Newsletter

October 2010 Newsletter

The Miracle of Prayer by Linda Sweeney

We say repeatedly in Big Dream Ministries, that EVERYTHING that happens in this ministry is because of prayer! We REALLY DO believe that! AND it really is a miracle that we can actually pray to The God Who created EVERYTHING! Sometimes I just like to say that out loud to myself because it's still such an astonishing fact to me! Why don't we ask, seek and knock (Matthew 7:7) more than we do?

God has been so gracious to allow me to see Him at work, not only in my life and in the life of family and friends, but also to see His Hand touching every part of this ministry! We learned early on that we would pray about everything. In fact, Pat has told you that before there was ever a study called "The Amazing Collection," she gathered up a group of praying women to petition The Lord about what He would have done to get His Word (every single book of it) to millions of women around this world. It would definitely take a miracle to accomplish that, and all we had was a prayer team, BUT what a team it was!

Soon God began shedding light on His plan and we began to follow...very timidly at first for sure! We knew we didn't know much and practically NOTHING about producing a DVD (video then) study, but we knew HE did! Almost immediately things began to come together, and people who were experts in areas we definitely weren't began to come to us volunteering their services! We knew first of all that this would take a lot of money, and we knew for sure we didn't have any (all the teachers' husbands were either unemployed or about to be)! BUT God touched people to generously supply our needs...the money began to come in and it came faithfully month after month. It certainly seemed that we were "on the right track" and that God was definitely leading and blessing! When we weren't sure of the next step OR when we were about to take a wrong step, the money would stop. We knew this meant "WAIT ON THE LORD!" Often we didn't understand, but we knew our main goal was to please Him according to His plan, not ours! Occasionally, we had what we thought was a pretty good plan (did I mention that I'm seldom without one!!), but as good as it might have seemed, it wasn't God's best for us and He had us wait again.

We formed Prayer Teams made up of women all over the country (and now all over the world) who believed in what God was doing, and they wanted to be part of this great new adventure. Now we have over 25 teams across the USA and several outside this country who pray for us via requests sent to them twice a month. They are the dearest, most treasured praying believers who humble us by their commitment to pray consistently for Big Dream Ministry. All of us have seen miracle after miracle come about through prayer. One month the request goes out and often it is replaced the very next month by a praise for the answer that has come! If you would like to be on our prayer team, please contact me and join us in seeing God perform miracle after miracle through prayer!