Discovery: The act or process of detecting,
finding, spotting, unearthing.
My true Soul Sister, Linda Jones, is the one who taught me how to open the lid of the small box I had placed God in and allow His divine Holy Spirit to come out of hiding, flow into my life, and fill my very being! That was sixteen years ago. During a part of those years, for some reason unknown to us, God placed Linda & her family in California. She’s back now living in my city and together we have experienced a journey over the last thirteen weeks like no other.
While in California, Linda met Christine Taimanglo (pronounced “time-an-glow”). In obedience to God’s pressing, Christine recently wrote a 13-week intense Bible study. The study being in prepublication, Christine contacted Linda and asked her if she would be willing to obtain an accountability partner and do the study as a preview before it is published. Linda understood that she and her partner would vigilantly go through the ninety daily assignments, one of which being to meet weekly and discuss the week’s lessons. Having accepted the quest, guess whom Linda chose as her study, prayer, & accountability partner? That’s right it was me! We began our study with a careful dissection of the introduction. That took me a week in itself because I had made up my mind from the get-go that if I was going to commit myself to a ninety day study I was going to absorb every single word including the introduction. I will tell you that the introduction was just as powerful, in its own way, as the study itself. As we’ve gone along, we have let Christine know our progress & thoughts. At the end of the lesson the two of us will give Christine our final thoughts on and the effectiveness of the whole study.
It is tough to decide what part of this study is my favorite; The mornings alone with God when my house is either asleep or empty, learning how to journal, hearing my Creator and what He is speaking in my life, the fact that the Holy Spirit has prompted and given me the material to write a lesson on becoming acquainted with Him, the deep discoveries and growth in the different facets of my life in which the study addresses, or the sweet early Saturday mornings when Linda and I escape to the coffee shop, cuddle up in the soft corner chairs we dubbed as our “assigned seats”, and unravel to each other all the amazing-ness of God that was so sweetly exposed to us during the week. Or would one favorite thing be the growth & depth, (can those two words even make sense together outside of spirituality?), of my prayer life including intercessory prayer and praying with someone else. As cliché as it may sound it truly is the culmination of all these blessings combined. Although I cannot go into details of the copy-written Bible study, I can tell you that with only one week of the study remaining; all that I have learned and experienced has not simply stayed between Linda & me. No it has expounded out causing a ripple effect in our lives and the lives of those around us! Prayers have been answered & voyages have begun. I have been able to use things I’ve discovered through this study in my job at Tammy Lane Productions & Linda has been able to accomplish great things in her job, also as a result. Maybe it was for such an effect as this that God had placed the Jones family in California.
I thought it next to impossible that Linda and I could get any closer as soul sisters but God spoke through her 16 yrs ago when she taught me, He spoke to her husband when they moved out of state, He spoke when Linda & Christine met, He spoke when He prompted Christine to write His Bible study, He spoke when Linda chose me to do it with her, He spoke every single day over the last thirteen weeks. He is always there and it is through listening and obedience that we know when God Speaks!
Blessings, Treva Hamm
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