Joyce Meyer’s Love Life Women’s Conference Words

Travel There – From God’s Mouth to Our Ears

If you read my last post about my dissatisfaction with the musical offerings at this conference, then you might expect me to pick apart the rest of it and you’d be wrong. I loved the messages delivered by the speakers: Joyce Meyer, Lisa Harper and Christine Caine.

Though I had been worn out by the drive and beat up by the music, when Joyce came to the stage she had words which were formed in her mind by the heart of God just for me. I had come looking for healing and encouragement. By the end of the first night’s teaching, I knew I had come to the right place.

Joyce started off in Genesis with our old friend, Abram. We all know his story. Abram had received great promises from God and things weren’t so bad, but they didn’t exactly match up to what God said there would be. “Then the Lord took Abram outside and said to him, “Look up…” She encouraged us to get outside our tent and look up.

She shared the difficult things in her life that she would change if she could, but reminded us, none of us can, no matter how much we may want to. However, she also guided us to Isaiah 45:3, “I will give you hidden treasures, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name.” From one of her greatest challenges, Joyce eventually received and continues to receive great blessings. She encouraged us to get out of our tents and look up, so God could reveal those hidden treasures to us.

Joyce Meyers was talking to me. I’d been so busy in my tent I’d been failing to consider God’s many blessings in my life, because I was distracted by the drudgery and the challenges in the tent. By getting out of my tent and driving for two days I found a star-filled sky. My hope for hidden treasures, riches which were stored up for me, broke through and joy seeped once again into my heart.

Joyce’s Guests

Friday morning Joyce took the stage with her speaker friends and talked about the mistakes and hard places in life with them. I loved the format and it fleshed out what Joyce had said about getting outside our tents, looking up at the stars and being aware of the hidden treasures. The time was like a balm on my heart.

That afternoon, Lisa Harper taught us with humor and Scripture about our God of second chances. She reminded me that no matter how much I mess up, I have a God who can use my mess to to be blessing to others. Since I seem to have a lot of messes at my disposal, it’s nice to know God can even use our mistakes to His glory.

Christian Caine, with her lovely Aussie brogue took one of the shortest Scriptures in the Bible, “Remember Lot’s wife!” Luke 17:32 and turned it in to a battle cry against our post-Covid doldrums. No matter what your life was like before Covid – good or bad – Covid has come and gone. Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt who lost both her past and her future. She urged us to embrace what was ahead and I walked out of the conference ready to do just that. I was out of my tent, looking at the stars.

Imagination Station

During one of the breaks I went down to see why people were standing in line in a certain part of the arena. There was an area called the Imagination Station and if that wasn’t it, it was something along that line.

The idea of it was to imagine something you wanted God to do for you and tell Him about it in a tangible way, by writing the thing you imagined on a strip of cloth and then tying it to a grid on the wall.

Confession, I am horrid at goal setting and vision boards are a craft to me, not an inspiration. I tend to have hopes, not tangible goals. I can set a goal for activities, but saying I am going to sell a certain amount of product or raise my profit X%. It’s beyond me. I can easily tell you places I want to go and things I would like to buy, but translating them into measurable goals, it just doesn’t happen.

For these reasons, I was a bit threatened by this exercise. I was tempted to walk right through the display area. Then I remembered. This was between God and me. There wasn’t going to be a quarterly review. I wasn’t going to be graded on it.

I got a strip, wrote three wishes on it and tied it on the grid. Then I walked through the rest of the display area and was encouraged by the verses displayed there. Especially this one, since being in my later 60’s could be construed as a reason to go sit quietly on the bench.

Now I can tell you how God works. I tied my wishes to the grid on the wall and while I fully believe that with God I can do anything, I was in no way sure my love of scrapbooking and my desire to pursue it more aggressively professionally had any interest to God.

I left the conference the next day and went on with my life. I thought from time to time about the strip I had tied to the grid, but I told myself, I left that in God’s hands, not going to worry about it. Within a week and a day, I had gotten an email, virtually out of the blue, from a potential customer who needed my scrapbooking assistance.

This new client was not magic. I had done the things I should. I am signed up as a consultant with both a traditional and a digital scrapbooking company. I have a website. I have social media to tell people I am a memory keeper. When I go to networking meetings, I mentioned it, even though Spot On Images, by necessity was the focus.. However, most days of my life all that goes unnoticed. That is until I turn one of my wishes over to God.

So that’s how Joyce and her guests impacted my life at the Love Life Conference in St. Louis and propelled us into selling SOI and making Memory Keeping my priority., but I hope you’ll come back next week, because we are going to play hooky during some of the conference’s sessions and I’d like you to come along.