Faithfulness and Favor

  I want to share about God’s faithfulness! At the beginning of Eswatini, one of the first things we noticed was the fact the kids eat the same meal every single day. At first, I thought it was simply rice and carrots so the Lord placed it in my heart to get these kids some protein… so peanut butter came to mind. Later we came to find out it is actually a balanced meal so that was a blessing to hear but the idea of peanut butter and Jelly sandwich day still sounded fun to give them a fresh meal. So I discussed it with some of my team and we decided to plan it! We started by asking our leader if that was okay and we got the go-ahead! She gave us a rough number of kids that come so we could come up with the amount of supplies we would need…. 136 sandwiches was that total.  Turns out PVT was right around the corner, so during PVT we announced our vision. Just from 1 announcement God provided over $65, which was more than enough for the vision to come to life! The next step was planning a day and asking our ministry host to help.  After all the details got sorted out and we did lots of math, we planned the day out with our leaders! So Tuesday after ministry, we stopped at our local “SaveMore” (the only store close to us which happens to be a gas station) and they had just restocked their peanut butter! Praise God!  Luckily our whole team was ready and willing to help too, so we distributed jobs to each one… someone got the bread, someone got the bananas (yes we added bananas as an addition to the sandwiches), and a few of us got the peanut butter/ jelly. Everything went more smoothly than I could’ve imagined and God’s blessing/ favor was so evidently on us, each step of the way. The next morning, the hour before leaving for ministry we gathered a few of our people from the squad and made all of our sandwiches… the cool thing too was that we got to do it for not only our care point but for one of the other team’s care point as well!  We ended up having leftover peanut butter, jelly, and money!  We are donating the leftover supplies to the base but it’s crazy to think we were worried we wouldn’t have enough in the first place let alone extras!  God provided more than we needed just like He did in Matthew 14 with fish and bread. Not that these kids necessarily needed this, as they are provided full meals by the care point but it was so fulfilling to be able to get an idea and watch the Lord’s blessing as we followed through on steps.

  This showed me when you are walking in according to the the Lord’s will, He will fight for you, open the exact doors needed, and provide every need along the way. This was a beautiful experience and I’m grateful to have been a vessel for the Lord to provide a new experience for these kids!