Today is Thursday, August 4th, 2005; Karen's Korner #604

"Oh, that you would bless me
and enlarge my territory!
Let your hand be with me,
and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain."
 
I Chronicles 4:10
 
This short verse in the Bible was prayed by Jabez and recorded in the first book of Chronicles. Most people recognize the verse and the name Jabez, made known to many of us in a small best-selling book by the same name, written a few years ago by Bruce Wilkinson.
 
In the book, "The Prayer of Jabez" readers were taught to pray each of the four sub-sentences as their own....asking for God's blessings, that their territory might be enlarnged, that God's hand would be on them, and that what we would do would not cause pain to themselves and to others.
 
Wright County native Sue Freund took the instructions seriously and within a week or two, God is having Sue step outside of her comfortable box and fly with 300 other Americans to help with a gardening project started by Wilkinson in Africa. She and her new friends will be planting cabbage and spinach with and for the natives, helping them to avoid starvation, teach them a new skill, and provide the plants to begin a new sustaining way of life. The short-term mission trip will be just under two weeks in length.
 
While we can pray God's blessings on Sue and her fellow travelers as they go, Sue has asked something from us:
 
"We are to bring any prayer requests along with us," she said, "after all there are 300 of us and we will be flying for 19 hours!"
 
Anyone who has prayer requests, return an email to me and I will see that they are passed along to Sue. Nothing is too tough for God! Give Him (and her) your worries, your concerns, your difficult problems, your joys. The typed requests can be with lots of information ("My son, Ted Hanson, who is stationed in Iraq from Martha Hanson) or they can be more anonymous (the future of my son and his family from a worried mom).
 
You have a week, then I will 'cut and paste' all of the messages together and forward them to Sue, to be read and shared with her African-bound friends, the middle of August.

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