Bloom!

This month we wanted to share this stirring and Gospel-filled video with you.  It's from Pastor Eric Ludy of Ellerslie.  Be sure to take a few minutes to watch this.  It's so worth it, girls! Praying you'll draw even closer to Christ this weekend! Joanna, Krista, Megan, Emily & Victoria

(This is part two of Alina's story of how God used a shoebox in her life.  For part one, click here .) Growing up, we continued to attend the church, going to Sunday school and learning more about God. God spoke to me and I received Him in my life as my personal Savior at 17. Then I started working with children every Saturday in a small village close to my home town. The kids were from poor families, mostly not Christian. Every Christmas, for the 5 years I worked there, we had Christmas celebrations in the little church where we were gathering, singing carols, putting up dramas, reciting poems, and Bible verses.  A Christmas message was always shared with all the children and parents invited for the occasion. At the end of the program, every child in the room received a shoebox. I still have pictures from those days. The smiles on the children's faces in the pictures remind me always of my little brother's smile, that Christmas when we received our own shoeboxes. ...

It's that time of the year again - shoebox time!  As the national collection week for Operation Christmas Child approaches on November 17-24, we thought it'd be a great opportunity to share how God works through this fabulous ministry.  Us Bloom! ladies love packing shoeboxes and pray that the Gospel will be made known through each box.  Krista talked with her friend Alina, who graciously agreed to share her story of how God used a shoebox in her life.  This is part one, with part two coming tomorrow. My name is Alina. I was born 32 years ago in a little communist country in Eastern Europe called Romania. It is a beautiful place, with gorgeous mountains, valleys and the Black Sea. The people are very welcoming but they walk the streets with sad faces, looking like they are carrying the burden of the whole world on their shoulders. There is a lot of poverty and desperation. During communism, people were forbidden to attend churches. The communists used to b...

As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, many of us start thinking about being thankful.  It's only natural when you have a holiday with the words "thanks" and "giving" in it!  Of course, showing gratitude to Christ for all that He has done in our lives and for Who He is - that's something we're to do year-around, not just during the holiday.  This was a good reminder to me as I was going through a book by Nancy Leigh DeMoss entitled "Choosing Gratitude".  I perused the pages, I was reminded of the story of how this book came to be in my possession... Sitting in the ER, my vision blurring so bad that I couldn't read the bulletin board in front of me, I felt like sobbing.  My head ached pretty badly.  I was dizzy, nauseous, and worried.  Yes, I had just gotten a concussion.  I felt like vomiting but didn't.  As I sat there, with a friend on either side of me, I tried to pray.  I tried to make sense of what was happening, but the con...

What do you fear? If you’re like me, you read that, thought good question, and skipped along without answering it. I don’t like thinking about my fears either. Some of them are bigger than others – I fear something terrible happening to the people I love, for example – while others are smaller, like the haunting fear of getting lost on my college campus and missing an important class or exam. The latter isn ’t that unreasonable, I suppose, given my terrible sense of direction. - But I digress. - Quite frankly, we live in a scary world. All you have to do is pop open your internet browser and you’ll see a headline of the latest terrible and senseless tragedy. Our friend gets cancer. Haiti, a suffering country already, is crushed by that earthquake. We watch as our best friend’s heart gets broken – or ours does. - It’s enough to make me – an optimistic and worry-free person by nature – want to crawl under my covers and never come out. But I want you to climb out o...