Too Small a Thing (The Death of Signarama Part 2)

October 2, 2016October 4, 2016 / Anne (Grace is my Superhero) / 1 Comment

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I honestly think that our failures are more useful than our successes. They certainly provide us with the opportunity to humble ourselves and acknowledge our need for God. God doesn’t waste anything, and failure is a treasure trove of learning if we will take the time to seek out that treasure. It is painful to come face to face with our shortcomings, but oh so worth it!

As we were heading toward the end of Signarama, I took every available moment to seek God. I needed to hear His voice because it seemed like our circumstances were contradicting everything I thought He had told me.

I thought He had told us to buy the business. Despite my fears and uncertainty about it, He had given me supernatural peace. I thought that He had promised to prosper Signarama. I thought that He had promised to use it to bring us the wonderful provision that He kept talking to me about. Through the four years of running the business, we experienced ups and downs, but mostly downs. Yet through it all, I had felt the peace of God.

Now that we faced our own inability to keep the business going, I questioned whether I had heard God correctly. Could I even hear His voice at all? How could I ever be sure that I knew what His will was? How could I avoid making the same mistakes in the future?

Annalise was just a newborn, nursing about 8 times a day for an hour at a time. Nursing this sweet little girl was my full-time job. I still had to take Ashlyn to therapy once a week at HealthSouth. Ashlyn’s therapist gave me my own little office to set up camp during the hour and 45 minutes that we were there. I could nurse, read, and pray in a quiet, private room while Ashlyn did physical and speech therapy. What an amazing gift!

Each week I would get cozy in a chair with Annalise and a nursing pillow. I would set out my Bible, journal, and pen on the little rolling desk. All my other children were in school or at home with my two teenage babysitters, and I had uninterrupted quiet times. I would ask God all my questions….and He would speak! How precious those times were!

One day I was mourning the loss of our dream. Chris always said during the pain and struggle of business ownership, “It just has to be worth it!” I always felt that it definitely would be worth it…eventually. Business people kept telling us that after 2-5 years we would really see the profits. Eventually, if we had the right team of employees in place, Chris would be able to work less but make more. He would have the freedom to pursue other investments, to spend time with the family, and to take vacations. Signarama would be an investment that would bless us for the rest of our lives, and perhaps one of our children would want to take it over when Chris retired.

Yet, we couldn’t make it to the point of earning a profit. We were facing the reality of losing everything we had put into it and moving backwards in our goals and finances.

It had not been worth it at all!!!

God gave me the scripture Is 49:4.

“But I said, “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.”

Isaiah was describing exactly how I was feeling! I continued to read.

“Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand, and my reward is with my God.”

Could there possibly be a reward in all of this? We just had to trust God that He was holding our reward even though we could see nothing good in failure.

When I talked to Chris about all of this, he told me that he had been meditating on the same scripture! God certainly was trying to tell us something.

Another day at HealthSouth, I asked God, “Was it your perfect will for us to buy Signarama when we did?”

He gave me Is 49:6.

“It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

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God had spoken this to Isaiah right after he had lamented about spending his strength in vain. Isaiah was being obedient to give God’s words to the Jewish people, yet he didn’t see any fruit. No one was listening to him. He was probably threatened and harassed for his message, and he couldn’t see what good could possible come from his pitiful ministry.

Yet God surprised Isaiah by telling him that his vision of bringing his people back to God (a vision that seemed totally unrealized) was way too small. God was telling Isaiah that he would also bring the light of salvation to the non-Jews all over the world. How could Isaiah have imagined how far his words would reach and how many people would be impacted by them? For the past 10 years I have lived in the book of Isaiah! The words of God recorded by that discouraged prophet have been a life line to me!

I bet Isaiah never imagined that a little mom and housewife in Pennsylvania would be forever impacted by his ministry. Yet here I am, writing an article about him! I bet most of you reading this have also been blessed by Isaiah.

I was very comforted by the thought that God was going to use our lives in ways we could not imagine, despite of, or maybe because of our failure. Still, we were praying that God would do a miracle right now that we could see. Resurrect our business, bring in the finances to keep going, bring us to the place where we could make a profit and recoup all our investment and more! The days went by and no miracle came. Why was God saying, “no” to our pleas?

After my time with God at HealthSouth, I began listening to some CDs that had been recorded at a recent conference at my church. I came across a quote from Lance Wallnau that spoke directly to my heart.

“God says no to what you want simply because He has something better in mind. If God isn’t answering Joseph’s plea to be released from the confinement of his prison cell, it’s only because Joseph, prophet, man of God, blameless as he may be, has a smaller perception of what prophecy fulfilled looks like than God has. In other words, he was willing to settle for a whole lot less than God had in mind so God had to keep him in a place of contradiction until the timing was right for him to be released to the greater thing God had.”

