God Keeps His Promises

Our experience at Thrive was so diverse and varied: pastor’s conference, orphanage, disabled centre, relationship evangelism, praying at the local hospital, etc.- that it is hard to claim just one as being the most impactful.  Looking back on our trip, I can see God’s hand in each activity, visit and conversation we had, which is so faith-inspiring.  One such time occurred at the Limakatso Disabled Centre.  We were there for the second day in a row and my husband Dave and I were excited to get the chance to serve these delightful children for another day.

We had our “Noah’s Ark” theme and activity ready to go: the plan was for Dave to use a hand puppet to help me narrate the Noah’s Ark story.  Then we were going to have the children glue popsicle sticks in the shape of an ark and then inside we would decorate them with animal stickers and rainbows, of course, to symbolize God’s promise.  The morning started off well, with Topsy (our translator) helping us communicate this amazing Old Testament story.  After I finished reading, I told the children that now we’d be passing around construction paper and popsicle sticks.  As I was talking I turned to my basket of materials and realize with a missing heartbeat that there was NO construction paper!  I frantically looked under the basket to see if we had dropped it or stuffed it in Dave’s back-pack.  With sinking hearts, Dave and I realized at the same time that we had forgotten the construction paper. I immediately started to panic, after all, our ENTIRE lesson hinged on using PAPER to construct an ark!  And remember, this is Africa so it’s hard to improvise and just run to the big supply room to grab more or to just find new materials and switch to a different project!  Desperately I sent up a prayer to God for help...”I’m not a teacher by trade Lord you know that…how am I to fill in the time for them…what are we to do now!?”  And all of these dear children were just staring at us happily expecting the project to begin so I turned with pleading eyes to Topsy and said, Do you have ANY paper?  In my head I was thinking that even a small pad of paper would do!  She pointed to the one cupboard in the classroom and said, oh yes, there should be some there.  I walked over not knowing what to expect and inside I found big thick sheets of blue, red, pink and green construction paper!  And even better, the papers were all printed with the following graphic on the bottom: GOD KEEPS HIS PROMISES.

Well, the Lord certainly got my attention that day!  I immediately felt foolish for having had any anxiety or fear about the lesson…not only did He provide, but he provided even better paper than we could have dreamed!  And as the story of Noah is essentially a story of the Lord’s covenant with us…the subtitle of the page just made the children’s projects look as if we had planned it ourselves.  It was a small, but subtle reminder to me that Jesus is constantly walking ahead, besides and behind us all the time.

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