I think it started with a debate about which end of the Turkey you stuff. I was convinced it was the, well, rear end, because haven’t you seen the Friends episode where Joey gets the turkey stuck on his head? The rear end, right? Well, head or rear, it doesn’t really matter, because I would have no idea how to even start preparing a turkey! I think that comes in the manual you get when you become a mom…yes?
Anyway, I’m assuming a few families in Port Huron have more of a clue than I do. Because over Thanksgiving, our church delivered over 200 Thanksgiving dinners! So Allison and I got our 3 boxes of food and a map of an area of town…and since we’d lived here for all of approximately 2 weeks, we turned on our GPS and only made a couple of wrong turns before we found our way. We could deliver to anybody we wanted to.
We drove around for a few minutes asking the Lord to show us who needed these dinners. We drove past a house with a giant ‘Beware of the Dog‘ sign. I’m pretty sure that roughly translates to ‘Don’t deliver here.’ So we kept driving and a few houses later we saw a woman in her yard. We asked if she could use a Thanksgiving turkey and she turned us down. Not taking her denial personally, we asked if she knew anyone else who might need a dinner. She told us about a family 2 houses down…the dad had just passed away 2 days before in a pretty brutal car accident. We turned and counted. Turns out, my translation was off.
So we carried our giant box of Thanksgiving dinner–turkey, stuffing, potatoes, bread, mac and cheese, cranberry sauce, even a frozen pie!–up to the door and before we could even knock, it swung open. And we came face to face with the dog. We affectionately refer to him as Satan. But just past Satan was a whole slew of people. When Amy (the wife and mother) saw us, she burst into tears. We asked if she could use the dinner and as she thanked us, the kids started digging in the box. They squealed over the jar of peanut butter because they’d just run out the day before.
The two girls, around nine or ten, then told us about their Sunday morning.
One started, ‘Guess what we got at church today? Wait, what did we get?’
The other reminded her, ‘We got saved. And we’re gonna get baptized too. Are you saved?’
And we said yes and goodbye as they walked out the door to the funeral.
I’ve struggled a little with blogging because after this year of adventures, I wonder if I have any good stories to tell here in America. And then I remembered that the best moments of my year didn’t happen when I was ‘doing ministry.’ They didn’t happen according to a schedule. They didn’t happen because I was overseas or because I was a missionary. They happened because God spoke and I listened. Because I truly believed I was bringing Kingdom everywhere I went. Because I saw what God was doing and jumped in. So if I don’t have any good stories to tell here at home, it’s probably not an issue of location, but of motivation.
Now, a month later, we revisited our family to drop off some Christmas gifts. With only a few more wrong turns, we walked back up the porch. We held off Satan and we talked with Grandma Shirley. We left some presents under the tree. Not because they need them, but because we wanted to give them. And suddenly, I have a story to tell.
Because I remembered how to interpret the signs. Even if they are in English.
