Above Rubies Daily Encouragement Blogs
Through the weekly and daily devotionals you can be constantly encouraged in your great role of parenting, the highest career in the nation. You can also stay updated on what's happening with the Above Rubies ministry.
BECAUSE WE SAID “YES”!
My husband and I met, fell in love, and got married. I was 27 and ready to become a mom. I had been working at our church as a graphic designer enjoying putting the gospel message on tracts, postcards, and bulletins. He was a pastoral intern at the time.
The Lord gave us a baby almost right away and we began life as a family. We both found there were a lot of ministry related things we were used to doing that we didn’t have the time and energy for anymore. It was difficult to keep our priorities straight.
After a few years the Lord led us to a small town in NH. My husband began his own business as a coffee roaster to support our growing family. Our long-term goal was to see people get saved, grow in their knowledge of God’s word, and hopefully start a church. Years passed and our family continued to grow. After 15 years, we are expecting our 10th child. And our ministry looked very different from what it did before had our first baby.
But today I want to take a minute to share with you how saying “Yes” to the Lord for 10 children has multiplied our joy and usefulness for him in SO many ways. Yes, there are things we had to say no to, but looking back there are so many doors He opened. What has the Lord done?
Seeing our family and love for our children has brought many opportunities. Ladies come to me who have experienced the loss of a dear baby they were carrying. Their unsaved families don’t recognize the little one as a life. We do! We love them, cry with them, and pray with them.
Ladies come to vent when it is their due date and their baby isn’t born yet. We hug them, we love them, we pray for them. Families have come that have a great many children and are glad to be able to spend time with another family who loves children, especially when their own relatives don’t like their big family. Couples have come who met the Lord later in life. They now realize that God’s plan for the family is different and better than the plan they had. They ask for prayer that the Lord will give them a child. We have cried, we have prayed, and we have seen wombs open and babies born!
Our church is still very small. Most of the children in it are ours. Recently we began two children’s ministries. We started a scouting group for boys to teach men to disciple their sons and teach them practical skills. We started a girls’ group to help moms disciple their daughters and teach them homemaking skills. These groups have been full and growing.
We look at each other in surprise. Where did these families come from? We began to realize that they are all parents who came to Christ as adults. They are looking at the world and desperately wanting to point their children away from it. However, their families are not Christian and they do not know now to raise godly children. Then they realize this “crazy” family on the other side of town who has nine children and children’s clubs that might help them. They come, they try it, they learn, they read, and they grow. This would not happen if we didn’t stand out so much.
As our children grow, the impact they have individually on our family ministry grows too! My oldest child makes friends everywhere he goes—at the park, at the lake, at the library. Moms and grandmothers will come to me (that I have never met) and ask to get their sons to my house to play. They can see our home is a safe place. Our children are different in a good way.
I often get the joy of talking to and praying with ladies because I can trust that my children will carefully entertain the visitor’s children. They play games, they make cookies, and they patiently come up with ideas that the children like. All because they know this opens doors for eternity.
We have had the great joy of listening to our children pray for their friends from the lake, the library, and the park. We have seen them give Bibles to their friends. We did not ask them to do this. They just watch what we are doing, and they desire to do the same thing on their level. They experience the joys and frustrations of ministry even at age 10 that will strengthen them for the future.
Once, my daughter purchased and monogramed a Bible for a girl that visited our church occasionally. About a year later the girl’s mother gave me a bag of craft supplies that she didn’t want any more. At the bottom of the bag was the Bible. I was so saddened. For one that they would be so hard as to give it back and two because I was concerned that my daughter might not want to give a Bible away again.
I put it on the counter, not sure what to do. My daughter found it and took it to her room. A few months later that girl came back to church. My daughter had the courage to tell her she found her Bible and would she want it back? The girl did take it back. About six months later, I happened to see the girl’s mother, and she told me that her daughter really liked “that Bible” that my daughter gave her and she reads it sometimes at night. What a surprise! Then she followed it up by saying that she was getting her other daughter one for her birthday. Oh, the surprising things that God does!
Yes, I no longer make 20,000 post cards for a bulk mailer for church invitations or hundreds of flyers for a church event. Today the Lord has replaced that with people, families, lives, and eternity. I am so thankful!
CHARITY PARKER
Greenfield, New Hampshire, USA
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Picture: Mason and Charity with their beautiful children: George (13), Eleanor (12), Amos (10), Stewart (9), Carolyn (7), Jane (5), Lydia (4), William (2), Faith (1) and coming baby.
