KNOW THE GOD YOU SERVE
Ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will
Ask God to fill with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives. Colossians 1:9 NIV
Meeting Specfic NEEDS
IS ANYONE AMONG YOU SUFFERING?
13. Is anyone among you suffering?
Let him pray.
Is anyone cheerful?
Let him him sing psalms.
14. Is anyone among you sick?
Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him with oil in the name of the Lord.
15. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16. Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.
THE EFFECTIVE FERVENT PRAYER OF A RIGHTEOUS MAN AVAILS MUCH. JAMES 5:13-16 kjv
MUSTARD SEED
The Parable of the Mustard Seed
Then he said,"To what shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what parable shall we picture it? It is like a mustard seed which when it is sown on the ground, is smaller than all the seeds of the earth, but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes greater than all herbs, and shoots out large branches, so that the birds of the air may nest under it shade.
Matthew 4: 30-32 NKJV
"GOD HELP ME", I can't fight this battle alone. That little small mustard seed of faith was all I had left. 2015-2024
The Battle of Good Verses Evil
The mind that became a Battlefield between good and evil.
It was the year of 2015.
I was stressed and seen no way out but to close my second real estate office.
I had fallen sick for the second time with Chronic Hep C in my transplanted Liver.
If, I survived six month of treatments in stage four liver disease in a transplanted liver.
It would be nothing short of a miracle.
The hope of pulling our family through another downfall so soon after liver transplant and my husbands horrific stroke was vanishing.
My body and mind had not healed completely from the transplant in 2009.
I was not prepared mentally or physically to be forced back to work a real estate market that was nothing but short sales & a foreclosure market.
I had a liver transplant in August 16th, 2009, two rejections, lung surgery and the real estate market had already began experiencing a housing market crash that completely bottom out January 2008.
Don't miss understand
I was and am grateful for the good. I was not grateful for the bad.
I give thanks to God in everything.
A special thank you to my donor, his family, Dr. Andrew Muir, Dr. Alstair Smith, all of Duke Liver Transplant team, the entire staff at Duke Medical Center, Durham, NC. and Dr. Mark Jackson and staffed at Fort Sanders Regional in Knoxville Tennessee.
I'm blessed to survive to tell this story, to give God all the glory.
We all have a story, that needs to be told.
Our Story Matters! Together Matters!
It had been a long hard road from hell.
The good news is if we press forward,we win in the end.
Richard, my husband suffered a horrific stroke March 5th, 2010.
God had given me the strength to step up as I always did and face my adversities head on.
Richard was holding his own the best he good in the situation he had found himself.
I left selling real estate at C21 MVP and stepped back out on my own and took over the oldest real estate company, Barnes And Associates in Sevier County, Tennessee. This was my second real estate office, November 2012.
It happened suddenly, one morning in 2015 as I walked into Barnes the office, within minutes, something has gone wrong and it felt like it was taking over my entire nervous system.
I was dying all over again. The Chronic Hep C disease was now active in the mans liver I received in 2009.
I went from stage zero immediately after transplant to end stage four within a three year period.
The GOOD NEWS!
A cure is out for all types of Chronic Hepatitis all across the board. Know someone sick? Please share, the cure.
My life was saved again.
Six months of Harvoni treatments resulted in me taking at least three months too much medicine.
Dying again. I developed brain fog, and severe fatique.
My body and mind struggle five years to stay afloat.
All our resources were depleted a few months before transplant.
Keeping me alive and fighting two chronic sickness, raising a family, etc, wrecked havoc on the home place;
I became afraid. I made the decision to close Barnes and Associates Real Estate.
I was not given any confirmation from TN. State Bank that they would extend our ten year Heloc Home Equity Loan.
I was concerned, how could I leave my husband and children to face a move out of our five thousand sq. ft. dream home Richard and I built.
A slim chance I would survive.
Fast Forward, It was July 17th, 2018.
It happened our home was foreclosed on.
We did not have $84,000 dollars to pay off the ten year Heloc in full.
