This is an amazing story of the power of God revealed to our family - through faith - on a very special Sabbath in the mountains of Montana.

Oklahoma Family Retreat 2015: Nothing is Impossible

<p>This is an amazing story of the power of God revealed to our family - through faith - on a very special Sabbath in the mountains of Montana.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Restoration International

Alane Waters

Tom Waters

Probabilities

And we are just as happy as everyone else to be able to be here at this Oklahoma family retreat.

And once again, we're excited about the message we're going to share this morning.

This isn't going to be so much of a message as just really sharing from the heart, but the title is probabilities.

You know, in our humanity, Once we hear that the probability of success is very low, or the odds of success are very broad, you know, 1 in a million or whatever, Our humanity just tends to shrink back from it.

We think, well, you know, nobody else seems to be able to do it and probably isn't going to work for us.

And today we hope that we're all going to be inspired that the God that we serve can overrule all probabilities, probabilities statistically, mathematically, and he can do what he promises to do.

So let me just see if there's anybody here from Ohio.

All right, we want to take you back to the late 1800s and what was starting to happen in America was the auto industry was in bloom.

I know you don't remember that from being there because none of us are that old, but maybe from history lessons you remember that, right?

Or maybe just because you're interested in cars that you know that.

But what we found very interesting during this time, late 1800s, 1895, in the state of Ohio there were 2 cars.

Now you think about the size of Ohio, it's more than almost 45, 000 square miles, That's a pretty big area, isn't it?

So what do you think the probability would be of these 2 cars and that land mass to meet?

And I'm not a great mathematician, so I don't have the actual statistical probability, but let me tell you, they collided.

They actually, the drivers of those 2 cars ran into each other, can you believe that?

So probabilities are there, but there's nothing that's impossible, right?

And mostly there's nothing impossible with God.

So how many of you have ever gone out with the intentional purpose of finding a deer antler.

If you haven't done that, you got to do it at least once.

Well, if we had more time, we could do a little survey, because the statistical probability of finding an antler when you go out to search for it on an afternoon is 90% failure.

More than that, but So you could be out there for 8 to 10 hours, even up to 100 hours, without changing that probability.

So the rest of you that didn't raise your hands might think, well, what's the use?

Why go out looking for an antler if, you know, I'm not going to even have maybe a 10% chance?

Can I just ask, those of you who raised your hand you have gone out looking, how many of you have ever found 1?

There's still less hands than went out looking, right?

And and that's not just the first time you know out there got it okay I've done that check that off my bucket list it's it's something that you've probably had to do repetitively right before you come up with success so what we're gonna be talking about today is an experience that happened to our family.

We wish that the whole family could be here today.

By the way, we had the opportunity of having a family reunion the week before this retreat.

It's the first time in many years that we've had our whole family together, including now 3 grandchildren.

We had a whole week of time together with our whole family, including Elaine's mother.

So, this particular Sabbath, Back in 2001, it was not the whole family.

It was the whole family except Allison, our oldest daughter.

She was away at massage therapy school in California, so she wasn't with us.

But we were going to have a special treasure hunt that Sabbath afternoon, something that we had done over the years and our success rate with antlers hadn't been that good either, but we were going out looking for the treasure of antlers on that Sabbath.

Now like my husband said we've been on many hikes and even intentional antler hunts and have come up empty-handed And we had on a rare occasion found 1.

And we lived at that time in Montana where there's a very high deer population.

You would see the bucks in the, you know, coming through your yard in the fall and in the winter and you're thinking just drop it here in the yard and they never did.

And we could never find our local deer the box antlers.

We always, the ones we seem to find were ones miles away from us.

We even had 1, not 1 Sabbath, 1 hunting season, the last day of hunting season.

We had hunters all around our property, well, where the roads were.

Honking their horns, flashing their lights.

I mean, I say our pets, they were wild, but we thought them.

They had them named and everyone had a name.

And so they were not afraid of us, and the hunters couldn't get close to them, and we kept them on our property until the sun went down, and then we let them go.

And we were asking for at least 1 of them to drop those beautiful racks that those hunters were looking for on our property and they never did.

Well, we're going to Fast forward to this Sabbath afternoon.

At that time, our son Josiah was studying probabilities in math.

And because we had been on such treasure hunts before, he was not so enthusiastic, can I say?

It wasn't the fact that we were going to take a 2 mile walk or a hike.

It's just that you know when you have repetitive failure you think it's impossible, right?

And that's kind of where his mindset was.

So on the walk he starts off with these statistical probabilities of the failure that we're going to have.

And somehow in my heart I knew it was more than just the mathematical Thing it was a it was deeper in his heart like, you know, this this isn't really gonna work and that's when I started praying specifically Lord Today, it's important if you know that this is going to make a difference in our son's life Please help 1 of us to find an antler to find that treasure because it's going to strip away human philosophy human probabilities human reasoning so We got we took a two-mile hike to an area that was a huge clear-cut.

For those of you that don't know what that means in logging terms, it was just an area where they cut down almost all of the trees.

And so we were there beginning our treasure hunt and we decided that the efficient way to have an antler treasure hunt was to divide up and try to cover as much ground as we could.

Well, not only was my wife praying, but I was praying because now it was sort of like a little bit of a challenge.

Here our son is saying, this isn't really probably going to happen, okay?

And so I'm praying, Lord, you know where the antlers are and you know if it's your will for us to find an antler.

And then I started thinking, just in the midst of this, I started thinking about a very difficult counseling situation that we were going through.

You know, we should be talking to the Lord as we're walking along, just friend to friend.

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Probabilities

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