Double Wow!!

Good morning…

“Here we go again?,” she emailed after yesterday’s post, Wow! “Do you still read Jesus Calling before you write or is this one of those God moments?” Hers was a really good question. Let me tell you the two most important reasons I adored her enlivening email.

First, she took me back to where our daily blog began. In January of 2012, I began emailing daily messages to a private google group we formed as part of a Bible study I was teaching at Northside Church. The small group of women was aptly named “Ladies on Line” (LOL). As individuals, we would read Sarah Young’s Jesus Calling each morning and I would choose a snippet of God’s wisdom from the page and elaborate in a brief daily post. What began with twenty-five female LOL members grew to reach over 625 women and men, adults and teens, in Atlanta and other states over the course of a few fertile years.

In the summer of 2015, with the blessing of Northside Church and the help of a dear friend, my husband and I took our written word ministry out of the church and invested in the creation of our own transitional website. Making our morning messages more accessible to all and easier to pass along, we launched our “sue2you” blog in September 2015. We started with zero subscribers, since the emails from “Ladies On Line” remained as church property, and within two short years our online community grew back to 675 subscribers.

Sensing that God was organically growing our written word ministry, in the summer of 2017 my husband and I hired our own web designer who helped us to create the “SueToYou.com” website we now enjoy together each morning. In the summer of 2018, our web designer taught me to add pictures to our daily blog posts, enhancing our experience. Since the costs incurred were increasing alongside our website reach and quality, we also added the gratitude gift tab in the spring of 2018 so our written word ministry could be sustained through the generosity of loyal subscribers. Then in the summer of 2019, I stopped taking off June, July, and August from daily writing and I purchased my first laptop with our SueToYou funds, allowing me to write to you every single morning, 365 days each year, from wherever I wake. This strange COVID summer of 2020, we have seamlessly leaned into the creative, collaborative web of connection God began knitting together eight and a half years ago. Today, we have 862 subscribers who freely forward our posts to friends and family members, ensuring that our morning messages are enjoyed by 1,500 to 3,000 readers most days from across all parts of our globe.

But it all began with Jesus Calling as our springboard into deep daily devotion with God.

Remember my friend asked in her email, “Do you still read Jesus Calling before you write or is this one of those God moments?”

Secondly, she reminded me again that God speaks in surround-sound among us each day. In yesterday’s blog post, God’s Spirit drew us to this Bible verse: “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8, NIV). When my friend sent me a snapshot of yesterday’s morning message from Jesus Calling, I knew we were experiencing another God moment together.