Displaced four hundred miles away from everything they had known for twenty seven years is a under statement.
The separation from church, family, friends, home and work was complete devastation and our first grand baby was born.
Looking back to 2018 now in 2025.
If my husband and my mind were thinking clearly. We would have survived better by renting a place and giving up the old home place in Conway.
Note: We had planned to sell the old home place in Conway to pay the Heloc equity line.
The transplant, rejections, stroke, market crash, Harvoni snowballed before we could make it happen.
My mind could not longer handle all that was thrown at me. My body was still we.
I suffered a nervous breakdown mid 2019.
It was 2020 when Nancy became determined to make a comeback mentally, physically and hopefully financially.
It was 2020 when Nancy became determined to win.
I've spent six years regaining mental and physical strength.
I traveled back in my mind to when I was twelve.
I began to wait tables part-time and think about how the little girl with determination to persevere from a broken and dysfunctional family survived.
Leaving home in 1973, at age thirteen, traveling on a Trailways Bus with ten dollars in my pocket.
I had child-like faith that life, on the street that life may not be as hard as life was the first twelve years of life.
Could I gain that kind of faith again?
Mustard Seed Faith
I spent a lot of time alone with God.
We had plans to sell the SC. home and pay off the equity line on our Tennessee dream home.
We had no plans to move back to South Carolina.
The old home place was in need of major repairs.
How was I going to gain back the mental strength needed for a breakthrough?
I had sold real estate many times from my hospital bed and never lost focus from 2002 through 2018.
It was late 2018, life had become to hard.
The trauma had become more than I could bare.
No longer could I play the role of wonder woman.
Too many setbacks back to back including, the loss of my precious mother just a few short months after the loss of the TN home and the displacement back to Conway, South Carolina.
Richard Grinstead was fighting his own horrific battle trying desperatel yto recover from a stroke that had paralyzed him, just three months after my return home from Duke University Medical Center November. 2009.
His left leg, arm, mind and voice was horrifically effected.
Richard spent day after day for years wasting watching a TV. He had lost his ability to focus.
Our family, our strong man, bewildered and struggle quietly, internally, and I was pressing on him hard not to give up.
His searching for work, online when he knew nothing about a computer or a smart phone became a nightmare from hell. It was hell for our family.
He kept trying to fill out applications electronically to no avail. I was no longer strong enough to fight for us both.
I was left with no time to teach him. I had to find a way to pick myself if we were going to survive, distant four hundred miles away from our kids and grandbaby who needed us.
Something, in my mind was not connecting the dots properly.
Too much Harvoni, confusion no more than the dots were in Richards mind due to the stroke.
We were suffering mental breakdowns.
I had worked in overload before transplant and again after transplant, the hepatitis treatments created massive confusion.
I experience the feeling of not wanting to live.
The same feelings I had experienced at age twelve, and at age twenty one before the rededication of my life.
I was shocked by all of this, again at age sixty. The emotional roller coaster created PTSD. The only hope I had was that mustard seed of faith. Would God rescued us? I spent endless days and nights studying God's word, reading daily, many times a day.
I kept the late Dr. Charles Stanley's 365 Day, Daily Devotional book on the table in my bathroom right beside the toliet.
I read and still read many pages almost daily.
Richard and I became distant, not able to communicate effectively with each other. I listen most Sundays, sometimes all day and evening to pastors and teachers preach and teach on TBN ChristianChannel.
When, I could mustard up the strength.
I would visit a few local churches.
I knew, God had allowed him to break me.
What I could not understand was the why?
But, like Job...I knew I trusted in Jesus.
Richard and I worked diligently and spent our time at church and home with our kids when off work.
We were like any other good middle class citizens.
What had happen?
We did everything we knew to do right.
We did our best to live by the golden rule.
When we broke, we broke hard.
The GREAT NEWS!
We have recovered somewhat, we both are walking miracles over and over again.
Satan could not destroy us, so he set out to destroy our finamces.