Streams of Life: Fresh Living Water for Life's Desert Experiences

By Mark Shiver

"This intimate look at Tammy's journals holds a treasure trove of insight and encouragement for anyone longing for the purity and simplicity of living devoted to Jesus. Here are wise words for a hungry heart; don't miss them."

Wayne Jacobsen, author of He Loves Me, Live Loved Free Full, and co-author of The Shack

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Feb 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9798890418197

Mark Shiver

Mark and Tammy served in the local church for twenty-five years and raised two wonderful children, Jenny and Andy. Mark is the host of Fueled by Grace, a website and podcast dedicated to sharing God's great love. He is also a part of TEAM Ministries, providing encouraging messages to kids and their families at travel baseball tournaments. Mark is ordained with Christian Global Outreach Ministries.

Book preview

Foreword

When a friend passes away, it is often the fact that our desire to remember them well presses us to remember them only well. This is not a regrettable part of human demeanor, whether by God’s grace or some unexplained act of parting kindness.

But Tammy was different. One need not have lost Tammy to know that she was a treasure in whom no guile could be found. I remembered her well many years before cancer ravaged her body and she departed from this world. It was not her passing that triggered fond remembrances; it was her living.

To say she was an angel misses the point, no matter how angelic she was. She knew of one virtue only - the grace of Jesus.

And that is the power behind the words you read in Streams of Life. Mark shared many of these words with me while putting the book together, and they speak so powerfully, I cannot help but feel them burn within me.

It is the person who wrote them that still burns like a flame because of her simple, steady life.

I am not going to tell you how much she loved Jesus and how hard she worked for Him and how much she was devoted to Him. Again, that misses the point, and it is not the message that Tammy speaks. I will simply say that Tammy was possessed of the knowledge that Jesus loved her and held her as His own.

With this knowledge, she grew and matured. You will feel it when you read her words. After all, most of our declarations about how much we love God ring as hollow as Peter’s boastful, Lord, I will not deny you. No. Tammy bragged only that it was God Who did the loving, devoting, and sacrificing.

Okay, the human stuff. Tammy was my secretary when I engaged in church work. It is not an exaggeration to say that my teammates fought off envy and wonder that I - of all rascals - could deserve to have Tammy helping me carry out my tasks.

I knew very little what to do. But that mattered less because God was with us, because the people we served were gracious, and because Tammy covered a multitude of my sins. Not sins in the sense of the absence of moral rectitude, but certainly in the sense of a pastor who erred more than he excelled.

Tammy could do anything. She was resourceful. She was ahead of her time at the dawn of the techno-explosion. She learned anything she set her mind to learn. She worked hard. She improved whatever environment she entered.

When Mark told me he believed he wanted to marry Tammy, I nearly scoffed. In my mind, no man was good enough for her. What can I say – one of the many sins of mine which she covered.

I recommend that you keep Streams of Life" handy as more of a resource than a devotional to work through and then file on the shelf. The truth that Tammy shared in her journals, combined with the encouragement that Mark adds about God’s love and grace, will serve us all well when we find ourselves in need of a fresh, cool drink of living water.

Tammy, I love you. There was no one like you. Say hello to Zack.

- Noel Cookman, President of The Mortgage Institute, a founding elder at Raleigh Christian Community Church, and lifelong friend.

Streams of Life - Introduction

My dear Tammy was a wonderful woman. Without a doubt, she was the godliest person I have ever known. She loved her Savior. She loved her Jesus.

It was this presence of character that grabbed my heart and my attention, and made me want to be in a relationship with her. Ask anyone who knew her and the first thing they will mention is her smile, her kindness, and her thoughtfulness towards others. She was never one to seek the limelight but rather enjoyed serving without recognition.

We were so much not alike. I, the gregarious, driven personality, and she, the quiet, steady, faithful one whose rewards are definitely piled up in heaven. This was Tammy, my wife, my best friend, and the mother of our children.

