The story which I am about to tell you, at least to me, is nothing short of amazing. A very clear message sent from God to myself, my husband and our children. You may not believe what I am about to write and that is okay. I thank you all the same for taking the time to read it. Never-the-less, whether anyone believes this story or not, it is all 100% true.
Before I begin the story I need to explain the reasoning for my writing it today.
In the month of March my oldest child, Aven Salei, turned 18 and my honorary niece Valerie Nerone had come to visit her. During her visit she shared with us the name of an inspiring pastor she had been watching online during the Covid months. His name is Pastor Michael Todd of the Transformation Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Our family watched a sermon he gave on the first Sunday of January 2020 and it was all about “Vision”. In the sermon he told us that when God gives you a vision of something that He wants you to do, you need to write it down. I had the idea to write this blog before I heard him say that, but felt more led to get it done after I heard his sermon. Then Easter came and with it our Huggabear Children’s Project work so the blog was delayed.
Then today we watched his sermon that was from the first Sunday of January 2021 called “Anchored” and in it he taught about how God speaks to us. To illustrate his sermon personally, he showed us how God had been speaking something directly to him about the work he was to do for the year 2021 and how God showed him not one, not two, but three clear and direct signs to confirm the work to him.
After seeing that sermon I knew that today would be the day I would write this blog. So, I want to say thank you to Valerie for sharing with us about Pastor Michael Todd, you were being used of God to speak to me and thank you to Pastor Michael Todd for those two powerful and personally significant sermons that you gave. God definitely used you to speak to me as well!
In order for you to have a solid understanding of this amazing story, how powerful God is, and how He can work in a person’s heart, I have to give you a little bit of my history with my homeland.
I was born on August, 26, 1971 in the Maricopa County Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. I have lived in Phoenix all of my life, which up to now has been 49 years, 8 months and 11 days.
I have always loved Phoenix. I have had the blessing of traveling to many places in this world and always loved coming home to Phoenix. I even loved the heat, well, kind of.
If I am being totally honest, I dreaded the heat. Every year I dreaded it. But I repeated the words of others around me saying things like, “Yes, but it’s a dry heat.” (Which does make sense when you have experienced humidity!) or I would say things like, “You just stay inside and move from air conditioned place to air conditioned place!” or “Our summers are hard but our winters are beautiful!” (Which also is quite true.) Josh felt the exact same way as me and even said the exact same things I did. We both loved Phoenix, Arizona. It was home.
However, as time went by, every year of my life, the summers were killing my love for living in Phoenix… along with all my trees. 😦 This past summer 2020 really did me in.
Then something very peculiar and significant happened. I had a dream.
It was in the month of May 2020. It was the week after Mother’s Day. If you haven’t read it, I wrote a blog about that Mother’s Day and what an incredible day God blessed me with if you would like to read it as well.
The dream was of my family, Josh, Aven, MaCaedyn, Samuel and myself, all standing in a tightly bound circle with our arms wrapped around each other. Outside our circle was another larger circle of people. Some we were close to, some we were not so close to. Not all my relationships were in this circle, just certain ones.
The best way I could describe how this looked is to use the diagram of a nucleus with a ring of electrons around it. My family was the nucleus and all the people standing side by side in a ring around us were the electrons.
In the dream I looked up and I saw that slowly, one by one, those people were being spaced away from our family. Like they were slowly floating backward. As I watched, I saw a giant pair of white glowing hands in-between my family and the outer ring of people and I realized that the hands were separating the people from us, creating distance between us.
When I woke up the next morning, I shared the dream with Josh and my children. I also shared it with a few prayer warrior friends who found it very interesting, yet, none of us understood what it meant.
That was May 2020 and anyone who lives in Phoenix will tell you, the summer heat of Phoenix doesn’t wait until the typical summer months of June, July and August to arrive. It can begin in May… or even April. As I sit outside right now writing this blog April 11, 2020, I’m sweating. Bleh.
