Acts 17:26 (NIV Original Translation)
HE (God) determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.
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Comments by Joan Boney:
From 1966 to 1971, I taught in the music department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. They downsized in the early 70's and I lost my job.
I decided to go to Albuquerque New Mexico where I got a job as orchestra director in 3 junior high schools.
I rented an apartment in a building overlooking Sandia Mountains. It was a nice treat to see the mountains after living in Texas.
The secretary of the music department and her husband also lived in that apartment building and we became friends. He had just taken a volunteer retirement from Kirkland AFB and was starting a business selling American Indian Arts.
I was lonely there so they asked me if I would like to go out to the reservations with them after school each day to buy Indian jewelry from the various artists.
Then they discovered that I had a natural eye to see down into a turquoise stone and judge the quality of the stone.
They asked me to go with them on Sundays to the big flea market on Central where they had a booth and sold Indian Jewelry.
Then they sent me up to Santa Fe and Los Alamos to wholesale jewelry to the dealers.
And when I wasn't working, I could study the Indian Jewelry at the shops in Old Town . I learned the business, the prices, and became an appraiser of the jewelry.
In turned out I was very good in the business.
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SMU hired me a second time to teach so I returned to Dallas after being in Albuquerque for one year. But I continued to sell jewelry from my home. Jim would ship me cases of jewelry from his stock.
A man set up a business called Portobello Market a few blocks south of SMU. He rented "stalls" to merchants where they sold various merchandise.
A business man from SMU told me about a small mall where he was putting in a Basken Robbins Ice Cream Business and suggested I might rent space there for my jewlery.
I decided to do that and built from the groupd up a beautiful shop with teakwood parquet floors and a kiva style corner fireplace and show cases built into the wall and the jewelry items displayed in the sand and on the walls.
It was a show place.
Neiman-Marcus sent people over to my shop when they wanted to buy Indian items. (Because of the design Neimans felt my shop was a natural for the man foreign visitors who came to Dallas.)
The shop was named: "Dr. Joan Boney's American Indian Arts"
The fact that I had an earned doctorate and had taught at SMU presented me as someone they could trust in buying Indian items.
I kept the business open until the July 31, 1979 when I closed the business to go on radio KWJS exhorting the church.
During those 10 years, God caused me to be born again. God transported me into heaven twice where HE ordained me into the ministry as apostle/prophet.
I had 3 competent women working for me so I could stay home at my apartment and study Bible with God teaching me by HIS Holy Spirit.
You can see how perfectly God set this up.
And I was making more money from the business than I did teaching at SMU
Amazing!
The money from the shop paid for the first month when I went on radio ... $800.
I had $22,000 from the shop when I closed it and that kept me going for several months until people began giving offerings.
It seems obvious to me that this was God's plan to finance the ministry at the beginning.
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God's plan for Pam Padgett, who was raised Catholic, and how God set up the early years to teach her Bible after she was born again.
Pam says:
As a senior in high school I wanted to attend college at Oklahoma State University (OSU), but my parents wanted me to attend Central State University where my older sister was already going to school.
OSU was a much larger and more active university than Central State. I applied for, and received, scholarships at both universities. My high school guidance counselor looked at both scholarships and determined that the one from Central State was the better scholarship. My parents insisted I go to school there. After I got to Central State, I learned that the scholarship was only a portion of what my guidance counselor thought. All around, it seemed like a mistake for me to go to school at Central State.
Not long after the first semester started, I met another freshmen named Connie Jo. She was a born again Christian and had her own Bible and read it. Although I was born again, I didn't know very much Bible. I had been taught a lot of Catholic doctrine, having attending Catholic elementary school, and thought that everything I had been taught was according to the Bible. I didn't have a Bible. My parents had a very large Bible that sat on the living room coffee table, and we dusted it every week but didn't read it. My younger sister had been given a very small New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs, and I read it at night until I went to college.
One day as Connie Jo and I were talking, I said something about Mary being "assumed" into heaven. Connie Jo simply asked "Where is that in the Bible?" I told her I didn't know where it was in the Bible but that I was sure it was there because we had been taught this in the Catholic church. Connie Jo told me she didn't think it was in the Bible, that she had never seen anything about that and had never been taught about that.
More things like this came up as Connie Jo and I talked, and I noted them. Connie Jo gave me a Bible for my birthday, a wonderful gift! I read it often, but didn't know how to look for anything specific. (I didn't know about concordances.)
So the next time I went to my parent's house for a weekend, I looked for these things in a 3-book set of encyclopedias they had called "Catholic Books of Knowledge", which contained Catholic doctrine. What a shock to learn that the things I had noted where not in the Bible! These encyclopedias told how the things I looked up had been added to Catholic doctrine, and it wasn't because they were in the Bible.
As I read the Bible I came across some things that were opposite to what I had been taught in the Catholic church. And Connie Jo continued to asked "Where is that in the Bible?" at times. By these things I began proving the doctrine I believed.
1 Thessalonians 5:21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
Interestingly, Connie Jo had also wanted to go to OSU instead of Central State. I don't recall how she had
landed up attending Central State, but somehow both of us landed up at
this smaller and less active university and became friends and spoke a
lot about things of God.
I feel these things helped give me a good
foundation to build on as a Christian. It's so obvious now that this
was all setup by the will and plan of God for each of us.
One more thing regarding my attending Central State ... Having been taught from a child that the Catholic church was the only true church, it was difficult for me to understand the differences I was seeing between the Bible and Catholic doctrine. I thought I must somehow be missing something.
But then I was led to talk with a nun who "happened" to attend Central State (a state college). She seemed afraid when I asked about some of the differences I had come across between the Bible and Catholic doctrine and said she didn't know the answer to my questions. She then added, "This is why lay people should not read the Bible." As she spoke her face turned very white, as though the blood was drained from her face.
Her reaction showed me clearly that I wasn't "missing something", but that the Catholic church is not based on truth. I left that church.
Acts 17:26 (NIV Original Translation) HE (God) determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.
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