The beginning of God's blessing to me

----- Forwarded message -----
From: Carolyn & Everett
ourfarm2@myfairpoint.net


The beginning of God's blessing to me..............1

All of you on my mailing list are going to get testimonies from me, and hopefully as time goes on, others will email me with their testimonies that I can pass on to you all... I began 'My Book of Blessings' several years ago, but the idea of it after a while fizzled, until this virus became the problem it is, I thought that it might be a good idea for me to pass on all that God has done in my life, (that I had brains enough to write down before forgetting it,) :( anyway...probably once a week or so, I'll pass on a testimony from myself or if any of you send me a testimony of yours I'll pass that on... and hopefully we can uplift one another with the wonderful things that God does for each of us, both large and small blessings....

[Mark 16:15] He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be damned.
[Mark 16:16] And these signs shall follow them that believe; It’s from this scripture of Mark 16:16 that I have been led to understand that the blessings both small and large, in my life, are signs to me. That HE is aware of me, and is working with me, so that I might have a better understanding of HIS Majesty and greatness and just how impossible it is for me or any human being, to put him into some kind of a box that I can completely ‘understand’ God. We can’t, because GOD is beyond our comprehension.

This is my testimony of how God has helped me along my way, many times when I didn’t even realize he was there, HE was.

Everyone has a testimony of God’s love in their lives. My life is no different. I recognize God’s hand through each stage of my life. Starting from my very beginning.

We lived in the southern part of Maine for over thirty years, and when we left Maine for a 5 ½ year stay at our church campgrounds in Odessa ,Mo. my only opportunity to know who had passed away back in Maine was to check the obituaries in the local papers. And I did, every day.

Now we’re back where we began as a couple, after being away for nearly forty years, Away from the only place I ever really loved. Our island home, here in Stonington, Maine. And still, I check the obits every day, And it came to me, just a short while ago, that everyone who has an obit put in the paper includes things like whether they were married, or not, if they had children , or not, and if they did , what their names were, their hobbies, things they enjoyed doing, what made them happy. How much education they had, and what they have done with their lives. It occurred to me that few if any included in their obituaries, what God had done for them throughout their lives. I’d like mine to be different. My life was always in God’s hands, So my book, will include all the blessings I’ve been able to recall, that make me who I am. Some I recall from memory but many I’ve written down as they happened or when memory, clearly reminded me of them.

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, and attend a Restoration Group here on the island. We began as members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Many of the RLDS membership left when women in the priesthood became an acceptable idea, back in 1984. So here we are, in 2010, meeting in a home, with maybe eight or nine. (Oh, I‘ve skipped a lot to get to this point, but its time to get to my story and my blessings, The dreams, visions, etc. that I have been given, which have strengthened my faith, and given me the fortitude to endure, through many disappointments, sickness, death of family members, and a list too long to mention right now of other hardships,

I jump around a lot and I hope you can keep up.

Our church priesthood is set up along the lines of the N.T. church of the Scriptures. We have, when the church is in order (which it isn’t right now) Apostles, seventies, high priests, patriarchs and evangelists, bishops, elders, priests, teachers, and deacons. One of the responsibilities of the Patriarchs is to provide a blessing to each baptized member, once in their lives. When I was in my early forties, I asked to have it done, as I felt I needed it. God speaks to us through his Patriarchal priesthood, giving us our blessing to sustain us through our lives. Which brings me to the first of my blessings from God. When my spirit was still with HIM I was being prepared for life that would give me an opportunity to come to know God, our Heavenly Father, I came into the world as a result of an affair between my biological mother Mary and a man she became involved with while her husband was overseas during WWII. Mary made a mistake, and I was the end result. She loved her husband but was lonely and only 20 years old, and this man was nearby and it happened. She didn’t know what to do, and living on a very small island back in the fall of 1944, where everyone knew everyone else, she felt she had to leave.

She went to N.Y.C. and was going to stay there until she had me , put me in an orphanage and go back to her life on the island in Maine that she was from and try to recover her sanity and future with her new husband when he returned from the war.

A man who knew Mary found out that she was pregnant, He mentioned it to his sister and her husband who lived in South Portland, Maine at the time,(The couple was from Stonington, )They had gone to S.Portland to get work during WWII. Their names were Bert and Ruth Williams. Bert and Ruth had no children and they knew Mary, through Ruth’s family , They both thought a great deal of Mary and so Ruth wrote to her expressing a desire to adopt her child when it was born . They wrote back and forth and eventually Mary came back to Maine, and stayed with Bert and Ruth until the baby was born. Then she went back to the island she lived on, and eventually Bert and Ruth, moved back to Stonington, with a baby. The baby of course was me, Carolyn. This was my first blessing, had I not of been adopted by this family of RLDS members, I would never had know God’s church. The church that accepts the scriptures as truth, the church which believes the Principles of the Gospel, which are: faith, repentance, baptism, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. And oh yes ,another blessing came in my Patriarch blessing. It has strengthen my faith when I doubted that I was of any good to God. It said, “God has known about you since before you were born and your presence here is not by chance, but by His will. He has watched over you at times and in places when you were not aware of His presence”.... And looking back over the years I know Exactly, at least some of the times, anyway, when he intervened in my mortal life to save my soul from a fate that would have destroyed me.

So anyway, that is how I came to be. Should abortions have been legal, I’m sure I wouldn’t be here today to share God’s blessings with whoever reads my ramblings.

So now, my book of blessings continues, in no particular order, Over the years I’ve written down many of the wonderful testimonies I’ve experienced. Those experiences that have strengthened my faith, so that during the ‘dark and cloudy day’ I can withstand whatever I am made to face, which incidentally does make you stronger if you don’t weaken. And you won’t weaken, if you put your trust in God, and remember that HIS spirit will not always abide with you, if you are not faithful to those things he has given in his WORD. If you do not pray, study the good book, and fast, so that you can be taught ‘line upon line , and precept upon precept, here a little, there a little, then you have no promise. I don’t think people realize that GOD’s Holy Spirit abides in his word. I can’t tell you how many times, when I get serious about studying the scriptures, that I can ‘feel’ his spirit in the pages of that book. I think sometimes people think if they read something once, they’ve done all they need to. That’s like using an analogy, that if I eat once, I don’t ever need to eat again, Well, we all know, a person starves to death physically, if they don’t do so daily. And the same applies to a person’s faith, It needs to be fed also, daily or you will starve to death spiritually.