I probably should have written this article first as I feel it is one of my most important learned lessons.

As I have mentioned in previous articles, I, nor my family have been spared when it comes to tragedy, hurt, or heartache.

I learned a valuable lesson years ago by a former pastor by the name of Carroll Phillips. I told Brother Phillips that every single time that I felt like I was trying my hardest to do something for God that something bad would happen to me or my family. The incident would knock me off track and cause me to look at my circumstances instead of doing whatever it was I was trying to accomplish for the Lord.

Brother Phillips explained it to me like this….. Anna, whenever you are going forth out of your household to do a work for the Lord it is like you are going out the front door and leaving the back door open. I looked puzzled and he explained further. He said when you venture out in faith that you should always pray really hard beforehand and ask God to put a hedge of protection around you, your spouse, and all of your household.

I looked up praying a hedge of protection in the Bible and it is listed many, many times.

Satan is just waiting for us a lot of times to step out and try and do a work for God so he can come in the back door of our lives and cause havoc.

It all made sense after that and now I am very cautious. I suffered many vicious attacks from Satan when I was younger. He would start out with something and if that didn’t work he would move on to something more hurtful and harsh.

We have great power in the Lord to fight these attacks. We need to pray very earnestly in the name of Jesus and make sure we close our back door as we go out in the front.

Spiritual warfare is real and we need to be more aware and more serious about the tools we have to fight with!

Tonight my husband and I grabbed a quick burger and drove to the site of our local high school Football Homecoming parade. We parked the car by the edge of the road and we waited for the parade to start.

Across from us were a group of teenagers and grandparents waiting and the song blasting through the air was a remake of our same 70’s high school song way back in the day.

My mind went racing backwards to my very own freshman high school Homecoming day and the excitement of making our float and knowing that my dad was going to pull the float with his old ratty jeep.

It was so much fun! We goofed off all day and the parade was in the afternoon. Later we had the huge bonfire and the snake dance from the school all the way to the town square and back. Of course then there was the big game and the escorting and crowning of the queen.

And oh, the band! My husband had played in that band and the sounds and the lights reflecting off those football helmets was a sight to behold!

Yes, this is hometown tradition and I love it! There is something about little hometowns where everyone knows everybody else and we share our lives together.

We parked beside our local dentist and his wife who had been our son’s kindergarten teacher 30 years ago. We reminisced about the turtle our son brought to school for show and tell and how the teacher brought it home to us over the weekend because she was afraid it was going to die on her watch.

We saw our fellow classmates there tonight snapping pictures of their grandchildren. It was amazing!

I pray that this tradition never ends in our little town and that we hold it near and dear to our hearts because this is the stuff that America is made of.

Go Hogeye!

Today was such a good day! We decided to take our 8 year old grandson to The Ark Encounter in Williamstown Kentucky.

Little man had recently given his heart to Jesus and we felt like the life size replica of Noah’s ark would be a visual that he would always remember.

My husband and I had both had similar experiences growing up as we watched the epic Ten Commandments movie with Charlton Heston. The big screen brought the Bible Story to life and we cherish that movie to this day.

This morning as we arrived to pick him up our daughter had only mentioned the 3 1/2 drive we had to make but did not tell him where we were going as we had asked her previously not to. He was concerned that he would need his tablet for such a long drive. I immediately told him that we were going to spend the day unplugged. I also told him that we were going to give him clues along the way and see if he could guess where we were going.

The idea of clues and making a game worked and we were on our way.

First stop was Dairy Queen and some breakfast together. We enjoyed that very much and told him that this day was all about him.

The full tummy, a pillow, and my soft velour blanket in the back seat soon lulled him fast asleep.

We had already discussed lunch and decided we would stop just before we got there as the food inside might be very expensive.

We stopped for lunch and he was curious about coffee and I gave him a couple of sips and he grinned continually and acted as if it immediately made him hyper. It was so funny!

He really opened up in the car the rest of the way and we had wonderful discussions about God, Noah, Jesus, and Satan.

