From My Heart To His

By Michelle Greene Wheeler

A collection of Christian poetry, devotions, stories and songs written through the trials and tribulations of the authors life and displaying how our faith in God can see us through anything!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michelle Greene Wheeler
• Release date: Feb 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465865359

Michelle Greene Wheeler

Michelle Greene Wheeler is a Christian author, photographer/artist, jewelry maker, ministry leader, and singer who lives in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Michelle is married to Bro. Adam Wheeler, is the mother of Tiffany and Austin, as well as the grandmother of little Kylie. Saved at the age of eleven, Michelle feels that a good song to sum up her life's testimony would be "A Heart Like Mine" by Bryan Duncan. The journey has had hills and valleys, twists and turns, but as long as she has Jesus Christ by her side, she enjoys the ride! Check out Michelle's art, jewelry and other items at her Romans12 Designs facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Romans12Designs. Shop tabs are at top and left hand side of page. God Bless!

Book preview

From My Heart To His

By

Michelle Greene Wheeler

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Michelle Greene Wheeler at Smashwords

From My Heart To His

Copyright © 2012 by Michelle Greene Wheeler

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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From My Heart To His

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Contents

Fifteen Years

Can’t Take Your Love From Me

Worth Waiting For

All I Need

Don't Forget, Lord

That’s What It’s All About

Witness

Ask Him

I Will Be Here

My Life

With A Touch Of Grace

Closer To You

In The Water

Thank You, Lord

You Define Me

With Him Daily Grow

Pray As You Go

Our Search for God’s Perfect Will

You

With Grace

What To Say, Lord?

When He And I Travel As One

More Than Enough For You

Standing On The Corner

Your Promises Are True

Teach Me, Lord

Let the Healing Begin

Press On

Such a Friend as You

Anticipation Is Making Me Wait

Make Me Like You

Treasure Of My Heart

My Prayer Debt

Persecuted?

More Like You

You Are My Light

Planting His Church

Be A Container

Many Are Called

You Are The One

Make The Change

A Small World

Loving Me Anyway

Sow Thy Word

When the Past Won't Pass

I Quit Trying

To You, Savior, I Turn

Someone Like You, Lord

Weary

Can’t You See?

To My Church

Just One Drop

Wearing You On My Sleeve

I’ll Sing Your Praise

Wholehearted Devotion

More Of You

My Friend Robin

Because You Asked Him To

To Me

Live By Love

Rather Be Praying For Than Prayed For?

I’ll Be Praying For You

Where Would I Be

He’ll Meet Me There

Who You Are

Savior, Redeemer and Friend

Times Like These

If You’re Looking For Mercy

Longing Just To Touch You

Isn’t It Amazing?

If Tomorrow

Romancing the Stone

I Read It With My Heart

In Word and Deed

Never Knowing How to Be Loved

Lead Me Through

Thy Heart

I Need You Still

The Same Old Questions

I Have Faith

Savior, It’s You

Trying To Get Back

A Different Me

Someone Somewhere Love

Prove My Love

God On The Mountain

Act With Courage

The Peace of Heart

Cling To Him

Addicted to Love

I Wanna Be

Give A Little Faith

Savior, I Love Thee

A Difference

Because Jesus Lived And Died For Me

I Know What Love’s About

God Knows the Plans for You

Before You

When You Come Home Again

The Presence of the Holy Ghost

If I Could Look Through Christ’s Eyes

I Fly Away

God Knew The Tree

For Never Givin’ Up On Me

I Searched

The Polka-Dot Dress

The Proof of Your Love

The Sun Will Shine Again

Doesn’t Matter Why

Real Christians Don’t Quit

What's Your Name?

Each Time I Pray

The Savior’s Call

When The Rainbow Fades

Get Thee Behind Me, Satan

Thou Art There

Every Moment

Sea of Forgetfulness

For Carrying Me Each Day

Restore My Strength

Send Me, I’ll Go

For Zelma

I Know My Savior’s Near

The Vow

He Never Ceases To Look On Us With Hope

Here He Comes

The Sun

Fisher of Men

His Hopes For Me

I Remember

In My Grief

How Life Will Be In Heaven

All Is Well

Pride In Our Children

All I Have To Do

Burdened

F-A-I-L-U-R-E

Renew My Faith

At The Door

It’s Time To Go

Why Another Church?

Whenever Times Get Rough

Thou Art My Son

I Pray

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All thanks must go to my Savior, Jesus Christ, who has blessed me in ways too numerable to list.

The poetry, songs, devotions and stories you read here are from a collection of writings I’ve been doing since I can remember. Those included here are from 1990 through 2010.

The words you read here will be filled with the tribulations and tears, as well as the joys of my lifetime. Most importantly, they express my gratitude to God for everything He has been to me and done for me through the years.

My hope and prayer is that the musings of my heart may be a blessing to yours.

All scripture references are from the KJV unless otherwise specified.

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Fifteen Years

In memory of my loving sister, Melissa Greene Ponder

I read a magazine article recently which posed the question What was the most life altering day of your life? It didn’t take me very long to decide that my answer was not as simple as one particular day, thought there had been many that had changed my life for the better or for the worse through the years. Birthdays and births. Milestones and marriages. Triumphs and tragedies.

But no. None of these singular events quite felt like they truly fit the description of most life altering.

Mine was not a singular day, but a span of fifteen years. Years that were altering because of one particular person who was a very central figure in my life during that time.