After my Mother’s Day 2020 adventure to visit Christopher Creek to escape the heat, my family wanted to have more of that time in the woods and out of the ‘flames’ of Phoenix. We couldn’t afford to take a trip anywhere so we would save up just enough money for gas, then we would pack a picnic and our baseball gear and head up to the woods just for a day. For us, it was thrilling! We were escaping the heat and could spend an entire day outdoors playing in the cool woods without boiling ourselves and burning our skin like we would in Phoenix.
It was during the Covid summer months of 2020 that a significant change began to take place inside my heart and Josh’s. Every morning that we got up to take one of our road trip adventures to the woods we were filled with so much pure joy and we discovered that joy wasn’t just because we wanted to escape the heat, it was because of the land we were going to.
Growing up, my Mema and Papa had three “homes”. One was their Phoenix residence, one was in Payson, Arizona and the other was a cabin that my Papa built out of internment camp sectionals from World War II at Mormon Lake nestled in the Ponderosa Pines.
When I had the blessing of being able to go to the cabin, all through my childhood and into my adult years, I felt something that I didn’t have when I was in Phoenix. It was like I was a different person. I was more peaceful. I slept better at night and had more energy during the day. I breathed in the clean air easy, and as a person who has dealt with asthma since the age of 3 months that is always a welcome relief. In the forest, I loved seeing the blue of the sky, the animals and most of all, the trees. I loved the sounds of the wind blowing through the trees and the crunch of the dry pine needles beneath my feet. I loved the sounds of the birds and forest critters. I also loved the lack of sounds from the city of constant traffic, sirens, and helicopters. I loved how the air smelled of pines as soon as I arrived and stepped out of the car. I loved how bright and brilliant the stars were at night and, most importantly, I loved how I could step outside and get away from man made things and submerge myself in God made things so quickly, so easily. I felt closer to God there. I still love all those things now, even more than when I was young.
When I am in the woods, on the beach, or in any other beautiful place of nature made by God, it cleanses me. My stresses melt away and even when there are circumstances of daily life that must be handled, it just seems so much easier for me when I am a beautiful place of God’s nature. Being out in the open reminds me just how big my Beautiful God is and seeing all He has created leaves me speechless.
Then I had another realization… something that is so obvious to me that I am actually a bit embarrassed to say I didn’t recognized it sooner. I am the author of The Huggabears children’s books. I have created an entire imaginary land called the Bearwood Forest and a town called Bearford Falls where the Huggabear Family and all kinds of other woodland critters dwell. The idea for that book series came from God and the place that He had me create is based upon the woods of the Ponderosa Pines, the very same woods where my Mema would take me on long walks and teach me about the love of Jesus, the power of prayer and God’s Word. I write about the woods in every single story of The Huggabears and my love for it is clearly reflected in all those stories. I realized that deep down inside my heart, the woods have been calling to me for years and years, even through my ministry work. Yet, I still live in the desert.
I came to understand that I am so much happier in the woods, Josh is happier in the woods and so are our children. So why are we living in a city in the desert? Josh began to realize this it too. We came to this understanding at the exact same time and felt the exact same way. When we shared it with one another it was such a powerful, beautiful moment in our marriage. All these years we had shared a great love for living in Phoenix and then, all at once, we both had been changed and everything was different. We longed to lived someplace different.
We began sharing our thoughts about our feelings with the children and wondered what they would think about moving. Well… we wondered what MaCaedyn and Samuel would think about it. All of her life we knew that Aven hated the heat of Phoenix. Detested it. Loathed it. Despised it. All those adjectives would fit into her annual descriptions of her feelings about the summers when the heat came. Though she will admit she does love swimming and waterparks, she always wanted to go and be in the snow and loves being wrapped in warm clothes, fuzzy socks and her treasured sleeping bag. Still, I honestly didn’t know how Samuel and MaCaedyn felt about the heat. So, one day during school I began to share with them what was happening my heart and how daddy and I were feeling like we wanted to live in woods. Both MaCaedyn and Samuel immediately shared that they would love to live in the woods and Samuel was quite specific that we were going to live in Flagstaff. Not that he hoped to live in Flagstaff, not that he wished we would live in Flagstaff, but that we will be living in Flagstaff and that Huggabear Farm would be built there.
