Thanksgiving Day in the USA is November 23 this year, but Canadian Thanksgiving Day was last week Monday, October 9. This post is therefore late, but I forgive myself because (1) I haven’t been well, and (2) my Thanksgiving weekend was spent between fresh concerns for Israel, and hosting some amazing house guests. So my aim today is to prove that a good post “is better late than never.”
I’ve had so much to thank God for since my last testimony post[i] that I’ll pick up from where that left off – last summer into fall. Without sharing details, I can say that in the months leading up to that time I’d been separated from the close Messianic congregation with whom Mike and I had been in fellowship for six years, including some members who’d been with us in an earlier Messianic congregation since 2013. Sensing that I should not ‘kick against the pricks’[ii] I had resigned myself to this separation, but God, my Heavenly Daddy, knew how lonely and restless I was, and decided to do something about it.
PART 1. So, He worked in a mysterious way one morning in August 2022, as I combed my hair in front of the mirror. My dresser was next to a large window, from which I had pulled back the blinds to let in natural light. As my eyes flitted between the window and the mirror, I remembered a lilting song that my sweet friend Allison and I had sung together in a grade 12 or 13 song competition at our girls’ school. It began with, “Beyond my open window, each sun bright morning brings,” and I think the next line went, “The fragrance of the thorn tree, the sound of restless wings…” (We’d learnt that song in the early 1970s, so it’s not surprising that I couldn’t find it just now on the internet.)
However, El Olam (the Eternal God) for whom the 20th-21st Centuries are a mere blip on His timeline of eternity, had reminded me of that old song to direct me toward a blessing He had in store. Step 1 of His direction came as a thought: “How can I contact Allison?” I had reconnected with a few old high school friends on a pre-Covid visit to Jamaica, but Allison hadn’t been able to join us. So I thought, “I can call one of those other friends and ask for Allison’s number.” Once I followed that prompt, Daddy God began to pull back a veil, initially revealing two things that morning. (1) The friend I chose to call actually had a very deep need to talk! Unknown to me, she and her husband had lost their son a few months prior, and her grief was palpable. We spoke for a very long time, and then I prayed with her and for her, promising that Mike and I would continue to remember her family in prayer. (2) I heard that our high school A-Level Class of 1970-72 was planning an October 2022 reunion in Jamaica, in preparation for which there was a lively WhatsApp chat that I was invited to join, although I couldn’t fly in for the reunion as some others were planning to do.
I did get Allison’s number, and when I called her the revelations continued. First, I discovered that she had become a passionate intercessory leader at her church. From our footloose teenage background of American-influenced ‘Black Power’ idealism – perhaps early evidence of what my distinguished daughter has termed ‘Remote Acculturation’[iii] – God had led us both into the sure-footed stance of service to His higher power. So now, after all these years, we again found ourselves on almost the same page – but this time a page with God as both header and footer. I was ‘blown away’ at what He had done.
The next revelation came as I caught up with other old school friends via the WhatsApp chat. An amazing number of us – certainly the most frequent and vocal participants – had also become ardent Believers and active ‘daughters of encouragement’ – in the spirit of Acts 4:36 and in other ways. Again I was wowed by the LORD’s work, and I imagined that many adults in our teenage years must have been praying for us. But here’s my actual testimony from all of this … here is what God was doing for me. He Who knew not only my lonely estate at the time, also knew what was coming toward us in the year ahead, so He was surrounding me and others with ‘new’ intercessory support! Sure, I was still close to a group of praying friends based in Toronto, but God knew that as concerns multiplied we would all benefit from broader intercessory networking. So although the reunion came and went, and although some months later I was able to gather in Jamaica with a few of those involved, still the chat continues – mutually uplifting, mutually supportive, an absolute God-thing for such a time as this! In this context, ‘such a time as this’ is not referring to the horrendous global events that are bringing us all to our knees, but the kind of personal events that attend many women moving from their 60s into 70s, such as the increasing frequency of illness and death of relatives, friends and husbands – all of which we have experienced together in the past year.
PART 2. Fast forward to July 2023, and the LORD granted me a partial re-connection, mainly online via Zoom, with members of the Messianic congregation that was still dear to my heart. This has been a great blessing, a good and perfect gift coming down from the Father of Lights, worthy of mention in my personal thanksgiving to Him. In this group, I am even more ‘on the same page’ doctrinally than I am with other groups, and can participate more freely in discourse and prayer without risk of detracting from the spirit of agreement. Here also, I receive prayers to which I can say a complete “Ahmein.”
Then, stepping into August, the LORD brought another surprise. Mike and I have to periodically put ‘credit’ on the cell phones we use in Jamaica, to avoid ‘losing’ our numbers. When I temporarily turned on that phone to do this, an unfamiliar WhatsApp chat popped up before me. It was a ladies’ fellowship group from the church we still attend when in Jamaica, which had been our church home for 20 years before we migrated to Canada. Shortly before the end of our last visit, I had requested for my Jamaican phone number to be added to their chat, but had neither followed up nor remembered about it once we returned to Canada and put the Jamaican phones away. The message I ‘accidentally’ saw in August prompted me to request that my Canadian number be added. So in short order I was also able to have that circle of ‘church sisters’ as regular contacts instead of just reconnecting on ‘snow bird’ visits.
PART 3. As a backdrop to all of the above, more frequent medical intervention had become necessary for me, so I had given up on part time employment, and wanted to rally more prayer for an extension of my earth-life. Can you see why God had set me up to reconnect with all these groups of praying friends?
My constantly close group of friends in the Greater Toronto Area is actually part of the Diaspora from our original Jamaican congregation. In this group, more than any other, we share all our highs and lows with typical Jamaican candor, so they knew that as Canadian Thanksgiving weekend approached I was not at my best. Can you guess what our Heavenly Father whispered in their ears to do? Well, I’ll tell you. Six of them made a plan to drive for almost five hours to our home ‘in the boonies’ on Saturday afternoon with a large turkey, seasoned Jamaican style, and other ingredients, to give us and our family a Thanksgiving Sunday treat! Through bad weather and road construction delays they came, to pamper me and Mike, to meet some of our grandchildren they hadn’t met before, and to reconnect with our children who used to be students in their Sunday School classes back in Jamaica. On Sunday night we celebrated further in sweet corporate worship to our God, in the Breaking of Bread, and with uplifting testimonies of God’s work in their lives – some of which we hadn’t heard recently, and most of which our younger generations had never heard before. On Monday morning – the official Thanksgiving Day – we had another devotional time, in which they blessed us with their memories of positive impacts that Mike and I (as the eldest among them) had made on their lives at our church back in Jamaica.
What a wonderful Heavenly Father we have! He had sent them to bless us, we had all gathered to give Him thanks, and He ended our time by showering us all with encouragement, upliftment, and a sense of His own thanks to us all. Then He piloted them safely back home to the GTA. Praise the LORD!
[iii] See https://innovation.umn.edu/culture-and-family-life-lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2020/01/Ferguson-Tran-2017.pdf
[i] See Part 2: A July-October 2022 Testimony
[ii] See https://www.gotquestions.org/kick-against-the-pricks.html
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