Honey Lake Church and Worldwide Ministry recently conducted a spiritual weekend with legendary coach Bobby Bowden who preached in Honey Lake Church on Sunday morning. On Saturday night we had a barbeque, silent auction, Gospel singing, and Bobby and I spoke. The purpose of that event was to raise money to create the prototype for our Worldwide Ministry website. Our goal was to raise $30,000 and we netted nearly $22,000 for the ministry.
While we didn’t hit our goal, we feel truly blessed for having raised that amount, especially considering we didn’t even conceive of the idea for the event until just a few weeks prior to it. The generosity of those who contributed means that work can now begin on building the prototype for the main tool for our ministry reaching people all over the world for Christ.
A couple of weeks ago I met with a friend and his wife who are helping to design the basic capabilities of the ministry’s interactive forum and website, (our main tool for reaching folks all over the world). The site will house content, (called the Hope Library), that is derived from real people, who have faced real problems in their own lives, and have found real solutions to them through Jesus Christ. Those solutions have allowed them to not only survive their difficulties, but to thrive!
It’s often difficult to get good advice from our preachers and teachers, family and friends, or even trained psychologists and psychiatrists. Few have actually lived through any of the problems for which they routinely counsel people. Many preachers got saved at nine years old and have never even tried drinking a beer or smoked a joint. How could they possibly be expected to counsel an alcoholic, or drug addict, or for that matter someone whose child is mixed up in the occult, or is considering committing suicide, or a woman that just got raped or molested, or someone who is incarcerated, or someone who is homeless?
They haven’t experienced any of those things and I’m sure cannot envision what it would be like to live through some of the horrors of this world; I can only imagine how helpless it makes them feel sometimes.
My brother once told me that unless you’ve lived through losing one of your children you cannot relate to someone grieving the loss of theirs. I would say the same thing about suicide. Unless you’ve lived through the pain of losing someone you love to suicide, it is difficult to find words that can comfort or make sense of it all. I recently interviewed a woman who had been raped and she said the same thing about her ordeal.
One reason my own message is so effective in prisons is that I’ve been in prison myself. I know first-hand what they are going through and they listen to me. It gives them hope to see that I’ve overcome the obstacles of my former life and inspires them that they too can change their lives, no matter what mistakes they’ve made. The same is true with empire builders who made fortunes and then faced all of the temptations and sorrow that comes with attaining too much success too fast. I’ve been there and done that and can relate to them too and I know others who can as well.
I’ve lined up over 100 people that I know who have lived through about every kind of temptation, sorrow, and tribulation that satan can dream up, (including being divorced, abused, addicted to pornography, raped, molested and trafficked for sex, diagnosed with a terminal disease, alcoholics, addicts, atheists, agnostics, those who have made huge sums of money but ended up miserable with a wife who was stone cold and kids an absolute wreck; you name it), and yet they now know wonderful peace, joy, and love in their lives.
Their stories (and in many cases, one on one counseling) will benefit those who are likewise suffering all over the world. Getting this content of real people who have solved real problems in their lives through Jesus Christ to people all over the world including some of those pastors mentioned earlier who need a helping hand in reaching these people will be the Worldwide Ministry’s primary goal.
The site will be very sophisticated, multi-lingual, and will contain built-in artificial intelligence that can answer questions in voice activated format and print. It ties in with every form of social media and real time updates on site activity. Cold shivers run up and down my spine and I experience spiritual goose bumps as big as grapes when I think about people all over the world accessing this system on their web browsers and before exiting making decisions for Christ. At that point the system will automatically link them to a discipleship program that fits their profile and they will be well on their way to serving Christ and enjoying His peace for the rest of their days.
Cool beans!
This week I’ll meet with several key people who are involved with designing our vehicle of outreach to the lost, and also spend some time further organizing the ministry, and finding ways to fund it. I’ve already been somberly told that in order to accomplish our objectives, it will require millions of dollars.
I personally worked an enormous amount of hours to put our Bobby Bowden event together, (as did several others among us, including volunteers from our resort staff). It literally consumed me and while I’m appreciative of the tremendous blessing that we received I’m also looking at investing all of that work and at the end of the day raising a mere $22,000 as being synonymous to building a small sand castle on the beach compared to needing to build Mt. Everest in order to succeed.
Yikes!
And then I thought of something Mother Teresa once said to one of the sisters at her clinic in answer to her concern over their not having enough money to buy food and medicine. She merely brushed aside the sister’s comments by saying, “Why don’t even worry about it my dear, God’s got lots of money . . .
Hmmm . . . That old gal might not have been the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen, but she was very wise, and I look forward to meeting her in heaven one of these days to thank her for the encouragement she provided to me today.
Psalms 50:10
For every beast of the forest is Mine, The cattle on a thousand hills. “I know every bird of the mountains, And everything that moves in the field is Mine . . .
September 16, 2013 – Click here to listen