A classmate had told him that at age 14 you get a free ticket to heaven…. I got that straightened out and then he told me that he didn’t think Satan was real. I explained all of that. My husband chimed in too and the questions we got were very interesting but very sincere. I felt honored to be given this day with him. There were funny moments too like when we discussed Noah’s sons; Shem, Ham, and Japheth and he said Japheth was a funny name and my husband said maybe Noah was hair lipped and couldn’t pronounce Jacob. I about choked on that one!

The weather was gorgeous, the ark was spectacular, the workers were so nice and our little boy of the day just made our day! The joy and excitement of learning and seeing this Bible story come to life through the eyes of an 8 year old boy is a day I will always cherish.

I highly recommend a day at The Ark Encounter but most of all I recommend spending a day unplugged, conversing with a child.

Matthew 19:14King James Version (KJV)

14 But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

When I was in my thirties I attended several weeks of a Bible study on the Holy Spirit. As the study was nearing it’s end, one of our instructors told us to go home and seriously think all week about what we would desire most from the Lord if we could ask Him for one thing in our life. We were told not to discuss this with our spouse, children, or any other person but just to pray and really commune and ask God for this desire of our heart. We were told that on the last night of the study we would be called up to the altar individually and could kneel and pray silently about this request. No one but God was to hear or know our request.

On the last night of the study as I was called up to pray silently about my request one of the instructors came over and knelt beside of me and said, “Anna, I have a word from God for you”….he continued on and this is what he said…..” The Lord says that you have joy but that it is your own joy, he wants you to release your joy and let His Joy come in.”

I was so dumbfounded because the request that I had prayed about all week was for God to give me a constant JOY in that no matter what came my way I could face it. Up until this point in my life, my spiritual life and my emotions were like a roller coaster ride. I had extreme highs and desperate lows. I was a worry wart and a person that fretted over the smallest problems. I actually hated that about myself and that is why I asked God to change me. So you can easily now see why the WORD from God had blown me away.

I rushed home that night and had to tell my husband and even had him ride back down to the church with me to talk to the two instructors but they were already gone and everything was locked up.

I believed these two men to be real huge servants of God and I was excited and amazed and could not wait to see how God was going to change me!

Over a span of probably two years after this I had nothing but tragedy, heartache, and hurt in my life. It was not your usual things but horrendous things like: Our first granddaughter died from SIDS at less than two months, the father of this granddaughter was stationed in Korea with the army and saw his daughter for the first time laying in her casket, this same son two weeks later was crossing a train track with a friend and was hit by a train…..our son lived but his passenger died, the list goes on and on but some things are so hurtful that I cannot even write about them.

I had prayed for JOY and got nothing but sadness, hurt, and heartache. I did not know what was happening in my life. We were labeled as the bad luck family and it was so many things that if it had not been true it would seem almost comical. It was ridiculous!

Our pastor and his wife one night felt so sorry for my husband and I that they wanted to take us out to eat to console us and show us how much they cared. They picked us up at our home during a horrible rain storm and their windshield wipers broke on the way to the restaurant. We all four had a laugh about it but in my heart it was not really funny.

Looking back now after all of these years I know that God was working a huge work in me and my heart. The prayer that I had prayed so many years ago was happening in me. Even though I received all hurts, God was the lily in all of my valleys and was with me through it all.

I love the song, ‘Tis So Sweet To Trust in Jesus, because of the part that says I have proved him o’er and o’er. I really have proved Him so many times and by that proof I can honestly say that my prayer of a constant JOY was answered.

My God is amazing and a keeper of His word! I feel very honored and privileged now to have gone through the hard things because I feel that when bad things happen to you it places you on the center stage of life and all eyes are upon you. Tragedy gives you a chance to shine for God and show His glory if you so choose. Rather than whine in your troubles you can shine for Jesus!

Choose to find the JOY in the journey and you will never regret it I promise!

