Shannon's Corner

SHANNON’S CORNER May 2018 Beauty from Ashes I recently had a conversation with someone who has gone through a very hard, hurtful and painful time for several years. This person shared with me how God has helped her to process through the hurt and pain.  Not an easy road.  But a necessary one in order to receive healing and restoration.  Yet, as she is sharing with me the various things that God has taught her and had her process and reflect on, I see a beauty.  I see peace.  I see Jesus. This is the part of my ministry that I love.  The part where I see Jesus reflected more boldly and brightly than before.  Jesus makes beauty from the ashes. I got to hear four of our directors share their testimonies at our directors retreat.  It was awesome to hear how God had worked in these four directors’ lives since they were little girls.  Their childhood and upbringing were all d...

It's hard to believe that summer is almost hear, which means that our season of summer interns has almost arrived.  I am excited about this season since I really do enjoy working with interns and hearing how God has called them to serve Him in a cross-cultural experience as well as to see how God will grow them and use them for His kingdom.  I am excited because this year I have been able to put into place a more informative and hands-on training/orientation for our interns who will be serving this summer. Some of you may be wondering why summer interns?  Our purpose for summer interns is because God calls us each to "go and preach the Good News..." and this is one platform to be able to share the Good News to the kids in our ministries, our national staff and those who live in our communities.  We are all one body but made up of different parts, which each part has it's unique purpose for the body as a whole.  Summer interns help by assisting, teaching, a...

SHANNON’S CORNER April 2018 Sustain. Encountering God’s heart for you.   The theme of our women’s retreat.  I want to share with you how God orchestrated our women’s retreat.  We usually have a group of women who come from a church to do a women’s retreat for our missionary women yearly.  This year the women were not able to come.  I figured that we would just wait until the following year. One of the ladies in our group approached Leslie with the idea of using Velvet Ashes online retreat for our women’s retreat.  Leslie talked with me about the idea and together we planned the retreat.  Because the retreat was online we decided that even if our ladies were unable to come to the retreat that they could still be blessed by doing the retreat on their own time.  I was shocked by how many ladies signed up to attend our retreat since this past year there has been some tension and...