They also began to tell me how much they loved being in colder weather. Whenever we took winter trips, they loved bundling up in coats, hats, gloves and boots. It didn’t bother them at all. MaCaedyn said, “You know, in the cold you can always add more clothes, but in the heat you can only get so naked.” Ha! Samuel and Aven also pointed out that we spend so many days stuck inside during the summer so if we moved to a place where there was snow, we might not be able to go out everyday but you can still play in snow whereas you can’t play in heat unless it involved a pool–which we don’t have, or water of some kind.
We also learned during the summer of 2020 that Aven has health issues which arise during the heat which she doesn’t deal with during the cooler months. Josh and I also noticed that we have more pain and inflammation in our bodies during the summer than we do during the cold months. These reasons were added onto the pile of why we wanted to move to the forest.
Once we learned of our family’s feelings about living in Phoenix and the heat we began to pray about it to see what God’s will was for us. We asked very specifically in our prayers that if God wanted us to stay here to use us for His glory in Phoenix, Arizona, then that is exactly what we would do, and we asked Him that if it was not His will for us to move to the woods that He would remove the desire from all of our hearts and that we would be perfectly content to stay and get back to loving the heat. We also asked Him if it is was His will for us to move to woods that He would make that clear to us as well.
Every day we prayed and every day the yearning to move to the forest grew stronger and our desire to stay in Phoenix diminished. It is still that way now. During our family scripture reading almost every night Josh read a chapter that spoke “the land you are going to inherit” or “the land you are going to cross the Jordan to inherit”. I looked it up and there is a tiny little speck of a town that is called Jordan which we would be pass or “cross over” when traveling from Phoenix to Flagstaff. This inspired us even more!
We decided to use our time escaping the heat as time to explore some towns and places to see where it was that would be part of God’s plan for us to live. Samuel thought this a huge waste of time as he knew that we were going to live in Flagstaff. He said it over and over again, “It’s Flagstaff… Flagstaff… Flagstaff… You all are wrong, it’s Flagstaff.” Still, we went and explored and with every place we went, though we had fun together as a family, we also felt it together as a family: NO. This is not the town. This is not the place. I can’t explain it to you other than to say we just felt it in and knew in our hearts it wasn’t the place God had for us.
I hope all of that gives you a greater understanding of where we were and what we were praying for because NOW we get to the really cool part of the story! This is what I was supposed to write down and share with whomever will read it!
When I first began writing The Huggabears books, God gave me a dream of a place where children could come to be ministered to. It was a location that looked like the Bearwood Forest and had the town of Bearford Falls from my Huggabear books. A land full of imagination, joy and the love of Jesus as well as being the home base for The Huggabear Children’s Project, Inc. ministry.
I thought the place was going to be a small children’s amusement park like The Enchanted Island or something, but I could never come up with the right name for it. My vision lacked complete clarity so I just kept creating the stories, the songs, and doing the Huggabear nonprofit work.
When Samuel was a baby he was thrilled with farming. I remember when he was three years old he saw pumpkins in the store and asked me where they came from. I told him about farms and he began planting and growing pumpkins and other vegetables in the backyard. When he was five years old he told me, “Someday, when I grow up, I’m going to have a farm.”
God told me in that very moment the place He gave me a vision of for children was going to be called “Huggabear Farm”! I can tell you right where I was standing when it happened. We had been working in the garden and were coming in the house to wash up. Samuel turned to me and said what he said and I was standing on the patio. I stopped in my tracks as God spoke Huggabear Farm to my heart. After that, the kids and I talked about the dream of Huggabear Farm everyday. We discussed ideas in school, we made drawings and lists, we watched educational videos and we began praying for it to come. This would be a farm like no other the world has ever seen because it would be a ministry farm. It wouldn’t just be about things we grow from the ground, it would be about planting the seeds of the love of Jesus into the hearts of others. A place where all families could come to for free and never have to pay for admission. A place where children would play and make memories. A place that would have the Word of God all though it so that the people who came to visit would be submerged in the teachings and love of God’s Word while they were there. Huggabear Farm would be full of music and laughter. We would put on shows and programs that would teach the love, power, healing and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. It would be a place of education, imagination and salvation. God revealed to me that there are people in this world who might never step inside the doors of a church… but they would visit a farm. While they were there, we would gently plant the seeds of the love of Jesus into their hearts and spirits.
