Preparing for 2013 – Reaching Hurting Women Ministries

For the last several weeks I’ve been asking God for direction and focus for my ministry blog. After much prayer and meditation I finally have a peace about my outline for the upcoming year. In keeping with last year’s magazine format, we will have topical weekly columns that repeat on a specific Wednesday of the month.

To be faithful to my recovery journey and my ministry’s primary message of healing, I will continue to dedicate the first Wednesday of each month to addiction recovery. The last few years I’ve gone through the traditional 12 Steps. This year I am going to combine the 12 Steps, with Celebrate Recovery’s Eight Principles – which are based on The Beatitudes. I’m looking forward to learning new things.

This last year we learned about Virtues and Vices. Although, I will continue my personal studies of Christian Virtue, I’ve decided to take a slight detour and focus on the Spiritual Disciplines this years. We will be using Richard Foster’s brilliant book Celebration of Discipline, Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines and Charles Swindoll’s So You Want to Be Like Christ? as foundations for our study. I hope you come along as we go out into the deep in search of what God would have us be in this life.

In 2004 when I was beginning my recovery journey and returning back to the Lord, I was a mess to put it lightly. I struggled terribly with my thought life and mental boundaries. It wasn’t long before God directed me to write scriptures and various lessons I was learning from books on 3×5 cards. These cards were crucial to getting through days and often hours of those early years. I literally carried them with me everywhere I went. As I’ve struggled in a few areas these last few months, I’ve been drawn back to my cards. Then when I was praying for this upcoming year, God reminded me of the important messages held in those cards. So for 2013, on the third Wednesday of each month I will post a column called Living Life Lessons which will be various topics and life lessons God has been working into my life these last eight years.

As a student of life and avid reader it’s important that I continue to share the good things I find. On the fourth Wednesday of each month I will be posting a Book Review. I’m excited about the book list that has already come together for this next year! Some are on my resource page and have been critical to my journey for several years. Others are new publications and some just new to me. I hope you will be blessed as we strive to be better together.