I can remember the first day I ever saw her. I had been very excited about this first meeting. It was at a backyard picnic in the summer of 1978, and Dad was bringing the lady that he had begun dating to meet the family. Even more importantly to me, she was bringing along her daughter who was my age. The possibility of having a sister had been the subject of many frequent prayers on my part.

In some ways, she was my complete opposite. She was taller than I was, though we were both ten years old at the time. I was pudgy, with sandy colored short hair and green eyes. She on the other hand, had long, dark hair, blue eyes, and was very slender.

We both were two lonely hurting little girls who needed each other more than either of us could have imagined on that humid summer day. And definitely more than Missie would have let herself admit at the time. For even at that tender age, she had built a fortress around herself. She was hoping that this would effectively keep anyone from hurting her ever again.

You see, we had both experienced devastating tragedies in our short lives. For all our differences, this fact made us very much alike. It made us able to understand each other as no one else really could.

In October of 1974, when I was only six years old, my mother had been killed in a terrible automobile accident on her way to work early one morning. I had even seen the accident in much of its gruesome detail from the window of the van that took me to school each morning. Because her car was behind the other, or maybe because it was not yet daylight, I never recognized that it was her car in the accident. I did not know my mother had died until later in the day when the principal of my school drove me home personally and my uncle stood to greet me in the driveway.

I dealt with her death with enormous grief. I mourned not only a mother, but also someone who told me that they loved me every day. I never really had that after she was gone, and I was very conscious of that affection missing from my life. It’s not that my father and the rest of my family didn’t love me, but it was more that they were just not the kind of people to make such displays of affection.

In December of that same year, a state away, Missie had forever lost her Father in a brutal act that can only be described as a murder.

Some teenage boys had been scaring his niece who was home alone across the road. Unfortunately, this had not been the first time that this had occurred. In an attempt to protect his family, he went after them. He was a tall man, with an immense presence. He was intending to warn them, for sure. Maybe even to put enough fear into them so that they would leave his family alone for good. But the tables were turned on him, and before he knew it, he was on a backwoods country road with four teenage boys beating him with baseball bats essentially to death. No doctor or machine made by human hands was capable of bringing the life back into his body.

Missie had dealt with her grief with much anger. Anger at the world, it seemed. And who could really blame her?

During those first days and weeks being around each other, we had a wonderful time. The parents would take us out to the movies, out to eat, and to meet more of the extended families. We would have sleepovers, and spend our time scanning the Sears catalog for all the toys that we’d like to have in the playhouse we were sure to have once we became sisters. Some nights we would giggle and count the kisses our parents were sharing in the hall where they thought they were quietly hidden away from us.

In late September of 1978, our respective parents were married. Needless to say, actually living together took a lot of adjustments. At times the anger would return and Missie would not be quite so sure that she approved of her mother getting remarried after all. There were times when I would become downhearted because I hadn’t fully realized just how much of my Dad’s time I would now be sharing.

Those first few years were certainly rough at times. There were fights over friends. Fights over boys. TV time. Telephone time. Fights over the parents. Fights because of imagined insecurities that we were being treated differently in some minute way. You name it; we probably fought about it at one time or another.

There were times when we fought for each other, too. The only time during my school years that I can remember being sent to the principal’s office is because of an unfortunate lunchroom incident. In sixth grade, three students would stay after lunch and help the ladies who worked in the cafeteria clean up. The kids were scheduled on a rotating basis. My day came, and I was assigned along with a set of twins that Missie and I had played with on the playground, as well as after school. Unfortunately, on this particular day, one of the girls had had a disagreement with Missie earlier that morning. She then took it upon herself to tell me that my sister was a word that cannot be printed in civilized publications. The next thing that I knew, I had taken the broom that I had previously been sweeping with and smacked it across this girl’s head.

Similarly, there was once an incident on our bus ride home one evening when another rider threatened me. I stood up, but before I knew it, Missie had come up from the back of the bus and was standing in front of me letting the offender know in no uncertain terms that they would have to go through her first.

But as much as we fought, we loved, too. We would talk on each other’s behalf to boys. We would devise plans to work one parent over the other. Have late night talks about school, and friends, and how much we missed our parents who were no longer there.

If we had truly been sisters by blood, one would just count all these things as normal sibling behavior. And it was.

Somewhere along the way, we had truly formed the bonds of sisterhood. Though not by blood, but through love. And even after such a rocky and uncertain start.

I can’t remember when we stopped using the word stepsister. When someone would ask, we would always just smile and say, We’re sisters. In the history of time, I doubt that there ever were two sisters who were closer or who cared more for each other than we two. Mom used to say that our relationship was an even closer one than that she shared with her own sisters, and maybe that was true. Unlike most, we could remember a time when we weren't in each other's lives and that, I believe, caused us to appreciate the simple fact that we did have one another.

The day that Missie married is one of my favorite memories. It was a bright and promising June day in 1990. Everything was in place and the ceremony had been rehearsed to perfection. Already in my Maid of Honor dress, Missie asked me to help her with her hair. I stood behind her, looking at her in her beautiful dress, with her veil lying beside her. There was a glow on her face, and her eyes were twinkling, and suddenly I realized something.

We were no longer to be those Greene girls. No more would we be Mom’s M&M’s. And whenever I needed her, as I so often did, it was not going to be as simple as going into the next room. And I began to cry.

She smiled as she turned around to me and asked, Shell, why are YOU crying? I’m the one getting married!

My heart filled with dread as I explained, I’m afraid I’m losing you! She half laughed and said, "Michelle, you will