creator, as well as His sovereignty over the earth. The created world continues to reveal God’s nature and power.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. (Psalm 19:1–4)

The three remarkable rainbows in the sky demonstrated that this same powerful Creator God was involved in our visit to Bolivia. God spoke the world into existence at the beginning of time, and He not only continues to create wonders that glorify Him, but He also brings the things we need into existence as we speak His Word to the circumstances and problems in our lives. As He does so, He manifests His nature and His ways to us.

2. God’s Miracles Reveal the Spiritual Reality Supporting Our Physical World

Miracles make known the existence of an invisible spiritual reality that is the true or ultimate reality in life. Most people live only according to what they can experience through their five senses, but there is a spiritual realm that undergirds, and is greater than, the physical reality of our world, and within which our physical world exists. The Bible tells us that Jesus, who is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, both created and sustains our world: “All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist [“hold together” niv]” (Colossians 1:16–17).

A miracle sign such as we saw in La Paz, and the resulting outpouring of supernatural healings and other manifestations, revealed to the Bolivian people the presence of God’s spiritual realm and His desire to intervene to meet both their physical and spiritual needs.

3. God’s Miracles Convey His Compassion for His People
God the Father does miracles to bless and deliver His people, because He is loving and compassionate. For example, when He sent Moses to deliver the Hebrews, who were enslaved in Egypt, He told him,

I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey. (Exodus 3:7–8)

In the course of delivering the Hebrews, God performed many miracles, including the manifestations of the pillars of cloud and fire, which were signs of His constant presence with His people, and the parting of the Red Sea, through which He rescued them from their enemies. (See Exodus 13:21; 14:21–30.) And God still saves and delivers today.

God loves all the people of the world. He created them in His image and sent His Son to redeem them. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). When Jesus came to earth, His healings and other miracles were prompted by His compassion. In one instance, when two blind men called out to Him, asking for mercy, “Jesus had compassion and touched their eyes. And immediately their eyes received sight, and they followed Him” (Matthew 20:34).

The sign of the three rainbows in Bolivia was a symbol to the people that God knew them and loved them and wanted to move among them in compassion, healing, deliverance, and the outpouring of His Spirit.

The apostle Paul wrote that if God gave His Son to die on the cross for us, “how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). “All things” includes miracles.
4. God’s Miracles Promote Faith in the Truth of the Gospel
Miracles are also a way in which God the Father confirms people’s faith in the legitimacy of the gospel message, helping to bring them to repentance and into a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ.

[Jesus said to His followers,] “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature….And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues;…they will lay hands on the sick, an they will recover.”…And they went out and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming the word through the accompanying signs.” (Mark 16:15, 17–18, 20)

Likewise, God opened the door and validated our ministry in Bolivia by the manifestation of the rainbows, which drew the attention of the people as they saw the sign personally or heard about it through the media. Then, during our meetings in Bolivia, thousands of people were saved and healed. The healings, including those of growths and tumors, were further signs—“accompanying signs”—that confirmed the ministry of the gospel God had given to us for the people.

Please remember that Jesus said we are not to seek manifestations of signs as a substitution for belief in God’s Word. (See Matthew 12:38–39.) And we are not to seek signs for their own sake, as a form of entertainment. However, God will use miracles to promote faith in His Word so that people will believe and be saved, healed, and experience abundant life in Him.
5. God’s Miracles Reveal Genuine versus False Spirituality
The signs accompanying our preaching of the gospel in Bolivia were a testimony to the people of true, godly spiritual activity in contrast to counterfeit spirituality. The witches who had protested our presence there had gathered for a conference in La Paz at the request of the president, who had also invited me to speak to governmental leaders at a breakfast, so there was obviously confusion in that nation regarding what kind of spirituality should be practiced and promoted. To some people, witchcraft or shamanism may seem innocent and helpful, but these things are false and destructive. The witches had tried to cause a commotion and disrupt our ministry, yet God showed that He is greater than counterfeit spirituality. He poured out His Spirit in a powerful way according to His love, bringing salvation, healing, and deliverance to the people.