Today I walked to the mailbox to mail some bills and I walked past this tree. Our youngest brought this tulip poplar sapling home when he was in fourth grade and I can still see him and his Dad planting it right there beside the driveway. It seems like that small event happened just yesterday!

I, like everyone else in America, had been watching coverage of the shootings in Las Vegas today and as I walked to and from the mailbox I was thinking of how quickly life passes by and how fragile life really is.

The Bible says our life is like a vapor ( James 4:14). From the Living Bible translation it reads like this: ” How do you know what is going to happen tomorrow?” ” For the length of your lives is as uncertain as the morning fog……..now you see it; soon it is gone”

I am sure that most of the persons in Las Vegas were there to enjoy life, have fun, be with their families, and listen to music. I enjoy all of those things too. 

It seems life lately is all about projecting in the negative. It is doom and gloom everyday on the news, bitterness, anger, resentment and back biting. Fingers are pointing in all directions to say that everyone else is at fault. I am absolutely sick of the negative!

I was thinking today how quick we live and how quick we die and death can come at any given time to any of us as the Bible verse says. We are just like a vapor.

We all have circles that we revolve in. Yes, maybe we cannot make big changes on the world front but we can affect our little circle that we spin in. 

May we pray each day to be more Christlike, be more positive, and be more aware that our time here is short. We waste so much of the precious keeping our thoughts and eyes on the negative. 

I walked past that tree today and I thought, “My baby boy and his Dad planted that tree, it was just yesterday, or so it seems.” Now, that baby of mine is a grown man with a wife and two small children….where did the years go?

Let us make the very best of the time that we have. Let us make amends with our skeletons in our closets, heal the hurts we have caused, and love our fellow man like never before.

I believe that Christ is coming back very soon. Will we be standing tall with roots grown deep as this tulip poplar tree beside my drive? I sure hope so!

I was 26 years old and had 4 children, including a set of twin daughters. We lived in an 1100 square foot house with no basement. My husband and I had only planned on having 2 children and living in this starter home for 5 years…..Haha!

Our second pregnancy was twins and we only found out 3 weeks before they were born. I had grown up in a family of 3 children and I always hated uneven number of children for the fact of never being able to divide things equally so I was tickled when that fourth child came along! I guess I am OCD in that respect.

It was the fall revival at our little country church that we attended. At the end of the service as the preacher gave the altar call, I felt a strong nudging to go forth. By the time I knelt down at that altar, I was bawling my eyes out.

The preacher came over and knelt down beside me and kindly asked if I needed him to pray for a special need. I said, “Yes, please pray about my children”. The preacher had this very puzzled look on his face as he had just finished preaching over the noise and blabbing of my 4 young children. I guess he couldn’t figure out what awful sin they had committed at their young age. My husband and I had to work different shifts for lack of finances and other reasons so I was there alone and maybe he also thought I was on the verge of some break down or something because of the way I was crying.

He prayed with me and what he did not realize was that the realization of the responsibility of my husband and I to raise these poor, pitiful little children had just smacked me right in the heart! In my mind I told God how I did not feel that we were capable parents, nor smart enough to do this parenting thing without His help. I spiritually lay every child I had down that night at that altar and made God a promise. I promised to see to the best of my ability that they were in church and raised in a Godly environment.

I won’t sit here and tell you that everything was sunshine and roses after that because it wasn’t. Times were hard and looking back I feel that I failed in many ways on keeping my part of that promise but God kept His. All four of our children were saved at a young age and baptized and I couldn’t be more proud of them in so many ways.

We ended up living in that little house for 8 years and instead of 2 children we had 4. Looking back I can see where God had His hand on our lives all along. Our children are grown now and our oldest son has already passed on into heaven. We have had our share of hurts and heartaches over the years but God has walked beside us and sometimes carried us through it all.

If you are young or discouraged in your life right now, I would suggest you do the same as I did because God is so much better at directing us than we are at directing ourselves. It takes a lot of faith to let go and sometimes we forget that we gave our burdens to Him and we try to pick them back up ( in my case) or just keep hanging on to those things.

