Melissa Hartley

Pastor's Wife, Prayer Warrior, and Patriot.
Seeking God and Loving People = Joy!
✝️🙏🇺🇸

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

Press in to your God-Given Purpose. Kingdom business is at hand! Don't get distracted...

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@JaniceDean @deb4liberty That is my fav movie of all time!

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

Why is dental work so expensive?😭 $1485 needed to replace the bonding on 3 front teeth that has served its purpose way past its time. Trusting God for provision.
Thankful my dental health is great otherwise. 🙏

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@miradreaamy 25!

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@Seraphinaf5 71 people

[Adam | Faithful Messenger @Adam_FaithfulM]

God gave Moses 50 chapters of instructions for a tent.

Fifty.

More space in the Bible is devoted to the design of the Tabernacle than to the creation of the universe.

That's not an accident.

Every measurement, material, and color was pointing to something, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

A thread. 🧵

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@LGP4july @JoshuaBarzon I think some feel they don't have a right to care about the finances. The statistical avg is that 25% (or less) of congregants financially give, supporting the work of the ministry in most churches. The majority attend with little to no financial input - so they don't care.

[Amir Tsarfati @beholdisrael]

Let’s set aside the frustration, anger, and sadness over what may prove to be the greatest American capitulation in modern history and look at the situation from a biblical perspective.

Two foundational truths are worth remembering:

▪️ Iran (Persia) will remain an enemy of Israel and will join a coalition determined to destroy her.

▪️ America will not stand with Israel militarily when that coalition comes against her.

Once you understand these truths, everything unfolding before our very eyes begins to make sense.

God declared the end from the beginning, and His Word has never failed:

“Remember the former things of old,
For I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is none like Me,
Declaring the end from the beginning,
And from ancient times things that are not yet done,
Saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,
And I will do all My pleasure.’”

(Isaiah 46:9–10, NKJV)

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@9mmsmg My husband and I use the same passcode. We answer each other's phones if we are the closest to it or in another room. No trust issues with us. 41 yrs married and He's still the one!

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Galatians 4:4 looks like a transition verse.

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son.”

If you read it fast, it sounds like a timestamp. But if read slowly, it is the most staggering sentence in the Bible.

‘Fullness of time’. Paul isn't saying God picked a convenient moment. He is saying God declared a moment complete. “The preparation is finished and everything I have been building across centuries is exactly where I need it to be”. God looked at human history and said: now.

Which forces the question. Why then? Why not a thousand years earlier, when Moses was fresh? Why not a thousand years later? What was so perfect about the first century?

I started looking into it and I have not recovered.

God needed a people with the theology. He spent 2000 years forming Israel; the covenant, the sacrificial system, the prophets, Isaiah 53 written seven centuries before Calvary, the framework of a coming Messiah who would bear the sin of the world. The Jews were shaped by wilderness, exile, and divine discipline, until the theological infrastructure for substitutionary atonement was fully in place.

But theology alone could not travel. God needed a language. Not a tribal dialect, but a universal tongue. So five hundred years before the Gospel, He let the Greek philosophers begin.

Heraclitus sat in Ephesus and concluded the universe was governed by an invisible rational principle. He called it the Logos.

The Stoics built on it. Philo of Alexandria stood at the intersection of Greek thought and Hebrew scripture and said the Logos was the mind of God in creation. For five hundred years, philosophy built a conceptual category it could not fill.

Then God sent a conqueror with no interest in theology. Alexander the Great wanted glory and empire. God let him want it. In satisfying his ego across three continents, Alexander Hellenized the ancient world and forged Koine Greek, the common tongue of the docks, markets, soldiers, and slaves. A language stripped of complexity, simple enough for anyone, universal enough for everyone.
The Hebrew scriptures were translated into it. The Septuagint was born. God used a pagan conqueror’s ambition to translate His own Word.

Then Rome came and paved the road. The Pax Romana. Piracy cleared. Stone highways stretching from Spain to Syria. A framework for movement the ancient world had never seen.

None of them knew they were collaborating.

Heraclitus thought he was doing philosophy. Alexander thought he was building a monument to himself. Rome thought it was building an empire for Rome. Not one of them understood they were stagehands. God was with Heraclitus in his pondering, with Alexander in his conquest, with Roman engineers laying stone, quietly requisitioning their work for a purpose none of them could see.

And then, when the covenant people were in place, the language primed, the roads built, and the category ready, when everything He had been quietly assembling was finally set, God stepped into the room they had unknowingly prepared.

John picked up his pen and wrote: “In the beginning was the Logos.”

Every Greek philosopher in the Mediterranean felt the ground shift. “And the Logos became flesh.” The category they spent five centuries constructing was not a principle. It was a Person.

