Every year my family saves up money in a jar to give to someone in need on Christmas eve. We have our small children (3 & 5) with whom we also encourage to contribute with change we give them. We then go out with our children and offer the gift to someone we feel led to give it to. We sometimes find a homeless person, a family at the donation center, or someone in a parking lot.
This past Christmas eve we stopped at the donation center and noticed a family shopping for adult clothing. There were about 4-5 children along with a woman. For some reason, we felt led to offer the gift to them. My wife and daughter approached the young girl (around 12) and gave her the jar with money. Immediately, the daughter started crying. My wife explained to her why we were doing it and we walked away.
As we walked out the door a woman ran out the door and stopped us. She said, i just want to say that what you have done was so special. She explained how she was fostering these children whose mother has just died and the children were picking out clothes for their father who was in jail – the kind of news that sends chills down your spine. In these moments you are reminded why the giver is more blessed than the receiver.
But this is not all. My wife and i are in the process of finding a small-group we feel God is leading us to in our Church fellowship. So we have been visiting many small-groups in the past few months. It’s taken us a long time to make our rounds because of the many choices, the holidays, being out of town, and my wife works every 3rd weekend as a nurse. Regardless, the next Sunday we were able to, we attended a small-group in the elementary school. They began planning out ways they were going to continue and serve a family they’ve been helping with lately. An individual leaned over to us and explained what was going on. She said that they were helping out a family of children, whose mother had just passed and the father was in jail.
Immediately, i was stunned at how similar this situation sounded. Someone then showed us photos of the children and the woman who was fostering their children. They were exactly the children and the women we saw at the donation center. The woman who had was fostering these children belonged to the same small-group we visited the week after. Somehow we managed to offer our gift these specific children, which seems like a ‘random’ act of generosity that turned out to be a ‘lucky’ guess; But then to randomly sit-in with a group at Chets who were also ministering to the same family? One would say, “it’s a small world”. But ‘randomness’, ‘luck’, & ‘small world’ are the terms the world has been using to discredit the movement of God since day 1.
No matter how insignificant you think your service or gift is, you never know how much of an impact it can have. Luke 21:1-4.
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