What a beautiful week we’ve had here in Kentucky. Spring has been all around with blooming trees and warm sunshine. It was enough to give you Spring fever and make some of you want to go fishing. Not me. I haven’t discovered whatever it is about fishing that makes people long after a pond bank. I like to walk on that pond bank, but not fish off it. I asked my Sunday School boys this morning what they liked about fishing and one of them said eating the fish. The other one said the fun of hooking the fish and reeling it in. I’ll just keep walking and enjoying nature that way and let those who love fishing keep on fishing.
We had a big day at my little church, Goshen. For those of you who may have read my Hollyhill books, I based a lot of my church, Mt. Pleasant on my Goshen Church. Of course only the good Mt. Pleasant members resemble my Goshen Christian brothers and sisters. As I said, we’re just a little church, but today we dedicated our beautiful new Fred Knickerbocker Fellowship Hall to the service of the Lord in our community. We named it after our pastor who’s been preaching for us for almost 25 years. That’s a long time to put up with the same bunch of sheep, but he’s a good shepherd and we’re blessed to have him as our spiritual leader at Goshen. Anyway, a couple of years ago we stepped out in faith to build a fellowship hall for our social events. We had no way of knowing how we’d ever raise the necessary funds. As I said we’re a small congregation without a lot of money. But don’t ever say the Lord doesn’t still work wondrous works. It says in the Bible that with God, nothing shall be impossible. One place it’s the angel telling Mary she can have a baby and still be a virgin. Another place it’s Jesus talking about how hard it is for a rich man to get into heaven. As hard as a camel going through the needle’s eye. Now I’ve heard some Bible scholars say that was the name of a small gate going into Jerusalem. One that a camel would have difficulty going through. I don’t know for sure about that. But whether that’s what Jesus meant or if he meant it literally, one thing is sure. With God, it could be possible. So it was with our fellowship hall. With God, and only with God has it been possible. As Laura said in her comment on my last post, “God is good.” And when is God good? “All the time.”
And then tonight I spoke for a women’s group W.O.W. (Women of Worth) at David’s Fork Church in Fayette County. I told them I wasn’t too good at acronyms, but I tried to come up with something to get in the spirit of things with their W.O.W. Since I want to write encouraging fiction, how about Writer of Encouragement? W.O.E.??? Definitely not the right acronym. So how about Encouragement Writer? E.W. Still not exactly what I had in mind. Eeew! Finally I just decided they had the right idea with WOW and I’d just use Writer of Words. They were a fun bunch and we had a good time.
Yet at the same time, with all the good things happening, I’ve had a shadow over the day, because I messed up last week and left someone’s name off our list of people to thank for our new building. It hurt his feelings and my apology, though heartfelt and sincere, wasn’t enough to bring him back into our fold today. So pray for him and for me that we can move past this bump in the road of our friendship. I’m sure some of you have had similar experiences where you hurt someone unintentionally and then had no way to change what you’d done. But you know sometimes we have to leave it to the Lord. He has the power to change everything.
Hope you have a fun week. Remember – Thursday is the National Day of Prayer. Prayer is powerful. Think of it like electricity. The power is there, but first we have to plug into it. I’ll leave you with the quote I put in our bulletin today — “The well of Providence is deep. It’s the buckets we bring to it that are small.” (Mary Webb)
So get your biggest bucket and draw deep this week.