Could this be what was happening in our lives? God had promised prosperity, we had pursued prosperity, and we had failed. God’s promise was still true, but His plan was even greater than we had originally thought. Was Signarama “too small a thing?” Did God have something much greater for us?

We purchased Signarama because we wanted something better for our family than struggling from paycheck to paycheck. We were in pursuit of the American Dream; that if you worked hard with skill and determination, you would achieve a better life for yourself and your children.

“Is Signarama a picture of what we could do with our own hard work?” I asked God.

“We were with child, we writhed, but we gave birth only to wind. We have won no victories on the earth.” Is 26:18 was the answer that I received.

Perhaps God’s dream was higher than the American dream?

“How gladly would I treat you like sons and give you a desirable land, the most beautiful land, the most beautiful inheritance of any nation. I thought you would call me ‘father’ and not turn away from following me.” Jer 3:19 was the scripture I got next.

This reminded me of the book I had been reading, God with You at Work by Andy Mason. Chris and I knew in our heads that we were God’s children and He was our Father. Yet reading this book had made me realize that the way we thought and lived our lives were indications of an orphan mentality. Truly being a son and daughter the way Andy described it was so foreign to my thinking that I could hardly understand it.

He said that the key to doing business in a kingdom culture was behaving like sons. To live in our inheritance that Jesus already won for us rather than working so hard for payment. To cease from striving and self-effort and to do all our work out of rest. To not seek God to attain His blessings, but to seek Him for relationship simply because we love Him so much. Then we would be able to watch the amazing things that God would do on our behalf.

People in the world are successful in business all the time with no relationship with God. They have innovative ideas, work hard, and achieve great things while having no understanding of God as their father! Why could WE not succeed even though we had sought God every step of the way and asked for His blessings?

Perhaps it was because we have also prayed crazy, outrageous prayers such as:

Give us more of you!

Give us YOUR dreams and visions.

Don’t let us fall short of YOUR plans for us.

Don’t let our lives be ineffective.

Let us impact eternity.

We want to see and participate in signs and wonders.

Bring all of our children into their destinies.

Prayers like that mean that a financial success out of our own hard work was “too small a thing.” God has something bigger for us like he had for Isaiah and Joseph. Something that requires us to actually become the people He intended us to be. That can only happen by seeking Him more and more each day. By being uncomfortable to know that we need Him. By seeking His kingdom first.

We can never achieve this by working hard. We can never step into our sonship and inheritance by working hard. Signarama was all about working hard. God cares about us too much to let us earn success from our own hard work. He wants us to become a son and a daughter and to see real success happen out of rest. Success that He brings about with His amazing power – not our own abilities or intelligence.

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I still don’t understand this whole “sonship” thing. How can I just accept His unconditional love for me? How can I just live in my inheritance? You mean I never have to work hard to earn it? I never have to prove anything? God delights in me just the way I am right now, failures and mistakes and all?

You mean I never have to worry about provision because God ALWAYS provides for His children? I don’t have to seek after these things but can seek His kingdom? This I just don’t understand.

But at least now I KNOW that I don’t understand it. I can ask God to show me and help me. I have the death of Signarama to thank for that!

Sunrise

March 24, 2015 / Anne (Grace is my Superhero) / Leave a comment

“Yes, the day will come, says the Lord, when I will do for Israel and Judah all the good I promised them.” Jer33:14(Living Bible)

I was reading this during my morning quiet time. I got up from the kitchen table to walk my husband to his car as he was leaving for work. I lingered outside to watch the beautiful sunrise. I was struck by the faithfulness of God in causing the sun to rise each morning. No matter how badly I had lived yesterday, no matter how much sin had occurred in the earth the day before, today the sun was rising on humanity again. Along with the sun came God’s promise of his new mercies. What a good God we have!

I sat down and continued to read in my Bible.

” If you can break my covenant with the day and with the night so that day and night don’t come on their usual schedule, only then will my covenant with David, my servant be broken…” V.20,21

Then I heard God say, “Anne, if you are able to keep the sun from rising this morning, then you will be able to mess up badly enough to break my promises to you.”

Sometimes I believe the lie that I will disqualify myself from receiving God’s promises. But God reminds me that it was He who made the covenant in the first place. He cannot lie, and He knows all things. He already took my weaknesses and mistakes into account when He made those promises. So I can rest in the knowledge that it is God’s job to bring His words to come to pass, and it is my job to simply believe.

Lord, help me to rest in your faithfulness.

In Honor of Spring, New Life, and a Baby Girl

March 3, 2015March 4, 2015 / Anne (Grace is my Superhero) / Leave a comment

I know we are still having winter weather, but I just can’t stop day dreaming about flowers, warm breezes, Easter, and a baby girl to be born in April!

So I think it is about time that I brightened up my blog a bit and post a story about new beginnings.

