By NATALIE LESTER
N.Lester@theknoxvillejournal.com
What started as a weekend for 30 girls, in her home, has turned into a traveling ministry for stay-at-home mom of four Stephanie Blackiston of Chattanooga.
Blackiston, who started a blog about her faith during a difficult period in her life, takes a different spin on love and marriage.
“Just as girls desire relationship, God desires to be with us,” Blackiston said. “That is the greatest love story ever and I’m living it. Girls don’t understand. They see God as a man with a big stick and not as the King of Kings who desires a loving relationship with them.”
On Oct. 29 and 30, Blackiston and her team will be leading a “His Proposal” conference at Calvary Chapel on Alcoa Highway. The first session will begin at 6:30 p.m. on Friday and will continue 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday.
The conference is the second of its kind, with the first occurring in Chattanooga the last weekend of August. That event grew from a weekend, which was inspired by one of Blackiston’s blog posts.
“One year on my wedding anniversary, I wrote about our love story, and somehow college girls found it and were encouraged by our story and marriage,” Blackiston said. “As more and more girls started reading, they would email me about what to do while they waited [to meet their husband]. The emails started coming so fast I couldn’t answer them all.”
Blackiston talked to her husband, Tim, and decided to open her home to talk about the event. Twenty-five girls drove from all over the region to spend time together and hear Blackiston’s message on the subject.
“We fed them and taught them as much as we could about marriage,” Blackiston said. “We encouraged them as much as we could about their season of life. It was exhausting, but there was so much response it was worth it.”
After Blackiston had her fourth child, the girls were begging for another weekend, and this time there were more girls.
“I realized how urgent this message was, so I called some of my friends and asked if they would help me do a conference on a larger scale,” Blackiston said.
On the eve of the conference, Blackiston was nervous and overwhelmed with all of the planning and pressure.
“I thought ‘I can’t do this. It’s too big and intimidating,’” Blackiston said. “I was praying and asking God for confidence. That’s when God spoke to my heart, ‘Dance with me. I’ll lead and you follow.’”
The weekend flowed and Blackiston immediately started to see a response in the girls.
“We have seen incredible, radical transformations,” Blackiston said. “They walk out of the door different than when they came in, because they understand God’s love for them for the first time.”
Blackiston assures the His Proposal conferences are different from abstinence programs.
“It’s very different because we focus on God’s love and forgiveness,” Blackiston said. “Girls find healing from the bad choices they made in their past. I don’t go through a list of what is a sin and what isn’t, because the Holy Spirit will teach them that.”
The goals of the conference are short and long term.
“Initially, we want to bring the girls into a deeper relationship with Christ, and the result of that is going to be that their lives are transformed, and they live lives of holiness,” Blackiston said. “Our long-term goal is to encourage them to cross the finish line of purity so they will have strong marriages. We want to encourage this generation to have stronger marriages than the one before.”
The His Proposal conferences are an attempt to turn the statistics around.
The average marriage lasts seven years, and one in three children are born out of wedlock, according to Blackiston.
“This message is so urgent, because of the statistics,” Blackiston said. “They are so scary, and I have an urgency in my heart to get this out before more girls are caught in the consequences of bad decisions.”
-
aheartsdeliverance liked this
-
theknoxvillejournal posted this