Please be aware that false teachers and prophets can exhibit counterfeit signs and miracles. Jesus said, “For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24). And the apostle Paul wrote,

The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

(2 Thessalonians 2:9–10)

Genuine miracles from God, however, are recognized by those who know His ways and are enlightened by His Spirit. One of the religious leaders of Jesus’ day named Nicodemus told Him, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him” (John 3:2). And the Corinthian believers to whom Paul ministered were aware that the message and work of an apostle from God will be confirmed by signs and miracles: “Truly the signs of an apostle were accomplished among you with all perseverance, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds” (2 Corinthians 12:12).

Remember that true miracles bring glory to God—not to a “miracle worker.” They confirm the truth of salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross and His resurrection and triumph over the devil and all the forces of evil. (See, for example, Colossians 2:11–15.)
How Do God’s Miracles Come to Us?

God’s miracles—His supernatural interventions in our lives—come to us in different ways. While there may be similarities between these ways, and they may overlap, each is important in itself. Throughout this book, we will explore various avenues through which God brings miracles into our lives. We will also discover what we need to know and act upon in order to receive our miracles. Miracles usually don’t just “happen” in our lives, for, as we have seen, God does miracles for various reasons and gives them as we seek Him through faith in His Word.

Think of yourself as on a pathway to receiving the miracles you desire from God. I invite you to take a journey with me as I relate the adventures of miraculous living that I have experienced in my life, knowing that you, too can experience the same kinds of miracles and live in the realm of the miraculous. The path to miracles is an ongoing one, and we can experience miracles of various kinds throughout our lives.

Let’s be sure not to miss out on all that God has for us. There are consequences of not accepting and receiving the miracles He wants to give us through our faith in Him. The Scriptures say that Jesus “did not do many mighty works [in His hometown] because of their unbelief” (Matthew 13:58). We don’t want to forfeit our miracle opportunities, which are part of the spiritual wonder and destiny God has planned for our lives.

If someone witnesses God’s miracles but observes them only as a spectator and stays in unbelief toward Jesus and His offer of salvation, there is a high cost to him.

Then [Jesus] began to rebuke the cities in which most of His mighty works had been done, because they did not repent: “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.…And you, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, will be brought down to Hades; for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.”

(Matthew 11:20–21, 23)

Not to experience a healing or deliverance God desires for you would be tragic enough, but to lack repentance and refuse to receive Christ would lead to a grim penalty. We don’t want to fall short of God’s purposes for our lives. In this book, we’ll see how to both receive Christ into our lives and enter into the realm of the miraculous. Let us be able to say with Paul, “In [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Receiving Your Miracles

Through Your Pathway to Miracles, I want to show you how to gain a deeper relationship with your heavenly Father and learn how to live in the miraculous according to His plans. He has spectacular episodes for your life as you hold fast in faith. Get ready to be liberated from frustration and defeat as you set your eyes continually on His positive truths and principles, even as you contend with negative circumstances and situations. You will discover…

how miracles begin
the reasons and seasons for miracles
the roles of faith, expectation, positive affirmation, and prayer
the importance of claiming your miracle
how to recognize the miracles in your own hands
keys to removing mountainous problems blocking your miracles
how to access “giant” miracles for big needs
ways in which God gives favor and opportunity
the nature of “miracle packages”
how to persevere to receive God’s miracle when there seems to be no solution for your problem and all seems hopeless.
My friend, whatever kind of miracle you need, read on!

Girl Meets Kitchen, or Not

Necessarily a Love Story

“Happy and successful cooking doesn’t rely only on know-how;
it comes from the heart, makes great demands on the palate and needs enthusiasm and a deep love of food to bring it to life.”