What helped me the most was to realize that our children are just on loan to us from God. Our job as parents is to point them back to Him. I love my children dearly but know that I will let them down in so many ways and try to keep their eyes looking to the maker. He’s the best! I hope you find this helpful and can do the same.

My husband served in Iraq at age 52. The above picture was taken of him as he knelt praying on the top of his Bradley armored vehicle in the wee hours of the morning. His troop was 13 days from coming home when his friend and comrade was killed. I wrote this article several years ago after meeting the soldier’s family for the very first time. I woke up in the middle of the night and I believe that God gave me every word to type. Robert Wesley Tucker was killed serving our country on October 13 and I want to share this to honor him and his dear family.

The American Soldier
By Anna Poston
As some of you already know, I have been caught up lately in a whirlwind of “Welcome Home” activities for our dear K troop soldiers. We are looking so forward to their return and the joy that it will bring to us.
On Thursday afternoon of last week, I found out that one of our young men from K troop had been killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb and another dear soldier that was with him had been critically injured. 

I came home that night with a real heaviness in my heart and I sat down in my chair and did much of nothing. All I wanted to do was cry. I sat there for a couple of hours and I did cry and then I pulled myself together and a real determination filled my soul. “What can I do, I asked myself”, I am not going to just sit here and let this family down. What can I do to ease their pain? 

I had already been making K-troop flags in my basement for the big “Welcome Home Celebrations”. I had found out from others that visited with the family that night that they wanted no black, but brightness and vivid colors at this soldier’s funeral. They wanted him to receive the “Welcome Home” that he deserved. For he was truly coming Home. 

I picked myself up and I pulled myself together and I went downstairs and I began to sew, I sewed and I sewed and with each stitch of the red, and the white, and the yellow, I thought back over this past 16 months and the tremendous sacrifices that our men and our families have gone through. The task became a real joy to accomplish and I cherished the thought that I was so fortunate to be the person that could do this task. It lifted my spirits and I so wanted to go in person and give the family this gift. 

Last night, I went down to the home place with my flag in hand. When I walked up the sidewalk, I instantly saw the mother of this soldier. I work with her at the hospital where I am employed. When she saw me, she quickly got up and went inside the house. I thought to myself, “Oh, I have done the wrong thing”. I and the
young lady that drove down with me just sat down on that front porch and waited. 

Finally the mother of the soldier came out of the house and I stood up and presented her with the flag. She didn’t say a whole lot, but took my gift and went inside and closed the door. I stood there feeling really bad that I had brought that flag and I just sat back down and waited. 

In a few minutes, that door opened and someone came and got me and told me that I was wanted inside. I went in feeling even more sorry that I had brought the flag and what a mistake I made by bringing it in. 

I was directed to the mother and dad’s bedroom and I slowly stepped inside. There they were, just the two of them, and my flag lay on their bed. The mother started thanking me for that flag and telling me that everyone had done so many things, but that this flag was the one thing that had really touched them and held so much meaning for them. They were planning on using this flag at the funeral. 

I was so relieved and so thankful that I had allowed my pain to be directed into that cloth. 

The mother took me outside and let me tell you what I saw there:
I saw a country home that sits on a hillside in Tennessee. I saw a flag up on the highest eave of the barn, and I saw a name board near the door that says ‘Welcome” and an eagle hanging below it. All across the front of the house with the big huge porch was plagues of things like the liberty bell and revolutionary soldiers and flags and banners. All of these things were already hanging there. They weren’t staged- they were there!
The mother took me out to the edge of the yard and looking towards the left of the house down in a little valley, a freshly graveled road circled around a grassy little peaceful looking spot that had the American Flag right in the middle of it. That was the son’s burial spot. His coon dogs were tied to the left of this and his brand new truck sat to the right on the grass in the front yard. 

I thought to myself what an all around Tennessee country boy this had been and a family that is just awesome! 

