My very first blog ever... ever!

Why now? I don't know. I don't have time. I have 50 other technical ways to express myself. I've been feeling led. That's it. So here I am.

Let's start with this bothersome title I chose. Seems ...self centered (but then isn't blogging just that?) I wondered if this title would offend people - a flippant slap to those who did and did not survive the great depression. It came out of my head and then out of my hands and into the sign up text box. Usually there's more attached than I realize at first when things come out of my head and then out of my hands. Some things that come to mind...

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I too have been poverty stricken in my life.

The heart is a hungry beggar waving around an empty tin cup
we stick it under any spicket we can find just to try and fill it up
So why are we still so empty...

(Those are lyrics from a recent song I wrote.)

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I preached a sermon one time based on a bunch of grapes sitting there on this grand piano beside me...well not really but the women of the group were visualizing it there ...like I asked them to. I realized that we are like those grapes. We have been cut from the vine. They look beautiful for a while, with vibrant color and plump full of water but they are dying there in front of our eyes. Disconnected for their source of life, the vine, slowly they wither, dry up and die.

I found that source... I mean He found me! He came and sat patiently beside that spicket I was bowing to and offered to fill that empty tin cup, forever -- with "living water" and as long as I placed the tin cup under His spicket, He promised I would never again find myself empty. He was clearly the miracle that had come to reattach me to the life source -- the vine. I was suddenly no longer dying. I was gaining life upon life upon life, eternally.

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I am the vine, ye are the branches: 

He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit:

for without me ye can do nothing. 

John 15:5 

Receiving that life upon life thing caused an almost immediate explosive passion from deep within to "bear much fruit". Over the past few years, I began to wither a bit. I don't believe I became disconnected from the vine but it was more like I was refusing to receive the "living water". Turns out it comes at a cost. Once you've had this water you find it near impossible to live without it though. Out of desperate thirst, I finally pushed the blockades out of my spiritual veins and set myself to recieve again. Maybe that's "why now". 

I've written my testimony in book form and titled it "Time In The Sun." It is about to be published by Westbow Press. In a few days it will be available on BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com and a few Christian bookstores. I plan to write a follow up called "Chapter 2". There is intentionally a ten year block of time missing from the first book. It is during that ten years that I stepped into the super freaky, mind bending, life changing, flesh eating ways of the Holy Spirit and this incredible place called the Kingdom of Heaven I suddenly found myself living in.

 

I didn't start a blog to sell a book. I wrote a book to avoid a blog -- but here I am. Who knows what this blog is about. But I pray most of all that it is fruitful. 

Peace In Him,

Jill Welch 

P.S. We dig and dig but have not yet found that my husband is an heir to the Welches Grape Juice fortune -- or Raquel's. No worries! We are heirs of the KING OF KINGS!