Georges Blanc, from Ma Cuisine des Saisons

I was not the kind of kid who grew up at my mom’s knee, helping her chop carrots for Sunday night’s chicken soup. I never really helped with any meal preparation, preferring to turn my attention in the kitchen to baking. There was always some social event with friends or a youth group party where I needed to bring brownies. The one memorable time I tried to make instant potatoes? Instead of the specified one-quarter tablespoon of salt, I used a quarter cup salt. That incident happened over twenty-five years ago, and I have yet to stop hearing about it from my loving and encouraging family.

Suffice to say, I was a bit ill-prepared for the cooking adventures that lay ahead as I lived on my own for the first time. And to complicate matters? My first apartment was in Uji, Japan, approximately seven thousand miles from my mother’s loving embrace and her pot-roast recipe (as if I could afford beef in Japan).

The recipe cards were stacked against me. No cooking skills to speak of, living in a foreign land where most of the time I couldn’t identify what I was eating much less figure out how it was prepared, a kitchen the size of my coat closet back home, and an oven so small it made me long for the Easy-Bake one of my childhood.

I was terrified going to the supermarket without an escort and a translator. I didn’t speak the language (as a short-term missionary teaching conversational English, speaking Japanese was actually a disadvantage in my job), and as unfamiliar as I was with food shopping in the U.S., shopping in Uji was like watching a foreign movie without subtitles and then having to write a paper on the plot.

Oh, and eating out? So not an option. While my cooking skills were limited, my food budget was near nonexistent.

A few things were easy to recognize. The bread in Japan was amazing. It was buttery and flaky and perfect. And there was some really lovely cheese and ham. So, for the first three months of exploring this exotic new culture, I ate ham and cheese sandwiches every single night for dinner.

As I started to get to know some of my students and coworkers better, I had this urge to invite them over to hang out with me. But I had a sneaking suspicion they would want to be fed. I knew that my students would love some authentic American dishes. The question was, Who would I get to cook them?

Another short-term missionary, Diana, had a cookbook called More-With-Less. This wonderful little book produced by the Mennonite community had tons of recipes that used simple ingredients most cooks would have in their kitchen. While I didn’t have a lot of pantry staples in my four-story walk-up, I was now armed with a grocery list as well as an English-to-Japanese dictionary for my trips to the store.

I started to look for simple things I could make: salads, sandwiches, curries, and mini-pizzas out of English muffins and ketchup. (I promise, my culinary skills and taste have gotten better over the years.) As I grew braver in all things cuisine, I started to ask my mom to send some of my favorite recipes from back home.

In fact, when I threw a Christmas celebration with my friend Spenser in my micro-sized apartment, we managed to make a fondue-potless version of my mom’s Pizza Fondue. Shopping for the ingredients proved challenging, even for Spenser who spoke near-fluent Japanese. After several attempts to translate cornstarch into the native language (One would think corn + starch = cornstarch, right? Wrong. It’s pronounced korunstarcha.), we headed back to my kitchen and made one of the best meals I have ever eaten—lots of tomato sauce, some ground beef, loads of cheese, and just the right amount of korunstarcha.

Pizza Fondue
(Connie Richerson)

½ lb. ground beef

1 small onion, chopped

2 10½-oz. cans pizza sauce (I use marinara sauce)

1 T. cornstarch (or korunstarcha, if you prefer)

1½ tsp. oregano

¼ tsp. garlic powder

2 cups cheddar cheese, shredded

1 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded

1 loaf French bread

Brown the ground beef and onion; drain. Put meat, sauce, cornstarch, and spices in fondue pot. When cooked and bubbly, add cheese. Spear crusty French bread cubes, then dip and swirl in fondue. This is also delicious with breadsticks. Serves 4 to 6.

From that point on, I was hooked on collecting my favorite recipes. I bought my own copy of More-With-Less when I got back to the States, and when I got married a few months later, I received my very first copy of everyone’s favorite red-and-white-plaid Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, with every recipe an emerging home cook could want.

I think most of us home cooks have a similar story to tell. OK, you probably didn’t have your first significant cooking experience in Uji, Japan, but I bet the first few times you got dinner on the table all on your own, you might as well have been in a different country.