“The Lord will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins, he will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the Lord,” Isaiah 51:3

It was the early spring of 2008, and I was surveying my new yard. Our family of eight had moved into this beautiful, older home in the fall. However, the yard hadn’t been touched in years and was overgrown. My husband, Chris, had just finished a week of “vacation” spent clearing bushes and brush from our corner lot. I was amazed at how much he had accomplished. Still, I lamented over the barren patches of earth the roots had left behind. I despised the remaining scrubby bushes that Chris didn’t have time to dig out.

“How I wish he could have finished the job! How I long to see grass growing and flowers blooming! One of my favorite signs of spring is the delicious smell of lilacs in air. Lord, how can I get a hold of a lilac bush and get rid of these awful ones?”

Days passed, leaves came forth in the warm sunlight, and I surveyed my yard again. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Two of the ugly eyesores had been transformed into lilac bushes! The tiny lavender buds held the promise of that glorious scent.

“Thank you God that Chris wasn’t overzealous in his yard work after all!” I prayed with overwhelming gratitude. God answered in his gentle way.

“You wish that I would remove all the ugly parts of your life. You even blame yourself that they still remain. But you don’t judge as I judge. Under your barren ground there are seeds that will grow! I have allowed the “thorns” in your life to remain because I know that when the spring season comes, they will bloom and blossom. Then you will realize that the blessings you had prayed for have been with you all the while in disguise…as a trial.”

God, help me to see my life as you do, full of you promise and potential.

Happy Heavenly Birthday Dad!

July 31, 2014July 31, 2021 / Anne (Grace is my Superhero) / 4 Comments

My Father, George Redman Beyer, passed away last year on July 31. In honor of him, I would like to post here the words I spoke at his memorial service.

All you who knew George, whether it was for 5 minutes or fifty years, knew that he was very kind, calm, patient, slow, methodical, and very intelligent.

He loved history and could remember facts and figures with an almost photographic memory. Most of those official blue and yellow signs you see around the state of PA were written by my Dad. When I was little I couldn’t remember the name of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, so I just told people that my Dad was a Historical Marker Maker. They gave me funny looks.

I got even stranger reactions when I told them that we were Quakers and went to Meeting instead of Church. Dad was always a man of peace. I almost never heard him criticize other people and I almost never saw him get angry.

In recent years, he had to bear with my five wild boys running around the house with nerf guns, squirt guns, and cap guns. Still he was very patient with them. He spent hour after hour after hour reading to all the grandchildren, snuggling on the sofa.

He answered question after question, read book after book. He rejoiced at the birth of every new grandchild and enjoyed them immensely.

This was an intense week for our family. Dad was sent to the emergency room on Monday with blood clots in his lungs. He stopped breathing and received CPR three times. When I saw him that evening, he was unconscious and the hospital was still trying to stabilize him. That night I prayed those deep, desperate prayers. I love it how God draws so near to me in times like these. I felt like He said to me, “This will end in death, but it is OK.” Then I saw a picture in my mind. I saw my dad as a young boy, running in the summer twilight.

He had perfect shalom, “perfect peace, nothing broken, and nothing missing.” He was running into the arms of God the Father. They both had such joy and excitement about being together.

On Tuesday the hospital thought they might be able to stabilize Dad and wake him up. Then we received a call that he had taken a turn for the worse, and we better get in there as soon as we could. Again I began praying in the car, and I was desperate with God. I said, “You can’t let him die if he’s not ready, if it is not his time. I haven’t done enough. I haven’t told him enough about you. I haven’t shown him enough love.” Again the sweet presence of God surrounded me and said, “It is already done. I have already done it all. All that is left is to trust me.”

So as we sat in Dad’s room watching him peacefully pass away, I again thought of him running into the arms of his Father. I heard the Father God say to him, “George, it doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do in your lifetime. I want you! You are my reward; You are my pearl of great price.”

Mom told me that Dad had recently attended a conference at Life Center and loved the song, “Abba” which means Daddy. (Click here to listen to the wonderful song.) We sang that song in Worship tonight. This confirmed to me that he had a longing in his heart to know God as his Daddy, and now his heart’s desire is fulfilled. He feels for the first time the full strength of the unconditional, all consuming love of the Father. Dad had loving parents and a loving family. Loving relationships are the joy of this life. But they are just the first morning rays of sunlight peaking over the horizon. Now he is standing in the brightness of noonday, and I am so happy for him!

I love how God gives us signs to explain what is happening in the unseen realm. He gave me a sign. My mom had transplanted a lot of flowers from her yard to into my yard. The irises and hyacinths have been blooming for many years now, but I have never seen the resurrection lily. I just thought it had died, and I had forgotten about it. But the day after my Dad died, I looked out my window and I saw it blooming!

I love you Dad!

God Needs Me?

