A few months ago, a sixteen year old girl who attends one of North Way's suburban locations decided to do something that was very generous. Instead of receiving gifts at her birthday party, she asked people to give her cash donations that she could give away to a good cause. She received over $300 in cash, and she gave it to the LAMP mentoring program at North Way. She wanted the money to go to LAMP, but she only asked that it go to "help somebody who really needed it."
I prayed through how God might want me to steward this gift, and nothing really came up over the past couple of months. Then, right before Christmas a single mom from Homewood who has five children in the LAMP program called me to ask for help. She didn't have any money to provide a Christmas dinner or any gifts for her children this year, and I felt like God was prompting me to use the special gift from months earlier to provide Christmas support for this family. My family went shopping and brought a full Christmas dinner and some small gifts over to her house in Homewood, thanks to the generosity of a sixteen year old girl who decided to do something special on her birthday. When I explained the story to the mom in Homewood, she was so moved. We all prayed together, and I got to see first hand how much the gift meant to her this Christmas.
Stories like this remind me that God's profound love transcends all manmade social boundaries... suburban and urban, racial, economic, generational, and cultural. God is on mission to redeem the world all of the time, and ordinary followers of Jesus play an important role in that mission. I was thankful to be an eyewitness to God answering a mom's prayer this Christmas.
No comments:
Post a Comment