The children and I had a pretty good idea of all the things we should have on Huggabear Farm and when we would talk about it with Josh he always was very supportive, but I could tell he hadn’t seen the vision for it yet. So I prayed for him and asked God, if this was something that our family was meant to build together, please give Josh the vision for it because there was no way I could ever build it without him.
God answered that prayer while we were housesitting for our friends John and Gerry Dillingham. They live on a golf course and each night we would walk outside and be in the beauty of the green course with all the trees and landscaping. Then we would come inside and the kids and I would sit and draw plans for the farm. It was in the open space of the golf course that God gave Josh the vision. He saw it clearly before him and I knew it was God that did it and not us because after Josh saw the vision of it, that was all he could talk about!
We decided to take a step of faith and start building what we could where we lived. We knew it couldn’t be much as we have a small home and yards, but we were going to do the best we could with what we have. We began building in the summer of 2018 and we had the majority of it finished by that fall 2018. We wanted to show God how serious we were about doing this and prove to Him that He could trust us if He provided us the land and the funds, we would build the real Huggabear Farm. But for that time, we were thrilled to have the mini farm.
We began having events for children of all ages, from infants and toddlers to teens and young adults. We had an opening day celebration, two pumpkin parties, a “Boo Bash” teen party with home made haunted house, two Christmas parties, a few birthday parties for our kids and an Easter egg hunt… then came Covid. We had to stop holding events at home, but we have never stopped working, building, improving, planning, designing and adding to the “Mini” Huggabear Farm.
Before our hearts changed about having the farm in Phoenix, we had looked at land all over the place! Anywhere we saw land for sale that looked like a nice parcel, we would visit it, pray over it and ask God to reveal His will. We didn’t and still don’t have one dime to build this farm but that doesn’t worry or detract us in anyway at all. We know God does and He would supply the needs! As God changed our hearts about the farm being in Phoenix, He began showing us that we could never do all that we wanted to during the summer months. It is just too darn hot! And for us, summer was a very important time because kids were out of school and looking for things to do.
I went back and forth on that for several months. Should we stay here in Phoenix where there are so many kids in need? How would they get to us if we were someplace far away? I was praying about this while watering the garden one evening and I asked God that very question, “How would the children be able to afford to drive up to us if they are children in need?” Immediately I heard that ever familiar whisper inside my head, “Do you really think I can’t get the children to you?”
Talk about humble! Boy did I feast on humble pie that night! I went in and told Josh and from that night on, I haven’t worried one bit about the location and whether or not children could come to us. Wherever it is God places us, He will make a way for the children to get there.
We knew so many things that Huggabear Farm would have on it and that it would be a place where Samuel could grow pumpkins, but we knew he didn’t want to sell the pumpkins, he wanted to give them away to children. So the question kept coming to our minds, “What would we grow and sell on Huggabear Farm to help support it so we could keep admission free?”
We wondered about apples or pecans trees. We even planted ten pecan seeds to grow saplings. Not one of them sprouted. So we kept praying. We knew that God would reveal to us what He wanted us to grow to sell so we could support the farm and our family.
No to the amazing part of the story! Not that all that wasn’t amazing, but this is pretty cool!
One day in the year 2017, I was in Hobby Lobby buying some items for a new Huggabear book and I saw an old fashioned red truck. Now, if you don’t know about The Huggabear books, I create all of the illustrations for the stories with my family by building miniaturized scenes that I photograph. If you have never seen the Huggabears, you can visit our website at: huggabears.org to see what they look like.
The red truck that I saw at Hobby Lobby was perfect for Daddy bear to have as a work truck. It was the exact size I needed and looked like it would be a perfect fit for Daddy Huggabear to get in. It wasn’t fancy, just a plain red truck. The only problem was it cost $70 which was far more than I could afford at that time and, oddly enough, I didn’t know about the 40% coupons on their app.
