Family Newsletter

December 2021

Dear family and friends,

Since life seems to move at such a fast pace, we want to take the time and share with all of you the journey that our family has been on over the past several years since our 2014 Family Newsletter. Like every other family, we have experienced a lot of changes, some blessings and some challenges. Our many blessings include: our children growing into incredible young adults. John stepped away for direct-care nursing and works full time for our Heavenly Father. John and I began ministering together through Remnant Restoration. Our challenges have centered around building a life of faith following the loss of several loved ones in a relatively short time frame; nine close familial relationships in three years. 

Loss is one of the common experiences that we all share in life. This season of loss has been very difficult for us. Though everyone reacts differently to loss, there are a lot of similar questions that we all ask: What?  What just happened? Why? Why did this happen, How? How do we move forward? What are we doing? Why does it matter? What is the purpose? We began questioning everything… knowing that life had changed and would never be the same. 

As we began questioning, we wanted real answers. We wanted real truth. So we as a family turned to our faith in God to seek truth, understanding and comfort. And we found it, in God’s Word. God promises that when we seek Him with all of our heart we will find Him (Deuteronomy 4:29). In this seeking, we have come to learn more and more about our God, and in so doing examine our own lives. 

We as a family began and continue an intense examination and are continually convinced, that the God of the bible is real and trustworthy. He continually shows Himself to be true to His Word and is healing as well as transforming us in amazing ways. We are humble and grateful for all that He has done, is doing and will do. Our overwhelming thankfulness fills us with a desire to continue to learn all we can about God and how He would have us live. Through this examination we continue to make a lot of changes in our family, how we live, love, and worship Him. It' is these changes that we would like to share with all of you.

As a family, we have made the commitment to love and serve the Lord our God with all our heart, soul mind and strength. We have all confessed His Son, Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. In writing this, we know that some of you will understand and others may not. Some may think we’ve gone off the deep end Jand that’s ok. After living life the way we thought best, wanted or blindly following traditions that we never truly examined for ourselves, we discovered that what we trusted in did not provide what we needed when we needed it most. We discovered that, for our family, God knows best and began patterning our daily lives after His Son and Word.

So what does this mean? For our family, it means we seek Him in truth, in everything with an open mind. Forget what we thought we knew and get to know who He really is, which as it turns out is pretty simple. We strive every day to read His Word, pray and ask for understanding, searching for what He wants us to do. And whatever we do, do it as if we were doing it for Him, instead of for ourselves (Colossians 3:23). We continually seek to worship Him in spirit and in truth as this is what He desires (John 4:23). These simple changes have brought us closer as a family. God fills us with unspeakable joy and peace as we seek Him, even during the tough times.

By seeking God’s will and way, we have also made other discoveries and changes. We discovered that living life the way we wanted or thought best, without seeking God was not fulfilling. In fact, it was quite empty, bankrupt. So we began a quest of seeking how God wants us to live, to love and to worship. We discovered that God has a wonderful plan for our lives and gives us written instructions on how to live life to its fullest. And, like a loving parent, He gives us rules to live by for our protection. We knew of these rules, but never really examined them before, what they truly mean for our everyday lives. We began and continue to study how and why God created all of us and how He instructed us to live. Again, we questioned and examined and prayed for understanding…

God began and continues to change us, slowly yet profoundly. We live differently. We worship differently and to us, more meaningfully. One of those changes involves the holidays we now celebrate. After carefully researching and examining the way we traditionally worshipped God and how He tells us He wants to be worshipped, we noticed some significant differences. It came down to two questions for us: do we love/worship God the way he wants us to, or do we love/worship God the way we want? What is more important, what our worship means to us or what it means to Him?

In answering that question honestly, our family decided to start celebrating God’s Holy-Days, The Feasts of God (Leviticus 23), instead of our traditional “Christian” holidays. As we learned, the traditions that we thought were all about Him, are not about Him or His Son at all. He is very specific about his Holy days, and they are designed to bring us closer to Him and His Son. So basically, we traded two holidays (Christmas and Eater) and gained seven! 

Right now, some may think we have lost our minds, if you haven’t before this point. Why would we give up Christmas and Easter? Does it really matter? We continue to discover much deeper meaning in celebrating The Feasts of God, His Holy-Days and have a burning desire to share with our family and friends. We have come to understand that God’s plan of salvation for mankind is summed up in these feasts. They are a rehearsal of the first and second coming of Christ. 

The first three biblical feasts were fulfilled by Jesus Christ on the actual feast days as written in God’s Word: He was sacrificed on the Passover (the anniversary of the Passover in Egypt), buried when the Feast of Unleavened Bread began (the anniversary of when the Hebrews left Egypt) and resurrected on the Feast of First Fruits (the anniversary of the Hebrews crossing the Red Sea on dry ground). The Fourth Feast of Shavuot, or the Festival of Weeks was again fulfilled on Pentecost (the anniversary of when Moses brought the law of God to His people from Mt. Sinai), when the Holy Spirit of God began to fill all those who put their faith in Jesus Christ, writing His Law on our hearts. Hundreds of prophecies have been fulfilled precisely as written hundreds of years before their fulfillment. While we certainly do not know exactly how or when the other three feasts (Feast of Trumpets, Day of Atonement and Feast of Tabernacles) will be fulfilled, it is perhaps reasonable to surmise that they will be fulfilled in the same manner… on the actual feast days as written in God’s Word. 

We are excited to share what we are learning about God and the grace that He shows us through His Son, Jesus. We have decided as a family that we will no longer celebrate Christmas and Easter, which only serves to distract us from worshipping God in the way He wants. Instead, we continue to celebrate God’s Feasts! We would ask that our family and friends, you would respect our decision. We pass no judgment on how anyone decides to worship and would ask the same. It is our hope that you will examine and test to see if these things be true (Acts 17:11). It is our desire that God use us to help others in whatever way He chooses. We truly believe that He moved us to share this with all of you.

May God continue to bless and grow all of us in His Spirit and Truth unit the promised return of His Son, Jesus Christ.

In His Service,

The Hall Family

Remnant Restoration