Every Blessing Is Yours: Letting Jesus Transform You Through the Wisdom of the Beatitudes (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781973612209)

Judy Nichols is a 70-year-old wife of a retired college math professor, mother of two married children, and grandmother of five. She attended public primary and secondary schools in Columbus, Ohio, graduating in 1964, and graduated from The Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology in 1968. But her real education that enriched and today motivates her life came from two sources: studying the Word of God and raising her children.

The youngest of three daughters in a loving Christian family, she attended church regularly, went to Vacation Bible School, completed confirmation classes, was active in youth group, and sang in the choir. Despite all this, she did not come to salvation until after college in 1969. She became active in Bible study groups and helped with editing a campus groups newsletter. Through a contact in Bible study, she was invited to move to Mansfield to serve as secretary in a Christian ministry. Considering the pros and cons of leaving her hometown, family and friends, and a job she enjoyed, God spoke to her that this was not just a man offering a job, but it was God calling her to serve Him full time. She moved and never regretted it.

She enjoyed writing letters and had several pen pals growing up, but never seriously considered writing until she was encouraged to write for her churchs little magazine, Salt & Light. She had numerous articles published there, and later several published in the association of churches (Alliance for Renewal Churches) publication, Commonlife. One of these was subsequently reprinted in a Mennonite magazine, Christian Living. For the last fifteen years she has been writing weekly devotional pieces (over five hundred in all) which are posted on her churchs, the local Christian radio stations and Mansfield Christian Schools web sites, as well as her facebook page. She has a mailing list of about 60 people, representing seven cities in Ohio, seven other states, and one foreign country, to whom she emails them. Recently, a reader from California asked her to send him one hundred devotions so that he could forward them to a dear friend in the Czech Republic who wanted devotional materials to translate and use in her discipleship groups.

Every Blessing is Yours is her first attempt at a book. It grew, over a period of several years, out of her study of Isaiah 61 (from which she wrote fifteen devotions) after a group study of Beth Moores Breaking Free, and then being involved in several Healing Care Groups, both as participant and then as co-leader. Last year she began studying the book of Matthew in her personal devotions, and the parallels between the Beatitudes and the word pictures of Isaiah 61 stood out to her in bold relief.