The blessing of my mother is that she is so interested, she is so bright, she never complains - the joy of the Lord just bubbles out of her. Anybody who's in her presence is blessed to be there.

The kind of trust God wants us to have cannot be learned in comfort and ease.

Abraham is such a fascinating figure. Three world religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - all claim him as a patriarch. He was raised in a religious home. And yet he rejected religion in order to pursue a personal relationship with God.

Around 1998, I went through lots of pressures and struggles. My children got married within eight months of each other, my son was diagnosed with cancer and went through major surgery and radiation, my mother had five life-threatening hospitalizations where I stayed with her, my husband's dental office burned to the ground.

If our lives are easy, and if all we ever attempt for God is what we know we can handle, how will we ever experience His omnipotence in our lives?

It was when my children were 5, 3 and 10 months old that I just felt the desperate need to get to know God through the pages of my Bible. And as a result, I started a Bible class in my city for the primary purpose of being in it.

The ultimate goal for me in prayer is to draw near to God...to fall in step with him...to discern his will so that my life might be lived accordingly...to discover what burdens are on his heart that I might take them into my own heart, then pray them back to him.