Make Your Day Count

LR:  Amen, that’s right.  And, you know, what if your desire is to become a nun.  If your desire is to become a nun and everyone is saying to you, “You can’t do it because you’ve done this, this and this,” God can cleanse you.  If your desire is to be a mother, praise God for it.  That was my desire.  And, you know, the Lord tried everything to bless me and the devil tried everything to rob me, and I had to make a decision to either quit and give up or try again.  And I had to make that decision.  I had a dream in my heart.  If your dream is to be Miss America, if your dream is to be a nun, if your dream is to be a lawyer, if your dream is to be a doctor, if your dream is to be a priest or a pastor or an evangelist, or if you know God has turned you into a prophet of God, don’t give up your dream in the face of adversity.  The devil isn’t going to make the road to God easy. He’s not that dumb.  One thing about the devil, he’s not dumb. He knows where your weakest points are.  When I saw my precious little son go to be with the Lord after two miscarriages, I finally said, honest, this is the truth, I looked in the face of my husband and I said, “Don’t you ever ask me to get pregnant again.”  Don’t ever do it again.  Now that was the devil talking. That was the “give up and quit” talking.  Had I quit, I would have missed my precious beautiful little Jordan Lindsay.  But the Lord finally gave me a peace and He said, “Now you know better than that.  I told you try again.  I gave you a strength.  I gave you a peace.”  And the Lord gave me the strength to try again when I was pregnant.  The whole time I kept saying, “This is God’s baby, this is God’s miracle, this is my little miracle.” Every time I look at her, I said, “I named you Jordan Lindsay, but your name is miracle,” because she is a miracle.  But it began with my conscious decision to say, “I’ll do it again.  I’ll get up.  I’ll get up from the ashes.  I’ll get up from the”–I was in the heap, I’ll tell you what.  I felt like I was in the floor, I was a failure.  It wasn’t me that caused that baby not to live.  The doctors to this day don’t have an explanation.  I couldn’t, I couldn’t physically say, “I did this wrong, I did that wrong.”  But I felt like a failure.  Even though I had nothing to do with it, I felt like a failure.  But, see, God didn’t make failures.  God doesn’t create, He doesn’t supernaturally give you birth to be a failure.  That’s not His plan and His purpose.  He gives you birth to be a child of God. And He said, “I will put you in high places, not low places,” like Miss National Teenager and Miss America.  He said, “I put you to be the head and not the tail.  That means I made you to be the top and not the bottom.”  If you’re living on the bottom right now, that’s not where God wants you to be.  You have to be content in the fact that God is in control.  But you’ve got to be tenacious in the fact that God has a plan for you to get up and get out of that mess and become what God created you to become. He called us all to be winners. (Applause)  And whether you ever win the crown or not, you’re still a winner.  If you’re the second runnerup or the third runnerup or the fifth runnerup or you never get to the pageant, you’re a winner in God’s eyes.  If you’re doing what God called you to do, you are a winner.  I really believe that.