First Mention of Jabez
Two weeks ago, in my first blog post of the New Year, I mentioned that decades ago, I read a booklet, The Prayer of Jabez, and prayed his prayer, “Oh, that You would bless me and enlarge my territory!” 1 Chron. 4:10
The result was that God granted my request, vastly expanded our speaking ministry, and even got us started in writing and publishing books.

Focus Prayer on Writing Ministry
I reread this booklet in December, and instead of the traditional “New Year’s Resolution,” I wrote a personal update of Jabez’s prayer and read it daily. Here it is:

“Please bless me abundantly in the writing ministry you have given me. Use the blog posts, stories, and books you lead me to write to expand your Kingdom on earth greatly. And keep me from the evil one’s temptations.”

Praying First
I have prayed this writing ministry-focused prayer every day since early December. The reason for this new focus is that Jo and I cannot travel long distances anymore, and I find it nearly impossible to think of the next thing to write when I have a speaking engagement looming on the horizon.

I look forward to continuing to work together with Jo who reads everything I write and always gives helpful suggestions for improvement. We expect to work together like this for whatever years God still grants us in life and health. We are already beginning to recognize some of God’s blessings in this ministry.

The first five books we wrote and published were collections of blog posts I had written in previous years. The next three books were short memoirs, of a child, a teenager, and a family man leaving for Brazil. These eight books were processed by volunteers and published cheaply through Amazon.
The current memoir, however, covers the twenty-two years our ministry was focused on Brazil. Those decades turned out to be a spiritual battle for the souls of the Canela people.

Result of Prayer
I was pleased to discover that God had already begun to answer our daily Jabez prayer and blessed us financially to the point that we now had money to have this memoir professionally edited and published by a highly experienced publisher.

The book will be going through several edit levels, and we are still constantly making significant improvements to it. We are excited, however, to know that God continues to bless not only the writing ministry of this book but four other writing tasks we are working on.
One of them is to write the explanations under photos of a large Canela photo book being compiled and published by our oldest daughter, Valorie, and her husband. It will make an excellent companion piece for the current main book!