Now, if you go to Hobby Lobby on a regular basis you know that eventually everything in that store gets marked down, but I never saw these red trucks get marked down. Never.
Then one day I went and they were all gone. I was disappointed but I thought, if God wants me to have a red truck for Daddy Huggabear, they will bring them back and He will provide the funds for it.
Two years passed by, it was now 2019. I went into Hobby Lobby and they had red trucks! They were a little different as they were a little bit smaller and they had a cute Christmas tree mounted in the back, but I checked the price and they were on sale! Only $25! MaCaedyn and I scooped one up and happily brought it home to show the rest of the family who all loved it.
I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to the outside of the truck itself. My main concern was whether or not Daddy Huggabear would fit inside and when I measure the windows and saw he would I was so happy! I gave thanks to God for making that purchase happen for the Huggabear Family. I knew I wasn’t going to be creating a book where Daddy Huggabear would drive the truck for a while, so I placed it in our workshop with some of my other story set props and went on my way.
Fast forward another full year. We are now in the year 2020.
I was working on my latest Huggabear book “The Ooky-Spooky, Creaky, Creepy, Scary Old House on Hallow’s Hill” which I released on October 31, 2020. This story doesn’t have Daddy Huggabear’s truck in it, but I was working around all of my story set props while creating it.
One day, I went out to get something from the workshop (or as Josh calls it the Huggarage) and I happened to look at the red truck as I passed by. I smiled and said, “Thank You again God for that truck.”
And then God said to me, “Go back and read what is on it.” I stopped in my tracks.
I didn’t hear an audible voice like when you or I speak. It was like a whisper in my brain. People who haven’t had this experience won’t understand that but for those who have had it, you will understand. The words were strong and clear. I have had this kind of experience before and I knew it was God, so I immediately turned around and went back to the truck. I pulled it out from it’s storage space and looked at it.
When I bought it, I had seen the Christmas tree, but was so focused upon the size of the window, the driver’s seat and steering wheel to make sure Daddy Huggabear would fit, I didn’t pay any attention to the side of the truck which had Christmas trees on it and read: “Farm Fresh Christmas Trees Fir, Spruce, Pine, Cedar”. I read the words aloud and after I did, God spoke to me again and said, “This is what Huggabear Farm will be. Christmas trees and Pumpkins.”
Of course! We could grow and sell Christmas trees to support the farm!
I grabbed hold of the truck and ran into the house! I was so excited and couldn’t wait to share with my family what God had just told me about Huggabear Farm… but everyone was on a device– some with headsets on and didn’t want to stop to listen to what I had to say. So I just took the truck back into the workshop and placed it back on the shelf and kept the Word from the Lord inside my heart.
That was in October 2020.
Time past and one day in November 2020, Josh went to do some grocery shopping for me. We have a game in our household that we love to play about staying on the budget. Whenever one of us goes shopping, we head out with our list in hand and usually come home bragging about how we stayed totally on budget or even came in under it. But this day Josh came home very excited and said, “I went $15 over budget today, but I had to get you something!”
I was excited to see what it was that made him so excited. “I saw these little Christmas barns for sale, and I started to get you one, but when I saw this, I just had to get it for you,” he said happily.
As he pulled the gift out of the bag it wasn’t just excitement that washed over me, it was the power of the Holy Spirit. Immediately, I clasped my hands over my mouth and stared at it in amazement.
“It’s a Christmas tree Farm!” he said with joy.
He had bought me a small, porcelain, light up, Christmas tree Farm that read at the top: “Farm Fresh Christmas Trees Fir, Spruce, Pine, Cedar”.
For a moment I could hardly speak or even breath as I knew that God was now speaking to Josh what He had spoken to me. Both items said the exact same thing, yet one was purchased by myself over a year ago at one location and the other was purchased by Josh at another. It was incredible!
