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Joyce Swann has been a Christian since childhood and a prayer warrior for over forty years. She became nationally-known in the 1990’s because of her work homeschooling her ten children from the first grade through masters’ degrees before their seventeenth birthdays. She has been featured on Paul Harvey’s weekly radio program, CBN, and the 1990’s CBS series, “How’d They Do That?” She has been interviewed by “Woman’s World”, “The National Enquirer”, and numerous regional newspapers. The story of the Swann family has also been featured in the “National Review” and several books about homeschooling success stories. Joyce is the author or co-author of five novels, including “The Fourth Kingdom”, which was selected as a finalist in the Christianity Today 2011 fiction of the year awards and “The Warrior” which, since its release in 2012, has had over 50,000 Kindle downloads and hundreds of glowing reviews. She was a popular columnist for “Practical Homeschooling” for nearly decade and she has retold her own story of homeschooling her ten children in “Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother”. “The Warrior” is her first solo novel.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

When your Life is a Mess

Do you ever feel as if your life is a chaotic mess? Sometimes it is hard to believe that we can ever get our lives straightened out. Relationships gone bad, jobs terminated, opportunities lost—all lead us to doubt that we will ever find the peace and joy that we so desperately desire.
The Genesis account of creation says that when God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was “a shapeless, chaotic mass with the Spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors” (Genesis 1:1-5). Even then, however, God was there, ready to make the mass—or the mess—into His amazing, perfect creation.
 It is interesting that God’s first creation was light. When the light appeared, He separated it from the darkness and then continued to create the sky, the oceans, the dry earth, and all that they contain. Yet, all of this came about only after He separated the light from the darkness.
The shapeless, chaotic mass described in Genesis is a good picture of the unsaved man or woman. Until we accept Jesus Christ as our Savior, our lives lack form, direction, and purpose; yet, even at those times when we feel most hopeless, God is always there, ready to make something beautiful from the chaos.
Even the person who has never heard the Gospel and who knows nothing about Jesus Christ has some light in his life. Helen Keller, who became deaf and blind at age eighteen months, experienced Christ long before she heard about Him. She lived in a silent, black world, unable to speak and unable to communicate until Anne Sullivan came into her life and began to teach her. When Helen had finally learned enough so that she could be told about God, she responded, “I always knew Him; I just didn’t know His name.”
It is not enough, however, to believe that there is a God. Only when we are willing to rid our lives of the sin and darkness that separate us from the light of Christ can we find true meaning and purpose, and only then can He begin to create in us those things that bring us into relationship with Him. Then our lives will take on form and substance and beauty. The light will overcome the darkness, and we will find that we truly are a new creation in Him.
For books by Joyce Swann, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/
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