Her love and passion for God played out every day in her devotional time. I won’t say she never missed her time with God, but I will say that it was rare, if she ever did miss a day.

Tammy would write her thoughts down in notebooks, whether they be things she was struggling with, scriptures she was excited about, or prayers that she was praying for herself or others. Each day was a snapshot of where she was in her Christian faith, sometimes on the mountaintop and sometimes in the valley. But there was never any waiver of trust in the Jesus she loved so much.

While she was alive, I never thought it would be appropriate to look at what she had written as this was her private time with her Lord. Unfortunately, Tammy died in 2019 after a battle with cancer.

I have all these devotional notebooks that she had filled with her thoughts and prayers, and eventually, I began to look inside. I was amazed at what I found. This woman of God that I was married to had an even deeper relationship with God than I was aware of, and somehow, never knew. Jesus said not to pray in front of other people, drawing attention to yourself, and Tammy lived that admonition daily.

Sometimes I wish she and I had shared more, but I was often too busy to sit down and talk to her about the things of God that were important to her. Most of the time our sharing was me the preacher trying to get her to see or be excited about something God had shown me.

Can you imagine how I felt when turning the pages of her devotionals and realizing she already knew so much of what I had tried to get her to see? She continues to amaze me even after having stepped into eternity.

While reading her thoughts and insights I found myself thinking, This is good and needs to get out to help others. Hence, Streams of Life.

Welcome to Streams of Life. It is the goal of this book to be a ready canteen of living water for your daily living. Sometimes in our lives, we are confronted with times of wilderness where thirst and dryness set in, and it seems that the goodness of God is not near or even real. It’s as if we have been dropped in a desert, alone and very thirsty.

A canteen full of cold, fresh water can help to get us through these times and remind us of the goodness of God and the reality of His great love.

Tragedy, fear, medical diagnoses, job loss, marital stress, children going off track – all these things can serve as catalysts to drying up the living water we desperately need and sometimes take for granted as believers. When the difficulties of life show us what Jesus said would be true – In this world, you will have trouble (John 16:33); how do we respond?

How do we stay in a place of faith and peace?

In that same verse, it says of Jesus, He told His disciples these things so that in Him they might have peace. Wait, what?? Sometimes this verse does not make any sense to us. How do you have peace when funeral home attendants have just rolled your wife out the front door and placed her cancer-ridden, lifeless body in the back of their van? Burning tears and screams of NO!! do not seem to be an indication of peace.

How do we have peace when the children we have raised to love God and His church seem to have gone astray? What about when our families are splintered and fractured, seemingly beyond repair? Where is the peace?

Is peace possible when the job we loved and worked at faithfully for years is suddenly gone, and the money for food and a roof over our head is cut off?

The question in these desert times is, How do we navigate the truth that, ‘In this world, we will have trouble’ into the stream of life where Jesus said we would have peace? After all, there is often very little going on that produces peace when we get hit in the face with a diagnosis that our loved one has cancer.

Sleepless nights over a child who has lost their love for the things of God do not produce peace. Worry over being unemployed is not a sure-fire path to peace. Yes, Jesus said in this world we would have trouble. But where is the peace?

The peace is in the rest of the verse. Here is the full verse: I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. (John 16:33)

It’s in looking to Jesus Himself for answers when the questions drown out our peace. Why? seems to be one of the loudest voices when the questions come. It sends us into the wilderness faster than just about any other question. And sadly, it often does not have an answer that satisfies.

But the streams of life that run throughout God’s Word can provide us with comfort in the wilderness, and give us the peace that we hunger for when in the desert.

Streams of Life

What do we think of when we imagine streams? Mostly water that is narrowly running over the earth’s surface, typically in a winding fashion. Perhaps there are rocks which the water flows over. Perhaps the stream is in a forest or at the base of a mountain, maybe flowing down the side of a mountain. A stream doesn’t seem to have any direction but meanders on its way until