I started jumping up and down and ran into the workshop to get the truck and began rattling off the story of how God had spoke to me that Huggabear Farm would be a Christmas tree farm. Josh and the kids listened intently and were astounded at the story and the two items which we clearly understood to be signs from God before us. I remember Josh saying, “I bet this is one time you are thankful that none of us listened to you! If we had, it wouldn’t make this so incredible!”
MaCaedyn told me that she actually had heard me tell my story so she knew that God had spoken to me first!
But Josh was right. If he had heard my story, then this sign wouldn’t really be a sign from God but just something that Josh did out of love and kindness. Josh NOT knowing my story and what God had shown me made it so much more powerful!
Right then and there we decided that we believed both of these things were signs from God and we also came to understand that the dream I had where the people were being distanced from us was also God communicating to us that we were going to be moving somewhere else. Somewhere other than Phoenix and that distance was going to be coming between us and the faces around us which were being moved back.
We decided that we were not going to tell a soul about what had happened with the two signs, but instead, we were going to pray nightly as a family for God to send us a third confirmation that Huggabear Farm was going to be a Christmas tree and pumpkin farm. We know God works in threes and we just wanted to make sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we were experiencing was communication from God, just like Gideon did in the book of Judges with the fleece. (Judges 6:33-40)
So we prayed and asked that God would send a third confirmation from someone outside of our family unit. It could be anyone and in anyway, from a relative, a friend or even better– total stranger! No one had ever said this to us before so we knew that if someone said it to us now it would be a clear confirmation. They could have had a vision, a dream, an idea, or whatever! However God wanted to give it to us, we asked that He could give us that third confirmation that Huggabear Farm would be a Christmas tree and pumpkin farm.
My family was so excited! We all love Christmas trees so much and use them to teach children about the everlasting love of Jesus just like the ancient German missionaries of the past did in the pagan regions. I even wrote a lesson about this from my character of Obadiah in my third Intercessors book “Confession”. In fact, part of our Huggabear work at Christmastime is to give Christmas trees to families in need so that their children can enjoy having a tree on Christmas day. The more we thought about it the more it made perfect sense! How could we not see this before? It was the perfect crop for Huggabear Farm! After all, bears live in the forest, we wanted to live in the forest and Christmas trees are something that could make a profit to support the farm every year! In my Huggabear books I never had given Daddy Huggabear a job, now I could! He would grow Christmas trees! It was all perfect!
Everyday we would spend time talking about it and everyday we went shopping we were surrounded by it! I have seen cute Christmas decorations that had a truck with a Christmas tree on it and say “Merry Christmas” in the past, but in the year 2020 they didn’t just say “Merry Christmas”. Everywhere it would say, “Christmas Tree Farm”!!!! It was in every store, everywhere we went! Then I had a wake up call, which again is embarrassing to admit I didn’t notice sooner… we keep Christmas trees up year round in and outside our house! Just little ones, but we decorate them for each holiday and we have two inside our home year round and FIVE outside on our patio year round! I also have three growing in our front yard! I used to have 7 but each summer the heat kills another one! (Boooo! Hissss!)
But still! Seeing all this was like that scene in the movie “I Can Only Imagine”. The writer of that song had been writing that phrase all around him for years and he didn’t see it until the time was right. And the time was God’s time. We were now seeing how God had been speaking this to us and preparing us for this for years! Which just added to our joy!!!
All of this excitement compiled with their dreams of experiencing a White Christmas (which is one of our holiday movie favorites) inspired the children to want to spend Christmas in the snow. They didn’t want to leave our home on Christmas Eve, they wanted to have dinner and our traditional events and our traditional Christmas morning but then they wanted to be packed and ready so that we could all–pups included, jump into the Huggamobile and head for the woods! And there was only one place they wanted to go: Flagstaff, naturally.
After weeks of searching, God led Josh to find the most darling cabin for rent where we could take the dogs. After opening gifts and having some breakfast, we headed for the glories of the forest in Flagstaff! There wasn’t much snow, but that didn’t stop us from having an incredible time! Our children were so happy. They said it had been one of the best Christmases of their lives– outside of Christmas at Disneyland of course. 😉 God blessed us so richly and we enjoyed every single minute of that trip!