July 5, 2014 / Anne (Grace is my Superhero) / 3 Comments

“He can do all things without us, but He had chosen to do them through us.” – The Call by Rick Joyner

I was pregnant with baby number eight. It had been three years since my last pregnancy, and I felt the strongest, the healthiest, the most alive I had ever felt! That was…until the morning sickness settled in. It was actually “all day but much worse in the evening sickness”. I had not felt horribly nauseous during my previous pregnancies, more like continuous car sickness. How I had wished I could stop the invisible car and just get out! I was optimistic that this pregnancy would be the exception, that I could say with a smile on my face and a twinkle in my eye, “I love being pregnant!”

Just the opposite had happened. I had never felt so bad! My days consisted of sitting on the sofa with my eyes closed, trying to feel better. My children ran around unattended. Home school, which we should have started a month ago, remained untouched. My older children did all the chores around the house and kept it running, though not as orderly or smoothly as I would have. My precious firstborn girl, Areli, carried an enormous burden. She heard my pitiful pleas all day long.

“Areli, could you make me some eggs?”

“Areli, could you fill up my water glass?”

“Areli, could you see who is crying upstairs, please?”

I tried to be a good mom; but mostly I whined, moaned, slept, felt sick, got sick, and slept some more. I felt useless and wretched. I knew theoretically that despite the weakened state of my body, my spirit could still soar high above my circumstances, like an eagle above the clouds. Yet, after days, weeks, and months of feeling crummy, my eagle had forgotten how to fly. My mind kept thinking about scriptures such as

“For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever!” 2 Cor 4:17

I knew that it was true, but it didn’t help me feel any better.

I thought about my joy in a newborn baby and how it was all worth it.

But it didn’t make me feel any better.

I reread every “Above Rubies” magazines I had ever received to encourage myself.

My mind was encouraged but my flesh still felt miserable!

My body felt like it was not capable to getting up off the sofa and doing anything productive or enjoyable, yet my mind continued to churn, swirling in descending circles.

“I just want to die. I can’t live like this. Why do I have to suffer? Why does God allow me to feel so horrible?”

Pregnancy is such a miracle, a blessing, a gift! So why did I feel so bad? My suffering was nothing compared to other women I knew, who kept almost nothing down for nine months, yet my suffering felt like too much for me to bear.

The question I kept asking was, “Is this worth it?” and I knew that it was. A new life is always worth it. After a mother is holding that precious bundle, her sorrow is turned into joy.

Then the question became, “How much is a human life worth? How much pain and sorrow is one life worth? How much would I suffer for one human life? Would I get pregnant and do this all again for one more human life? How much is a life worth to God? How much suffering did Jesus endure?”

The only conclusion I could come to was this; one human life is worth IT ALL! There is no limit to the value God puts on a life, no price too high to pay, no suffering too severe. Jesus suffered more than any of us. He went through betrayal, slander, hatred, lies, scourging, mocking, and the cruelest execution ever conceived. He felt the wretched, incurable sickness of the evil of the entire world. And he bore the effects of that twisted iniquity; separation with all that is good and beautiful and holy, his Father.

He said that his suffering was worth it because of the joy set before him. (Hebrews 12:2) That joy was human life, redeemed and set free. He said that I am worth it. He said that you are worth it. He said that the child in my womb was worth it. If Jesus was willing to suffer for my child, shouldn’t I? After the suffering of His soul, he saw the light of life (my life, your life, my child’s life) and he was satisfied. (Isaiah 53:11)

I knew that my suffering wasn’t in vain, but I still didn’t feel any better.

“God, give me a vision of this child! Something to keep me going,” I prayed.

In my mind’s eye I saw beams of life coming from this child and shooting out to the far reaches of the earth. This child would be a blessing to me and my family, yes. But he would also have an impact on the entire world! How? I have no idea! But if I could have some small part in sending life to the whole of mankind, sign me up!

Then I heard God’s loving voice.

“Thank you for being available. Without you, I couldn’t bring this child of destiny into the world.”

Then I felt the peace that only God’s voice can bring. I felt His gratitude sink deep into my soul until I was saturated by the unbelievable goodness of it. God needs me? The all powerful God NEEDS ME to be available? What if I had said that seven children were quite enough, and that there were too many children in the world already? THIS particular child, with unique DNA from his father and from me that could never be duplicated, would have never existed! His very individual purpose and destiny would have never been manifested. His precious personality, which was a dream in God’s heart since before the world began (Ephesians 1:4), would have never been realized. And now he exists…because of me! I cannot think of anything more powerful. I cannot think of any higher honor for God to give me, than helping Him to create something of inestimable value and eternal impact.

I never could say during that pregnancy that I enjoyed being pregnant. But I could say that pregnancy was when I relied on God the most and sensed His presence the closest and felt His glory the heaviest. And the moment that precious Babe was born…I could say…