My last blog post talked about how each of us is important in the Kingdom and that we all need each other. Preachers need folks to clean the church's toilets and rock the babies in the nursery. Evangelists need prayer warriors to give them spiritual back-up and teachers to train up the baby Christians. We missionaries need other parts of the Body of Christ as well and I was reminded of that this afternoon.
A lady came to We Will Go for the first time this afternoon. I picked her up from a day shelter in the ministry van and at some point, she told me she needed new shoes. Now this lady wasn't saying she needed new shoes like most of us say we need new shoes. For the majority of us here in America, when we say we need new shoes, what we really mean is "I'm tired of the ones I've been wearing and want a different style". But for this sweet woman, when she said she needed a new pair of shoes, she meant she needed a new pair of shoes.
Yep, that's the pair of shoes she'd been wearing, without socks, on a brutally cold March afternoon.
Normally, we try to encourage folks to come to the clothes ministry on the regular times it is open, but when someone comes to us with a need like this lady had, having her wait til Tuesday is just not an option in my book. So when we arrived at We Will Go, instead of going straight into the worship pavilion, I took her right on to the clothes ministry. She needed a big size and to be honest, I wasn't sure what we had. But praise God! We had several in her size and after I gave her a brand new pair of socks, she put them on and started trying on shoes. After just a few minutes, it was my extreme blessing to watch her walk right over to the worship pavilion in her like-new pink and white, super cute, Sketcher's tennis shoes.
Now I don't know who donated those shoes, but let me tell you, I might have been the one who got the pleasure of helping her get the much needed shoes, but I couldn't have done that without the donor who took the time to bring them to us.
A lot of times, we missionaries get put on a pedestal. We're often sort of seen as the super stars of the church. But that's just not right. We just have a different calling on our life but we still yell at our kids, think mean thoughts about our spouses, and get pulled over for driving too fast. We're not perfect. We're just given a different job. Many days I absolutely love this assignment God has given me. Other days, it is really, really hard. But the thing that makes it so worth the hard times is when we see someone trade an old life in for a new one.
Today, someone traded old shoes in for new ones. It didn't require a lot of work on my part and was really just a little thing. But it was huge for my new friend. Who knows but that this simple act of love put into practice will be the very thing that God uses to bring her to the place that she trades her old life for a new one in Him.
And this missionary couldn't have done her part of the story without the person who previously owned the pretty pink and white shoes playing her part, as well.
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