Monday, 18 December 2017

My... one more week!
Christmas is almost here... and then a brand new year to plan and make goals for and continue toward our dreams.

The end of the year is always a time of evaluation and planning.

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I went to turn on the TV to some Christmas music this morning and discovered a terrible train wreck had happened, on my favorite train system, the Cascade run.  I started crying every time I sat to watch it.  Christmas is such a hard time for tragedies to happen.

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I think I have watched almost all of the Christmas movies at Hallmark's stations.  I tried to watch a few of the offerings at other stations, but they get so raunchy I have to turn them off.  Some of the Hallmark movies are objectionable these days, so I am nearing the point of not watching them anymore.  Not sure what I will do.  I like to buy the ones I can deal with, but they are getting to be a pretty short list.  Morality shows up in so many ways... we often get it packaged in more "digestible" ways when you compare SNL and Hallmark, but the issues are still being presented to us.

The loss of a godly influence is more impacting than most believe.  I think some of the "good" people who don't want GOD in this world think that having everyone just like them is not going to make the world bad.  Christians are people who are learning how to be better than they use to be, good people have only their own moral ideas to guide them.  If everyone has their own idea of what is moral, it could be a very wide boundary.

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I continue to post at my Working Together Inc page at Facebook.  I am learning about daily posting, PayPal.Me/WorkingTogetherInc , and what I need to do better for next December.  It has been decided that the way to achieve a yearly income budget (foundation) is to have the Membership Drive for the next year in December.  (I finally decided that was the way to stay dependent on GOD for His provision and His boundaries.)  This year I am trying to post every day about it.  I decided to share some of my goals and plans for WT as part of this process.  Membership is the main goal of Working Together.  It will give us the connections to Christians and other interested people, and it will limit our activities to our members needs, with eventual outreach to those outside our membership in the local communities we are established into.

I suppose it would be too much to go into here.  I discovered again that I had created a PayPal.Me account for WT so I started using it as a payment method.  It isn't perfect, but it is an option.  I can take donations from people who want to help me get this effort better established, and I can apply a membership to those who pay $100 for an individual one-year membership.  It will automatically be registered as a PUBLIC Membership, with email delivery of the monthly newsletter and other digital deliveries.

I am not able to offer the installment plan via PayPal yet.  By next year I will be offering that.  The installment plan is for those who want to pay monthly instead of in one payment.  It is $10/month.  As it is now, I can only offer a "subscription" option through PayPal, and I need to figure out the benefit structure better with that option.  My plans are all dependent on the full payment of a membership fee, so I need to break the benefits down into monthly parts... that will accrue as payments are completed.  The installment plan works better after more than one year has passed as some benefits increase as each year of renewed membership passes.

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My PayPal.Me account registers me in Portland, Oregon, but I want to set up the offices for Working Together in Eugene, Oregon.  It is a complicated process for me because I don't have the money to do all these things myself.  I was able to update the presentation for those who go to the link for payments.  I added a photo of my logo-type thing.  I reworked the statement about what we are doing.  It took a lot of tries, but I hope it finally stays the way I wanted it to present.

My logo-type photo is a design I also want to make into stickers for various uses.  I like to put the Operation Christmas Child shoebox sticker on my letters (envelopes) as seals, so one day I will create a sticker for Working Together.

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I think I know how Abraham and Sarah felt after waiting on GOD for all those years.  We expect GOD to do something right away.  When He doesn't, it is a challenge to keep believing.  I decided to use this blog for my posts because faith and prayer are my life. 

GOD doesn't tell us all the details of what He is busy doing, He just works out His Will.  I thought about at one point in my search for answers and decided it is because Satan would know what He is doing and try to mess it up.  Prophecies are a challenge for us to understand, but they are also a challenge for Satan.  That is why Satan thought he won the battle when he killed Jesus... but, actually, he was achieving GOD's Will, making it possible for us to be saved, making it unnecessary for us to have to sacrifice animals at the temple to forgive our sins.

GOD doesn't work the way we think He should.  We have to trust Him, to believe that the end will show us why things happen the way they do.

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Well, I need to go write my Facebook post.
I will be back tomorrow, GOD willing.

In Christ,
Deborah Martin

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May GOD help us all to trust Him through the hard times,
through the things we don't understand,
through the questions and the doubts and the dreams.
May GOD be kind to those who are suffering tonight.
May the angels be sent to comfort those who are hurting because of tragedies that have come into their lives unwanted, and unexpected, and undeserved.
May our lives be filled with hope and love and peace and joy and goodness.
May we all give more than we get, and share our bounties with those who have nothing.
Amen.