Awesomely Answered Prayer!

I wrote this on Oct 28, two years ago on this blog:

The fourth exciting thing is an answer to prayer. Back a couple
of weeks ago while we (the editorial team of Japan Harvest) were rushing to put together the latest edition, God impressed upon me to pray for a new team member to join our team. This seemed an unusual thing at the time, these sorts of impressions don't happen to me very often. However I did, and, hey presto, on Sunday I had a somewhat random in-the-pews conversation with someone after church. It almost accidentally (of course, no accident, but it wasn't directed by me) turned to editing. To cut a long and detailed story short — we had a meeting yesterday and we have a new team member, at least for a trial run on the Spring Edition next year. I'm excited, I'm very excited. (See the whole post here.)

The designer who's just stepping down has done an
awesome job on the magazine. I'm sad to see her
leave as I depended on her for many things. Here's one spread
in our latest magazine. Love the creativity, and the professional way
that she approached her work (despite severe limitations
on her available time to work on the magazine). Plus, she's
become a good friend. Thankfully she's not moving away, but
I'll miss the regular interaction we had about the magazine.

Another exciting thing happened this past week. The amazing thing is that it is almost the same story.

Last Monday I wrote here about how our magazine designer (yes, the one I recruited above) had told me she needed to step down. I've been asking God daily for someone to quickly fill in this important role and wondering how much to advertise this need vs whether to just leave it in prayer and see what God does.

Well, in the end I felt very restless about the whole thing, and last Thursday and put this up on Facebook:

I'm praying daily for a new designer for Japan Harvest. Our designer has too much on her plate and needs to step down. Do you know anyone (particularly an English speaker in Japan) who has these skills?

That night I received a message from a friend from our church here in Japan who has both the skills and the (expensive) program to do the job. After talking with him at church on Sunday, he's agreed to take on the role from next month.

How awesome is that? You've gotta love Facebook when things like this happen (I also recruited our Associate Editor from my Facebook friend list). I didn't know that he had this hidden skill. But it seems as though he is God's very timely provision. An answer to our prayers.

Today I'm so thankful.

I'm also recommitted to praying for other big needs that we have coming up, for example:

• Someone to manage the magazine while we're on home assignment from June next year.
• A couple more associate editors to share the editing load.
• Some people to take over the lease on our house here for the year we're in Australia, so that we're able to come back to live in this convenient house.
• A house and car in Australia from July next year.
• A teacher/teachers to cover my husband's jobs while we're away.

If you like, you can join me in prayer!