Beside Still Waters Ministries

Great is Thy faithfulness, O Lord!!Just when I wonder if God is paying any attention whatsoever, He tenderly and lovingly shows me in countless ways that He truly loves me.The holidays are hard for me - since my parents divorced in ‘96, but especially since I moved back up to Ohio in 2000, Christmas never feels “right”. Everything going on celebrates “family” and yet mine never can seem to get along even for one day. What is funny is it actually isn’t my parents all that much, though it is hard to get them to decide on what they are going to do, it is my siblings. Anyway, long story short my sister made her own plans to be somewhere else on Christmas, which is just as well because she usually causes the most tension and stress, and my dad and stepmom went down to my stepsister’s in Columbus. So, my aunt and I went to my mom’s house, where my brother and my nephew spent the night and we had Christmas together. My brother managed to upset my nephew only once with a silly demand and an even sillier punishment, and my grandma complained about us watching “Cars” on DVD only twice. All in all, a pretty good day considering how it has gone in the past.Anyway, because of that family stuff and because all the hoopla makes the desire to have a family of my own (husband and children, ahem) come out full-force, I also usually feel REALLY lonely. This year, while I did face some of that once again, God new the prayer in my heart and brought back to me some friends from my past (high school) and helped me get closer to other present friends. I don’t know why, but friendships always seem to be difficult for me - not necessarily difficult to create, but difficult to go deeper than a surface friendship and very difficult to continue if circumstances of life draw us away from living near one another and seeing each other regularly. I can’t say that I’m all that great at keeping up correspondences, but the funny thing is that all of my friends from as far back as I can remember have the same problem. They don’t write me much, and I don’t seem to either. It isn’t on purpose, and it isn’t because I don’t care or they don’t care, it just happens for no real reason.The other gift of Christmas God brought me is actually continuing to show me that I’m headed in the right direction with starting my Beside Still Waters Ministries business. I just had another church agree to pay me to lead worship on a regular basis on Saturday evenings. It was basically laid in my lap with little effort from me, and I am just amazed. With the money from the cantata I played for at Uniontown, I was able to register my own domain name for the next three years. I only have one page there right now, and the only link that works is to go to this blog, but here it is: http://www.beside-still-waters.org/ . Just so you know, the dashes are important, the name without them was already registered to someone else as was using “.com” at the end instead of “.org” I also got for a little more money an e-mail address using that domain name. I’ll be switching all my business stuff to that.Well, gotta go because lunch is done. God is good - ALL the time!!