Maybe your mom had you peeling potatoes before you could walk. Maybe you have a rich heritage of recipes passed down from your grandmother. None of our cooking histories are going to look the same, but we do have one thing in common: We all need to get dinner on the table.

I am not a professional cook. Tom Colicchio will never be critiquing my braised kale and chocolate with bacon foam on Top Chef. But over the past twenty years I have put dinner on the table almost every single night. And while my family still likes a pizza from the neighborhood shop, our kids who have left home really look forward to coming back for a home-cooked meal.

That is all the reward I need.

Why This Book?

So, you discovered my deep dark secret—I’m not a professional chef. I don’t have my own show on Food Network, my own brand of spatulas, and I’m not going to be appearing on any morning show making a frittata for Kathie Lee Gifford.

Still, I’m required to feed our large family almost daily. So when I come across a cookbook, I have an unnatural need to own it. I’m always looking for new recipes to keep dinner interesting at our house. I have an entire bookshelf in my kitchen for my ever-growing collection.

But to be honest with you, most of the money I’ve spent on those cookbooks could have been better spent on a good set of knives or a heavy iron skillet.

I have found that most cookbooks are aimed at the fantasy life many of us aspire to—entertaining regularly, having unusual and exotic ingredients on hand, and hours and hours in the kitchen to create these masterpieces, from scratch.

And then there is my reality. Yes, sometimes I like to spend a Saturday afternoon cooking up a big feast for friends and family. But most days? I want to get a delicious, healthy meal on the table quickly.

My test when I’m purchasing new cookbooks? I flip to a half dozen or so recipes throughout the book and ask myself, Can I imagine cooking this recipe in the next couple of weeks? If most of the recipes fail the test, the book stays at the store.

I want the reality. I want dinner on the table every night without being seduced by pictures of stylist-arranged food that—let’s be honest—I’m never going to prepare.

While those books offer up a lot of grilled-chicken-in-a-peanut-sauce-in-the-sky dreams, I need some reality. It’s not just about the recipe; it’s about all the aspects of getting dinner on the table.

By the end of this book, my hope for you is that you will be able to:

save time, money, and energy when it comes to
preparing meals
have less stress when it comes to shopping
get your kitchen prepared for battle
learn some stress-free ways to get dinner on the table
get out of your cooking rut
This book is all about the process, the how of getting dinner on the table. It reflects the collective wisdom of hundreds of women who don’t have prep cooks or a crew of interns trying out new recipes. We are the women who spend a significant part of our days thinking about, shopping for, and preparing dinner. And all these wise, wonderful women are going to show you a better way to get dinner on the table no matter what your cooking background or skill level.

This is the book I wish I’d had when I first started cooking, as well as when I was raising my brood of pint-sized food critics.

Don’t worry, there will be plenty of recipes. We all love to find that one recipe that is going to become a family favorite! But this book has much more than that. My hope is that you will be able to use the recipes you already have, the ones in this book, and the new ones you find along the way to set a big, bountiful table for your family.

At Stake in 2012
Where do we go from here? And how do we get there?
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding.
—Proverbs 4:7, nkjv

Never has our nation faced a time of upheaval and tension such as this. Since Election Day 2008 we have endured a near implosion of our financial foundation with widespread collateral damage in the form of a continuing recession; a subdued, chugging, and burping economic recovery; unemployment that remains painfully close to the 10 percent threshold; real estate values that have yet to find their bottom let alone begin to mount any form of substantial rebound; bailouts; layoffs; massive deficits as far as the eye can see; a lecture from the media elite that our civic discourse isn’t civil enough, conveniently after their candidate was elected to the White House—recall how dissent was the highest form of patriotism, but apparently only until January 19, 2009—and the cherry on the bad-news sundae in the form of a tin-eared administration that responds to
the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by ramming a multi-trillion-dollar socialized medicine new
entitlement down the throats of the American people.

