#TheLoft

http://www.leahadams.org/category/the-loft-linkup/

      I am very excited to link up with a site of bloggers for the next few weeks - #TheLoft.
This first post is to be a "get to know you" post, so here goes:

     

     I am...Suzanne, and I am a work in progress! I live in Florida - a native, in fact! I grew up in a Christian home and learned about God at an early age. My compassion for others led me to the nursing profession, where I spent sixteen years as an obstetrical nurse. While taking time off to raise my 2 children, I fell in love with volunteering at my church home. One of my first tasks as a volunteer was teaching children's Sunday school. My preparation for teaching led me to the Source of my lessons - the Bible. As I began to read, I soon learned all of the things I didn't know about God. Here I had believed in and loved Him all my life, never realizing I had been missing out on one very important thing: a personal relationship with Him. Teacher became student as I began to hunger and thirst to know God more deeply and intimately. As I spent time in the Word of God, slowly the personal relationship I never knew I could have with God began to take shape. My old life began to fade away, to be replaced with the new one God desired - one with meaning and purpose.

     Before long, I was tasked with not just teaching lessons, but writing them as well. What's more, I was given the responsibility to move my teaching out of the cozy Sunday school classroom and into venues with larger audiences. This was an unfamiliar and daunting task for the shy, young woman I was! However, a remarkable thing began to happen as I stepped out in faith: I began to hear clearly from God, receiving His unmistakable inspiration in my writing. In addition, as I stood nervously before my audience to speak, God absolutely took over, enabling me to speak boldly and confidently the very words that He had inspired.

     Over the course of 18 years, I learned so much, and was given many opportunities to write and teach all that God was teaching me, including 5 wonderful years as youth director at my church. I saw myself in the faces of those youth, and purposed in my heart that I would show them how to have a deep and personal relationship with God - something I had missed out on in my own youth. As I began my 5th year as youth director, God spoke clearly to me that I was now to write a book. After 2 1/2 years of listening for God's inspiration, the book was complete. It was a true labor of love! The end result is a 90-day devotional that leads its readers,step-by-step, into a personal relationship with God, and points them to the Word of God as the Source of all wisdom and knowledge, and gives them the tools they need to live a life of faithful obedience in a fallen world.

     I am... a person who lived my life for so long following after my own will, and in reading God's Word for myself and developing a personal relationship with Him, I now know better. I anxiously await whatever God has in store for me next!