That would’ve been enough if that was all I had seen but then I was asked to follow the younger women up the gravel driveway to a trailer that sat just as you turned in. This was the home of the soldier and his special little family.
His wife was a young girl, just graduated this past May from highschool. She was absolutely beautiful with her long, lean, frame and her black hair and soft spoken voice. She carried on her hip, their small baby girl that will be a year old next month.
We went into this little home and I saw pictures. Pictures
everywhere. Pictures of a mom, a dad, and a small little girl. Everywhere you looked, there was pictures of the love between these three people. on one wall, was a picture of the young woman at her senior year prom and the little baby was on her hip in the picture. She had taken the child to the prom for the soldier was away in Iraq. 

I thought back over my own life and myself getting married at age 17 and the man who in my life was a soldier before he ever married me. I thought of all the years of my soldier and how many times that he has been away from us drilling and learning soldier kinds of things. I remember getting up one bright early morning and having to load all of our kids in the car and go with my soldier and drop him off so that he could travel to Memphis and take care of that city when their police and firemen went on strike, I remember him being in Colorado when our little twin daughters learned how to walk. I remember catching my kitchen on fire one summer while he was away doing his two week drill. All of these things flooded through my mind and I could see myself in that young girl and small child that had welcomed me so graciously into their home. 

Nobody knows the sacrifices that our military and their families go through unless you are a member of this rare breed. 

I left there last night with a pride that is indescribable!

This is the stuff that the American Soldier is made of! The family that the American Soldier has! Nobody made him do this! Nobody made
him die for his country! He did it all freely and they did it freely. They all did this thing together and that is what I saw last night. I saw the love. The deep love for a country and for a land.

Don’t ever take that gift of the American Soldier for granted. Appreciate it every day and cherish the fact that you live in a land that is FREE! Freedom is not free. Someone paid the ultimate price. 

Someone just did
Robert Wesley Tucker 

It was the week of Matt’s very first birthday and our water at home had been frozen all week. We had tried everything to thaw it out and nothing had worked. I had planned on baking my traditional, special stand up teddy bear cake for his birthday but had to bake his cake at Mom’s instead because of the water issues. My special cake pan would not fit in her oven so I was forced to bake something else. Also, when it came time to put the solitary candle on his cake, I realized that I had left the candle at home and we were forced to use one of those huge emergency candles because that was all that Mom had. I was bitter, mad, and frustrated to say the least!

We went to church the following Sunday and I was sitting on the 2nd pew behind the preacher before church started….

I was sitting there complaining to the high heavens about the water being frozen to my girlfriend. The preacher heard it all and he whipped around and said……Why can’t you thank God for that!

His statement made me really mad and I looked at him like he was nuts!! He got up and went to preach the sermon but I never heard a word of it but just sat there thinking over and over about what he had just said to me.

Before the sermon was over I began talking to God in my head and said to God that the preacher was nuts but what do I have to lose. I began to thank God for my water being frozen all week and I thanked him that I didn’t get to make my special decorated cake for our son and I thanked him for forgetting the birthday candle and every other bad thing that had happened to me all that week.

I learned a very big lesson that day! When we got home from church, we had water again! Ever since that day I have a plaque in my home that says…..God gives His Best to those that leave the choice with Him.  James 1:2-3 My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.

Hello to my family, friends, and acquaintances!

My name is Anna Poston and for all of my life I have had a secret desire to be a writer. I used to write God letters all the time as a child and go bury them in a secret spot. Later I would go back to my secret spots and look for God’s answers but nothing was written down. I always wondered why He wouldn’t answer me back.

As I grew and matured I realized that God does answer me back in so many ways. I recently have been given a golden opportunity to start this blog. A dear friend has opened this door for me! My desire is to write words that will direct people to God and give them peace in the midst of their storms.

Yesterday a dear friend posted these words….Faith enables us to move through the storms carrying our calm with us! Reading this phrase gave me the idea to name my blog Peace! Be Still! So let’s get going and carry that calm with us daily!