God Story

For weeks now, our pastor has been encouraging us to share our "God Stories" with anyone we come in contact with. When we share "God Stories" with others, they are able to see firsthand what God is accomplishing in our lives, how God is working in our lives and how God so often works unbeknownst to us and behind the scenes to "work all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose." Romans 8:28 Following is a "God Story" that just happened in my life...

A couple months ago, I made the decision to go on our very first Youth Mission Trip to Honduras with our youth and a handful of other adult leaders, including my son-in-law. Arrangements were made and tickets purchased. Somewhere in this same time frame, Darrel brought to my attention that GE was planning an all expense paid trip to Tampa, including deep sea fishing etc, the weekend of June 27th. He was SO excited about it, as was I. That Sunday, the 29th, will be our 37th anniversary and we rejoiced that it fell that way and that GE would actually be paying for a wonderful anniversary weekend for us. How wonderful of God! Well, it wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I realized that these two trips coincided! I was heartbroken and did not know what to do! Our youth team would be flying in from Honduras on the same day we were supposed to be leaving for Tampa! We would not arrive in to Macclenny until around midnight, which would be too late to leave for Tampa. Of course, my mind started reeling on how I could work this out. I thought the best way would be for Darrel to just go ahead and drive to Tampa on Friday morning as planned and then he could drive over to I 75 and pick me up on the teams way home. Well, this would mean another 4 hours of driving for Darrel and he was not too happy about that as we were going to have to get up very early on Saturday morning for our day of fishing and he didn't want to be that late coming in. My heart was breaking trying to figure out what to do. Well, I called Gene, our missions pastor, to basically just tell him I had a dilemma. When I called and said I had a dilemma that I needed his help with, he laughed and said, well, I have a dilemma too, let's hear yours first. I began telling him how I needed to get from Miami to Tampa and might not ride the church van home with everyone if I could figure something out. He began laughing and proceeded to tell me why! HIS dilemma was that we would be having 1 extra person coming back from Honduras with us and there would be NO WHERE for her to sit on the van ride home as we were loaded to the max on the van. He was looking for God to make a way for there to be an extra seat! It was ME! My NOT riding home with everyone, my BIG DILEMMA, had turned out to be HIS ANSWER TO PRAYER!!!! I ended up simply booking a flight out of Miami in Tampa. Darrel will just pick me up at the airport, which has ended up being only 20 minutes from our hotel and we can continue our weekend there! Isn't God good?!!! It's a "GOD STORY" in the sweetest way! God is always at work, we just can't see Him working and so we sometimes forget that He's there. God even cares about little things like this! He's wonderful, isn't He? If you have a "God Story," I'd love to hear it!