Henrietta Mears

Yesterday I had the incredible opportunity to spend the day at Forest Home and speak to the Forest Home Women's Auxiliary. What a privilege! As I drove in to the Forest Home area I saw Mears Lake and the Mears cabin. I thought, "Wow, I'm in Henrietta Mears country!!" Even better, I delivered the messages in Henrietta Mears Amphitheatre. Another privilege! I remember when I was in seminary I went to one of their book sales and found an incredible treasure. It was a book entitled "The Story of Livingstone." When I opened the book, what I saw revealed the treasure - the former owner had signed her name in big blue letters - Henrietta C. Mears. She is my hero for many reasons - she loved the Lord Jesus Christ, she influenced others to be sold out to the Lord, she was a trailblazer and wrote her own curriculum, she was flamboyant and fearless in so many ways. She believed God for the Forest Home land and evidently made an offer of $30,000 that was turned down because it was too low. Then, evidently a flood came through and destroyed parts of the property and the offer was then accepted. Now you should see beautiful Forest Home. My friend Bonnie Nelson, who is the Spiritual Guidance Board Chairman, showed me the Mears cabin and the beautiful Lakeview Lodge. There were a number of women there at the Auxiliary Leadership Conference who actually KNEW Henrietta Mears. I had lunch with one woman who was part of her college group, who met in her home, and who knew her very well. She told me a number of stories and said that Billy Graham used to call her a technicolor Christian. What a blessed day I had. One I will never forget. I hope a bit of Henrietta Mears will rub off on all of us and that we will, as she often encouraged, DREAM BIG. Anything less is not worthy of our great God.

Where Have I Been?

Within a few days after my post about Jowett in January, my little Fujitsu P5010D suffered a serious hard drive crash. Every intelligent person has their hard drive backed up, especially if they are writing books, and especially if they have a new book about to be published. Unfortunately, I did not have anything backed up except a recent edition of the new book. When the message "unmountable boot volume" appeared and I could not get into Windows even in Safe Mode, I knew I was in trouble. So I called the most brilliant Fujitsu guys up in San Jose at portableone.com (Ivan and Tim) and they said they would do their best to save everything. The Lord has been teaching me a lot about "TRUST" in the last two years (TRUST is total reliance under stress and trial). This was a huge issue of "TRUST" for me. All my book outlines and ideas for the future were on this hard drive. Also a book on ministry that is more than half written. I prayed that the Lord would give the computer guys brilliance. I reasoned that if I lost it all, then the Lord could give me new ideas and that all was really not lost. I did experience His peace in the midst of it all. At any rate, after several days, they called me with the good news that they were able to fix the hard drive long enough to clone it and install a new hard drive with all the old info on it. The bottom line is that they were able to make it function as if it never happened. Thank you Lord!!! Once I received my little laptop back, I was way behind because of deadlines for my new book, Radical Intimacy. So I shifted into high gear. Once the book was edited, it was time for typesetting. Jodi Adams, the designer for Quiet Time Ministries, had already created the style with the hands of God and man from the Sistine Chapel ceiling painted by Michelangelo. We decided to use Adobe InDesign because it can do so much more than Quark. I thought because I knew PageMaker so well that InDesign would be a piece of cake. Typesetting is a different story. There are things you need to know such as baseline shift, kerning, leading etc. So I called up totaltraining.com and had Steve Holmes' DVDs on InDesign fedexed to me. I studied them for an entire weekend and became an InDesign pro :) (not really, but I learned enough to typeset a book). Thank you Steve Holmes of total training. I spent the next week typesetting Radical Intimacy and then uploaded it to the printer, got the proof, and voila, about a week later, the books arrive, just in time for our 30 Day Journey for the Women's Revival Campaign beginning April 7.

I'm excited about Radical Intimacy. There are individuals and groups from everywhere on this quiet time journey. We have over 200 women at our church doing it and there is an excitement in the air. I pray that the Lord will use this book to help thousands draw near to the Lord in a new and deeper way.

I'm happy to be back to my blog and will share more as we go along. Oh, by the way, I now have everything backed up on this little computer. Blessings to all!