God took my breath away today and I wanted to tell about it.
At college here my “home church” is Sojourners Mennonite Fellowship, “Menno” for short. We’ve been meeting in a store front, and the church has been meeting there since it started almost 10 years ago. However recently, the leadership of the church were made aware of a storefront at the end of our block that was for sale. The guy that owns it lives on the west coast and was a former student of our pastor. The storefront for sale includes the whole building section, both floors and garages included. The building listed for $120,000 three years ago when it was put on the market…but this county is an impoverished one with the sole exception from poverty being the college, so there’s no way that anyone around here would buy this storefront anytime in the then-foreseeable future.
However, the church leadership decided to go out on a limb and see what God would do with their step of courage: they bid $50,000 on the building, leaving themselves another $25,000 for negotiating room. The owner accepted their [$50,000 on a $120,000 building] bid on the spot. Then God decided to knock our socks off- an anonymous donor gave the church the $50,000 dollars to pay for the building in one payment!
And!! The building has two floors and upstairs there are many many rooms, enough for Sunday School rooms and a nursery and the toy library (same concept as a book library just with toys, it is for the families in the community that have trouble affording food, let alone toys for their children)! Downstairs there is (or will be) a worship space once we knock out some of the temporary walls, and there is a small room for a church office (this church has never had one before!) and also there are plans underway for an adjoining dental clinic to serve those in the community who can’t afford rising health costs, served by a dentist in our own small congregation!
There is still an enormous amount of work to do on the majorly unfinished building- many of my (and many others’) Saturday afternoons this semester will go for sledgehammering down walls, ripping up old carpet, and repainting rooms and stairs- but its not nearly as daunting as it logically should feel because the hand of God is so obviously in this, blessing it every step of the way. And it’s all happened so quickly…it’s one of those situations where there’s a whirlwind of activity over which you have no control and at the end, you’re sitting trying to catch your breath, saying, “What on earth just happened, Lord?!?”…and He gives you this crazy peace about something that seems too big for you and too much for you to handle by yourself.
I think though that He likes giving us the gift of impossible situations…its one of His ways of showing us how incredibly He loves us and how He can do anything in our lives if we give Him our will and our desire to do things ourselves; when we are weakest and have nothing to give is when He shows how He’ll always come through- showing His strength through you, turning your impossible situation into a breathlessly joyful miracle, whether great or small.
So that’s my good news and I’m quite excited! Feel free too to share this as both a praise and encouragement, and as an ongoing prayer request as one part of the Church for another.
Love to all, and God bless. =)
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