Trusting God is always easy to do until it costs you something. It takes being faithful to another level when your finances, time, relationships, or even your “image” are on the line. Recently, I have experienced this first hand.
I have always trusted God in working out the current situation I was in. However, that was easy to do since I was already there and it didn’t cost me anything to get there. A few months ago we had decided to start planning a banquet to raise funds for this mission trip. We had planned on doing some raffles, door prizes, and maybe even a small auction. I just kept thinking, “If only I could get fully funded before the banquet and just turn it into a celebration”. Then one afternoon when I was driving, I felt like God said, “Do you not have enough reasons to celebrate?”. I tried to ignore it because making this banquet into a celebration was not convenient for me when I was only 50% funded.
After several days of trying to ignore what God had said, I finally gave in. I made the calls to cancel the raffle, auction, and turn the donation bucket into a prayer request bucket. Now it was just a celebration with food, live music and free keychains. I was already feeling extremely counter productive. I’m supposed to be raising money for this trip but yet I’m cancelling all the fundraising plans.
Then God takes it a step further. One night while in prayer I get this feeling I’m suppose to buy 100 extra meals and give those tickets away. This I REALLY tried to ignore. I already felt counter productive for cancelling the fundraising and now I’m supposed to buy 100 meals extra for people that may not even show up.
After praying about it a lot, there was no denying it. I know this is a small step in Faith for some but for me, I had never done anything like this before. I’m not going to lie it was nerve racking. I was worried that I had wasted my money on food that wasn’t going to get eaten. I was afraid I wasn’t going to get fully funded for this trip. I was even nervous about being judged if no one showed up.
Thankfully, we have a trustworthy God. The celebration dinner was a huge success. We had just enough food. I received over 40 prayer requests that I am actively praying for. Also, even though we didn’t do any fundraisers at the dinner, because of your generous hearts I am also over 90% funded!
Thank you all so much,
Dylan