The ‘fullness of time is not a timestamp’. It is God’s signature on a completed work. And the humbling thing is that this work was not built by saints. It was built by conquerors, philosophers, and emperors who thought they were writing their own story. God let them think that. And used every word. If this is not amazing then I don’t know what is.

[Erin Derham Van Swol @HistoryBoutique]

If you don’t know about John Quincy Adams, the end is a God moment if I’ve ever heard one.

Our 6th president fought to abolish slavery & didn’t win, but guess who was in Congress at the same time? A young Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President who…

Enjoy!

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@Supersonic_Red Born in 62 here! Our parents let us sit in the backyard talking to "Complete Strangers" (lots of truck drivers) on our handheld CB radios! "Breaker 1-9. What's your 20?" Fun memories!

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@AvonandsomerRob My 1975 Fiat! My hubby says it was one of the first things that attracted him to me...ha ha.

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

This!

[Supersonic Redhead🛫 @Supersonic_Red]

There’s a generation a lot of people forget exists. We were born at the tail end of the Boomers, but we are not culturally the same as people born in the 40s and early 50s. We are Generation Jones.

And honestly, it explains a lot.

We grew up in a world that still felt fundamentally analog, but we were young enough to be dragged headfirst into the digital revolution. We are the bridge generation between rotary phones and smartphones, between slide rules and AI, between Walter Cronkite and algorithm driven media.

We remember when there were only a few television channels and the entire country watched the same thing at the same time. We also adapted to the internet, email, forums, social media, streaming and now artificial intelligence. We lived before and after the technological singularity hit everyday life.

That is not a small thing.

People born in the 40s came of age in a post World War II America that was still industrial, deeply hierarchical and institutionally stable. Their formative years were shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, the civil rights era and a society where information moved slowly.

Generation Jones came later. We inherited the aftermath of all of that.

We were the kids who watched Watergate destroy blind trust in government. We watched manufacturing begin to collapse. We saw divorce rates explode. We were the first truly latchkey generation in massive numbers. We learned independence early because many of us had to.

We grew up with one foot in old America and one foot in whatever this new thing was becoming.

We played outside until the streetlights came on but we also learned DOS commands. We learned cursive and keyboarding. We had card catalogs and Google searches. We went from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming in one lifetime.

We remember maps. We remember memorizing phone numbers. We remember life before GPS and before every human interaction became filtered through a screen.

And because of that, I think Generation Jones developed a very unique perspective. We are adaptable because we had no choice but to adapt. We learned technology as adults instead of being born into it. We remember a slower world but were forced to survive in a rapidly accelerating one.

That creates a very different mindset than either older Boomers or younger Gen X and Millennials.

A lot of us also reject the caricature people now associate with “Boomers.” We were not buying houses for the cost of a sandwich in 1965. The interest rate on my first house was over 14% and that was after buying down a point. Many of us got hit by recessions, outsourcing, pension collapses and economic instability just like younger generations did. We watched promises evaporate in real time.

We understand older generations because we were raised by them. We understand younger generations because we had to evolve alongside them.

That’s why the Jones generation often feels culturally homeless. We are rarely discussed, rarely defined and usually lumped into categories that don’t actually fit us.

But we exist.

We are the human transition point between the industrial age and the digital age.

And frankly, there will probably never be another generation quite like us again.

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@CircuitMacGyver @SusieM414141 Possibly for Kid's Camp or VBS! I used bought and used a lot of pool noodles when I did a water themed VBS!

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@randyalcorn Yes... This! I'm almost 64, and my understanding of the Bible and the passion to teach others has never been greater!

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@james_xond My husband and I will both be 64 this July. Neither of us takes prescription meds! We aren't crazy about what we eat, nor are we exercise freaks. Just a little pickleball a couple of times a week.

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@heckyessica They work great on cinderblock walls. Be careful with drywall though!

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

@heckyessica Yep! Used them (correctly) for VBS decor, and the decor stayed up... but when it came time to take everything down...uugggh! So much damage! Paint peeled off the walls in several areas.

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

It's tragic that this young man is now being punished simply because he was born in Nigeria. He has legally & diligently worked towards citizenship and towards becoming a successful adult, now he's sidelined. Nigeria is a foreign country to him now.
How can I help him?

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

Need help with resources...
A young man (age 36), whom we have considered a son for 15+ years, immigrated here with his mom from Nigeria when he was 14. He attended a Bible college after HS graduation. Then for the last several years, he worked 3 jobs while attending college.

[Melissa Hartley @beefaithful62]

Knowing the avg turn around time for renewal was 150+ days, he filed his paperwork last September. Now, due to the freeze on status updates on green cards, his job has been placed on hold and he can no longer legally work.