This was shared on a forum I belong to and I asked permission to bring it here.

Today is my day for the devotional and I want to share something that Celiabeth said to me the other afternoon. Remember, she is our youngest grandchild and has just turned four years old. At the time of our conversation, it did not hit me as to the depth of what she said, but it has since.

I was sitting on the love seat and she squeezed between the seat and the end table. She reached out and patted me on the arm and said, “Nana, how is your kidney ‘fection?” All the time those huge brown eyes are seeking my face looking for the answer she wants to hear, which was, “Oh, Celiabeth, Nana is feeling much better and will be back to normal before too much longer.” As if we were conspiring, she leaned into to me and said, “Nana, I am going to tell you something that you probably don’t know.” She said, “I know you know who Jesus is, don’t you?” I said, “Yes, I certainly do.” She cuts her little eyes up at me and says, “Then you know He will heal you, don’t you?” I said, “Yes, I do know that.” Then, as if she were telling a universal top secret, she said, “Now, Nana, this is what I don’t think you know—–did you know that you don’t have to wait until it is dark to pray?”

They have family prayer and devotions every night before they all go to bed and that is where she got that. She laid her little hands with the chipped fingernail polish on them and prayed the sweetest prayer for me. Tears streamed down my face. She smiled and said, “See, I told you and it is not even dark!”

Now I told you this to say that, yes, those were words from a four year old, but how many times have we waited until it got ‘dark’ to pray? When things got so bad that we couldn’t fix them ourselves and we couldn’t do anything else but ask God to help us. Darkness surrounds us in many ways—family relationships, work problems, church problems, financial problems, marriage problems—–many, many ways of darkness and sometimes we wait until the darkness envelopes us and drags us down before we pray.

So, in the words of a very smart little girl….. “You may not know this, but you don’t have to wait until it gets dark to pray”.

Thank you for allowing me to share a ‘grandchild’ story.

Love, Rhonda

and faithful instruction is on her tongue Prov 31:26

It’s not always easy to know what the right thing to do or say is.

I manage a forum of over 1,000 people, mainly women, in the Virtual Assistant industry.  The forum is many years old but in recent years I’ve felt the need to bring on board some moderators for a number of reasons – some are on the other side of the world to me and they can moderate messages when I’m in bed asleep.

But there are times when we need to discuss a certain member for not behaving well on the forum or to another member who becomes demanding and insists we do things their way.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had a small number of newer members take exception to an older member and they feel I should be banning her from the list.  I’ve struggled with this particular problem and took it to my moderators for discussion – it wasn’t a decision I wanted to wrestle with on my own.

Thankfully my team of moderators are a group of wise women of varying ages and experiences and each were able to give me their perspective and thoughts on the women involved in this latest conflict. And they were able to help me see things in perspective.

When you’re in the middle of conflict and each side hold what seem to be convincing arguments it’s often hard to see the wood for the trees.  You need to be able to step back and look from both sides, and seek wise counsel.  We can’t always know the answers ourselves.

In the midst of this I had prayed to God for an answer and as if to help put the final part to the answer, this evening a lady I know from another state rang me out of the blue. She manages a network about 12 times the size of mine, but like me, it’s her business, and like me, she has problems with members from time to time. As she says ‘they are human and all have different personalities.  They need to learn to get over it or go without’.

I didn’t know Lyn was going to call me and I had not contacted her about my problem.  I had responded to a newsletter she’d sent out several days ago and it was tonight she chose to ring me and encourage me and just have a chat.  She’d been away interstate and hadn’t seen my email of encouragement to her until this evening.

Isn’t God good? He provided a woman with 12 times the ‘talent’ that I have (see Matthew 25:14-30) to call me on the very day I’d been struggling with a problem, providing just the answer by a woman who could speak wisdom and faithful instruction into my life. Thank you Father!

Proverbs 31:26, faithful instruction, speak with wisdom, Proverbs 31 Woman