GOD HAS A PLAN – FAMILY! By Laetitia Benberry

Two of my favorite scriptures have been Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, not for your destruction, but to give you a future and a hope” and “What was meant for evil, God meant/turned it to good” Genesis 50:20. I always enjoy the posts on Heartlife Ministries but was really blessed by Evangelist Camper’s article Pregnant with Purpose and her noting Jeremiah 1:5a, “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee”.

I want to relate the story an elderly African American woman who told me about her grandmother, who was a slave. She told me her grandmother was forced to cook for her slave-master and his family. This woman said her grandmother was not only forced to cook the slave-master’s food but forced to have sex with him and bare his children. Out of the most horrible of circumstances through the hardship of slavery, poverty, cruelty, and rape, this woman’s grandmother prayed for the day her children would be set free. Even when “freedom” came there was still extreme hardship, poverty, the Ku Klux Klan came riding, lynchings, and Jim Crow laws to deal with. Still her grandmother taught her children and grandchildren to strive, to dream and to pray for a better day. The elderly woman, who told me about her grandmother, married a man named Thomas Petty and they had 5 children. Their fourth child, a daughter named Eleanor, married a brick layer named Hiram, who later became a minister, a pastor, a civil-rights activist and a champion for the sanctity of life. He was the first one in his family of 12 children to graduate from college. Out of Eleanor and Hiram’s marriage 8 children were born: 2 carpenters, a college professor, a medical doctor, a counselor, a deputy sheriff, a pastor and a registered nurse. You see that elderly woman, whose grandmother was a slave who had her slave-master’s children was my maternal grandmother Ida Gardner Petty. The registered nurse is me. “What the enemy meant for evil”, with Godly grandparents and parents who put their faith in God, much prayer, perseverance, love, discipline and raising their children “in the fear and admonition of the Lord”, God turned to good.

God knows the plans he has for each one of us. You were not born by accident. God did not make a “mistake”. When we turn our lives and our children over to him, the enemy is defeated and “NO weapon formed against you or your children shall prosper”, not even the chains of slavery, bondage, poverty, hatred, racism, segregation, ungodliness, addiction, perversion, or demonic oppression can destroy what God has in store for you and your seed. “Choose life that you and your seed may live”. Deuteronomy 30:19. May God bless you as you turn your future over to Him.