WHY WE STARTED FINDING THE FAMILY

I love it when people ask me why we started Finding the Family. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel. There are amazing ministries in the greater Springfield area that deal with recovery. But there’s just an added component that we work with, which is the WHOLE family, having the children come too. We help teach parenting skills, coping mechanisms and all the children are along for the ride.

It didn’t happen overnight. Finding the Family was actually birthed in our hearts, in the year 2004. Ultimately, we felt that when somebody was just barely making it into the church, or into the recovery class that they were missing something in the middle of the week. The component of accountability. I needed that, my husband needed that, and we knew that other people were going to need that too. So we just thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if…” and we just kept praying to the Lord just like that. The whole dynamic behind Finding the Family was birthed because we wanted to see people who were in recovery, have accountability, learn that they can have true friendships in the middle of their recovery, be able to voice out loud when they were struggling, and not feel the condemnation from other people who didn’t understand. We understand, we’ve been there.

So we literally live in a glass house. Our families on the property see when we have difficult days and they see that we still run to the Lord with those difficult days. And I think that’s important for people to see that there’s a true walk with Christ. It’s not a facade. They see me whenever I’m cranky but they also see me go before the Lord and ask him for forgiveness and they see my husband lead with strength. The things that we ask them to do, we do ourselves.

A NEW CREATION

When you want to be a new creation like the Word says, the old is gone the new has come, 2 Corinthians 5:17, you do new things. In the story of Moses, and he’s going in, getting the children of God out of Egypt, God gave him a specific message. “Go and tell Pharaoh, to let my people go.” That was his directive. He didn’t veer from it. He went in and kept getting shot down. Pharaoh kept trying to bargain with him, “I’ll let this much more go, I’ll let you go a little bit further.” But there’s a one liner that not many people will remember or even quote from Moses. I can’t wait until I get to Heaven because I get to say, “Thank you for your one liner!” which is this, “not one hoof left behind.” He knew what God had put in his heart. Don’t compromise with the enemy which was Pharaoh. Don’t compromise with the enemy. Because even if they leave one piece of themselves in Egypt, their eyes will turn back to see what it is that they left behind.

You have to pull everything that looks like your old life in bondage and run for your new life. Romans 12:1 talks about not conforming to the patterns of this world but being transformed by the renewing of your mind. Pastor John Lindell says that the renewal of our mind helps break down our defenses to God’s will in our life. I believe that. When we started doing what we should be doing, it wasn’t because we were trying to paste fruit on a tree. We wanted the Holy Spirit to truly produce fruit from within us. So that love, patience, kindness, gentleness, self control all that stuff comes out when you’re actually grafted into the vine.

In the year 2000, when I gave my heart to the Lord, I was changed. I said I don’t ever want to go back into the past, because that past destroyed me. It made me hate my life, I didn’t want to wake up every day and be a mom because I really didn’t even know how to be me. I didn’t know who I was anymore. And so when I became a Christian, I didn’t want to do any of those things anymore that were destructive to me and to my kids. But if I’m scared to go back to that, then what’s wrong with that fear propelling me into my future with the Lord? The problem with that is it says in 2 Timothy 1:7, that God does not give us as spirit of timidity, or fear but of a sound mind. So that means that’s power, that’s a strength in our mind that God gives us to keep moving forward. So, that should be what propels us in our new life of Christ, not the fear of going back and doing something that can hurt us. If we are running from fear then we are going to get really tired. But if I have my eyes locked on my Savior, then I can have the energy and excitement to keep moving forward and it’s a brand new life.