A few days after we came home, I went outside and called my friend Gerry who couldn’t wait to hear all about our holiday and I about hers. After I had told her about our trip I said, “We all love it up there so much. It is such a great town! We also went to Williams because we love it there too! In Flagstaff we have all that we need up there as far as city needs go, even a university, but then a few minutes out, you are in the thick of the woods.” I conveyed how much we all want to live there–even the little dogs! They loved it! Reblen, who usually spends her days resting on our chaise was outside running and playing everyday. She was the first one out the door!
After a while of sharing how much we love it there and how we are begging God to let us move there if it is His will, Gerry said, “Angelique! Huggabear Farm should grow Christmas trees and pumpkins! It could be a Christmas tree and pumpkin farm!”
As soon as the words came out of her mouth I jumped up off my seat, ran to the house and started yelling in the door, “Gerry said it! Gerry said it! She said Huggabear Farm should grow Christmas trees and pumpkins!!”
My family was ecstatic! Poor Gerry probably thought I had gone crazy! I took the time to explain everything to her about what we had been praying for and when I did she too was amazed! God used my friend of so many years, to give us our third confirmation: Huggabear Farm will grow Christmas trees and pumpkins amidst lots and LOTS of love, joy and imagination!
We would love for it to be in Flagstaff because we have fallen in love with the town–and we love Williams and the Historic Route 66! But does the Huggabear Farm have to be in Flagstaff? No. That is a place we love and the forest I have known all my life. But we all agree, we want God’s perfect will to be fulfilled. Because when it is, wherever He leads us, it will be absolutely, totally and completely perfect! We are placing none of our limits on God’s plan because we know, He knows best. Our prayer right now is, “Lead us Lord, we will follow!”
There even came a great change in my heart about my dream home. I had always hoped to have a home of my own someday, something that reflected our family with enough space for us all to be together and have places of our own as well. We would call it Huggabear House. I, sad to say, had placed another limitation on God where that dream home was concerned. I wanted it to be single story with no stairs, but even that desire began to change in my heart. I would take whatever home God wanted me to have, stairs and all, and if it was an old home that needed love and restoration, we would do that too.
God had transformed my heart during the year 2020 where this dream was concerned and I am so glad that He did because I understand that He has plans for me, my family, and our ministry work that far surpass anything that I could ever hope or imagine. I want God’s perfect will to be done in my life over my own will for I know He knows best, after all… He created me.
So that’s my amazing story! Some people may read this and not be impressed. They may say it is all just one big coincidence. But we know better. We know that there is no word in the Hebrew language that means coincidence. It is all God! And we know that He spoke to us direct three times. Once with a toy truck. Once with a porcelain Christmas decoration and once through a faithful, Jesus loving friend. He also spoke to me many times through my dreams!
The month is now April and we still haven’t heard from God about when or where He wants us to move. But He has given us work to do in the meantime while we wait on His perfect timing and plan. We took a little missions trip on Easter Sunday to do some Huggabear work for the homeless in Flagstaff, enjoyed a trek through the woods, had a picnic and even made a snowbear! There was no snow where we were on Christmas but we were blessed with a little on Easter! Samuel declared that we were the only people in the history of the world to create a snowbear and snow bearpaw on Easter Sunday!
We are still waiting on God and I admit it is hard sometimes in the waiting, especially when you are so excited to go and do something you know you are meant to do. It makes me think of Abraham and Sarah who had to wait 25 years for God to fulfill His promise that one day they would have a son. My waiting is much easier because I have my beautiful family waiting with me and while we wait together we are loving each other, praying together and seeking God’s perfect will for our future place of ministry.
I encourage you as Pastor Michael Todd encouraged me, if God has given you a vision for a work that you are to do, write it down! Share it with others so that when God brings that vision to fruition, not only you, but all you shared it with will know that God always keep His promises, He does speak to people, He has never changed and He is still able to perform miracles!
Oh yes, and Samuel wants me to make sure that everyone knows that he knew first that it was Flagstaff… just in case it really is Flagstaff!
Angelique La Fon-Cox 