Dear Lord; This morning Father, I want to share a story with You; A very powerful story that brought both my wife and I to tears last night.<\/p>\n
It was a long day yesterday Lord.\u00a0 Between the ice storm which led to school delays and then closings, and a number of other typical daily stresses, Shannon and I both came home a bit worn down.\u00a0 Grabbing the mail on the way in the house, Shannon spotted a hand-addressed envelope from the kids\u2019 school.\u00a0 She opened it up, and inside was a letter written to us by one of the office staff regarding Jonathan.\u00a0 She quietly read the letter, laid it down and started to cry.<\/p>\n
The letter was a personal note from one of the school administrative staff detailing a conversation she\u2019d had with Jonathan the previous Friday.\u00a0 Apparently, Jonathan was assisting with shuttling some computer equipment between his classroom and the office, and helping with putting it away.\u00a0 At some point during this process, he started talking to one of the ladies in the office and asked her if she was familiar with a man called Jesus Christ.\u00a0 While surprised, she replied that yes, she was very familiar with Jesus.\u00a0 He then went on to tell her all about his disease (Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis)<\/em>, his surgeries, treatments and chemotherapy as an infant, and how he\u2019d gotten through all those trials and was doing very well now.\u00a0 She told him how wonderful he looked and that she was glad everything was doing so well, at which time he then left to go back to class.<\/p>\n What Jonathan didn\u2019t know however, was that her husband had been battling two forms of serious cancers for many years, and that it was only through the grace of Christ that he was still alive.\u00a0 Along with that, she indicated there were others within earshot going through similar trials who also took interest in his story.\u00a0 She wrote that Jonathan\u2019s unprompted testimony was exactly what she and others needed at that moment, and she was sure he was meant to be there to deliver Your message.\u00a0 Her faith had been renewed, by the witness and encouragement of our little boy.<\/p>\n When I came home shortly thereafter and read the letter, there were tears in my eyes as well.<\/p>\n I talked to Jonathan later that evening about the conversation that prompted the letter (of course, not revealing what she\u2019d written to me)<\/em>, and asked him : \u201cWhat made you ask her if she knew Jesus?\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 He answered that he really didn\u2019t know, and honestly didn\u2019t remember what led up to it; It just came to him at the time.<\/p>\n You spoke through him Father, and to him it seemed perfectly natural and reasonable at the time.\u00a0 May we all be that open to Your Voice Lord, and not be afraid to share it with others.<\/p>\n Thank You Father. \u00a0This touched me in a way that only You can.\u00a0 Please bring Your Healing and Comfort to those going through these trials, and let us all be as effective and powerful a witness to Your Grace as the words of a child were that day.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n ~Phather Phil\ufeff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Lord; This morning Father, I want to share a story with You; A very powerful story that brought both my wife and I to tears last night. It was a long day yesterday Lord.\u00a0 Between the ice storm which led to school delays and then closings, and a number of other typical daily stresses, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[526,925,286,321,27,556,43,915,361,15,173,628,59,5,804,923,301,269,924,116,190,119,355,230,845,517,776,572,585,818,174,922,547,227,117,867,584,384,462,889,114,122,789,71,157,449,379,348],"class_list":["post-539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-emails-to-god","tag-cancer","tag-chemotherapy","tag-child","tag-christ","tag-comfort","tag-conversation","tag-courage","tag-dear-lord","tag-encouragement","tag-faith","tag-father","tag-friday","tag-grace","tag-healing","tag-help","tag-histiocytosis","tag-husband","tag-jesus","tag-jesus-christ","tag-jonathan","tag-kids","tag-langerhans-cell-histiocytosis","tag-message","tag-mother","tag-need","tag-personal","tag-plea","tag-powerful","tag-read","tag-renewed","tag-school","tag-school-delays","tag-serious","tag-shannon","tag-son","tag-storm","tag-story","tag-stress","tag-surprised","tag-testimony","tag-thank-you","tag-treatments","tag-trials","tag-voice","tag-wife","tag-witness","tag-wonderful","tag-word"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p18mMc-8H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}