It is hard now to decide what the larger insult added to injury was: the repugnant charade committed by Nancy
Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democrat-majority Congress under the name “deem and pass,” or the blatant hypocrisy across the county from the summer of 2009 and early 2010 as the talking heads of the media slandered the Tea Party with vulgar remarks night after night on television.

In hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t be shocked by anything this administration has done since taking office. They stated with vivid clarity near the end of the campaign season their intent not to “let a serious crisis go to waste.” And indeed they wasted no time concocting their “Stimulus Bill,” a moniker so breathtakingly steeped in Orwellian double-speak you had to wonder if they themselves ever wonder, “Can we really get away with this?”
They certainly did, and it’s quite challenging to arrive at any conclusion other than the political Left of the United States viewed their stimulus plan as their chance to raid the public treasury with the same reckless abandon they utterly wrongly ascribed to their political foes on the right during the Bush years, and specifically during the War on Terror following the September 11 terror attacks. Make no mistake—the political Left in the United States shrieked for more than six years in all their Bush derangements syndrome glory against the fraud and opportunism they accused the Bush administration of in response to the 9/11 terror attacks—and then turned around and did the exact same thing in reaction to the financial crisis of late 2008 and the ensuing recession that defined the first few years of the Obama administration.

Within that time span there was also the Obama Apology Tour in which the president attempted to curry favor with every left-wing goon around the world by attempting to apologize for everything the Bush administration had done. One wonders how the free people in Iraq felt about that apology, while popular uprisings across the Middle East hear not the first whisper from Washington in support of their calls for democracy. They must all wonder how the priorities of the United States got so far out of whack so fast.

And now we look ahead at what’s before us . . .

• What sort of economic fallout will there be in the years after huge deficits resulting from the economic stimulus?
• How will the freedom movements in the Middle East shake out in the long term?
• In the near term, will the instability of the Middle East and the corresponding spiking of oil prices completely derail the global economic recovery?
• How many candidates will join the fray for the Republican nomination? Will we be choosing between Newt and Sarah? Will Jeb Bush jump in?
• What kind of all-out blitz will the country be subjected to for the reelection of Obama, considering the raid on history the Left pulled just to get Obama in office the first time?
• Will the recovery have legs and start blooming jobs by the time the summer of 2012 rolls around?
• Or will there be some kind of double-dip, the recovery dragged down by the massive deficits and municipal debt at the state level or the slow-to-recover commercial real estate market?
• Will there finally be an energy policy grounded in innovation?
• And how much more spreading around of other people’s wealth will we have to endure before our economy gets back on a solid footing of competitiveness and growth?

As believers, we know to take our cares and concerns with thanksgiving and petition our Lord in prayer. And as
we said in the run-up to 2008, the first thing Christians must do is pray. Pray that the Lord will raise up godly
candidates whose values are based on biblical principles and who will govern in a way that is in agreementwith God’s wisdom and honors the blessings God has given. And encourage others to pray as well.

Second, stay informed of where the candidates stand on the critical issues highlighted for you in this book.
Third, get involved. Speak up in support of candidates who hold biblically based positions on key issues.
Fourth, if you aren’t registered to vote, register now, while there’s still time to vote in the important elections
this fall.
Fifth, contribute financially to the campaigns of candidates you support.
Finally, cast your vote accordingly. May the new president we elect in November of 2012 be a godly, wise
servant of this wonderful nation who will lead us into a rich, wondrous future.

A storm the size of Texas brews when Gloria Powell and Kai Chang meet in a Ft. Worth hotel. They have come to discuss the future of Lily, the daughter Gloria adopted from China and the sister Kai hopes to reclaim. Kai is a doctor who had to give up her little sister during the Cultural Revolution and has since discovered that an inherited genetic defect may be waiting to fatally strike Lily.

Gloria’s relationship with her daughter is tattered and strained, and the arrival of Kai, despite the woman’s apparent good intentions, makes Gloria fearful. Gloria longs to restore her relationship with Lily, but in the wake of this potentially devastating diagnosis, is Kai an answer to prayer–or will her arrival force Gloria to sacrifice more than she ever imagined?