Prayer is extremely powerful. When you pray sincerely to God and what you are asking for matches up with His desires for your life, amazing things can happen.
Over the past couple of weeks, our team has been praying for direction and help when it comes to the community dinner we’re supposed to have on Saturday nights. Since we got back from the holidays, we’ve received a lot of “no’s” when we asked people if they wanted to come over for dinner. After some reflection as a team, we realized that many times we would ask the parents of kids we know and often times they would say no, but the kids were usually sitting there asking to still come over. Then the idea struck us, what if we see if the kids can come to dinner and we’ll offer to walk them home afterwards.
This past week we began putting this idea before God and praying for an answer, and God definitely decided to provide us with an answer.
By lunch time on Saturday Josh had put out an invite to a family we know, the parents said no but they were more than willing to let their two boys come over. The two of them were extremely excited to help cook dinner. By mid-afternoon, after I got back from working at the clinic, I found myself walking back home with three more kids coming over for dinner. By the time dinner was ready, we had one more join us for dinner. In the end we had 6 kids/youth, varying from ages 5 to 16 over for dinner.
At the end of the night I was exhausted. There was a point in the evening that Josh and I looked at each other in the kitchen, agreed that we loved having all these kids over, but we definitely didn’t want to have 6 kids of our own.
The best was in youth group today when the 16 year-old stated to the group that the best thing that’s happened to him lately was coming over to our place last night for dinner. And it was great to share with him that dinner last night was one of our best moments lately too.
I am extremely thankful to God for answering prayers and providing us with needed direction. Even though at points yesterday evening things seemed crazy, I am more than happy to be a place where these kids can come and hang out, have fun, and be safe. I feel honored and blessed that their parents trust us enough to let their kids spend the evening with us. And I feel loved by a God who is there walking along side me every step of the way.
