“So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves.” Galatians 5:16
Figure 1 Meet Ebenezer
The Apostle Paul gives us this very simple formula by which we should live our lives. This is the key to living a godly life that pleases our Lord. It all boils down to this, LET the Holy Spirit guide your lives. It is a moment by moment decision of submission to the Holy Spirit through constant listening to Him. What led Paul to whittle the entire Christian walk down to this simple command? Well, that is found a few verses earlier when he states in vs 13b-14: “But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love. For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
It is this guiding principle, through prayer and submission, that I found myself telling my wife, Peg, that we were going to get involved helping a woman in Kentucky who had a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) 21 years earlier. The TBI caused her weeks long migraines as well as grand maul seizures often times lasting up to 8 hours. For the last 11 years she had her faithful companion, Pippa, a service dog, that kept her safe and comforted during these episodes.
Her name is Beca and we have never met her face to face. We only knew of her through one of the missionaries LPC supports, Marcos Schultz, in Porvenir Mexico. Beca is his youngest daughter and Marcos had mentioned her in many of his newsletters and he asked us to pray for her.
God put it on my heart to begin praying for her. After a number of months of praying for her daily I heard the Holy Spirit say that it was time to for us to help her. “But, Lord, I don’t know anything about TBI’s!!”, I protested. The Holy Spirit brought to my remembrance a few specialists in SoCal that our daughter had used to be healed from black mold and aspergillus in her lungs that had almost killed her and had created brain trauma of fight or flight.
So began a journey that has lasted for almost 2 years now. Beca and her family live in very humble circumstances so God prompted me to pay to fly the entire family out to SoCal to meet with these two specialists to see if they could help (and pay for those visits as well!). Both specialists believed that they could help. So, we began to pay for treatments and other things to help them. Both Peg and I believed the Holy Spirit wanted us to see this to the end, no matter the cost.
Things were going well until her service dog, Pippa, died in early 2023. This set her back in a huge way and it also started a string of disastrous events in the family’s life that kept her health and wellbeing spiraling out of control. God told us to continue to help financially and in any way He led us. We got others involved, including some monthly financial help from the LPC Global Focus budget.
God’s Word tells us to count the costs and plan before we get involved in doing things but it also tells us to listen to the Holy Spirit and do what He tells us. We are in an open ended commitment to help Beca get better and functional, no matter the cost. My “evil desires” would be to close the checkbook and say sayonara, let God take care of you. But, here is the thing, God said He would take care of her and her family and He tapped me on the shoulder to do it.
I said above that her service dog died in January and she needs a service dog to function. God helped her find a pup from a line of TBI specialized dogs that they brought home in July. Now the dog needs to be trained. TBI service dogs cost between $15,000 and $50,000 to train. Miraculously she found a trainer who was willing to take her on that was only 3 hours away. Total costs should be around $20,000.00. We ask you to pray and listen to the Holy Spirit and see if He would want YOU to help in funding this need. This is NOT tax deductible, but then again, the Bible does not talk about giving only when it is tax deductible.
Here is the link to the giving site for Beca’s dog’s training. His name is Ebenezer.
Beca's Story and Support Site.
So I say, LET the Holy Spirit guide your lives….