Small things with Great Love

"We can do no great things, only small things with great love."
The past few days, I feel like God has been teaching me the power of loving and serving Him through unconventional and unexpected ways, and recognizing the truth in this quote of Mother Teresa's. In mission trips, there's usually a specific group of people that you're ministering to, and I've been focused on doing just that: working with the kids in Kenscoff. This past week, there have been a couple of delays as we've tried to follow the Lord's leading and I'm not going to lie, I was kinda ticked off by it. But I had to learn that God is bigger than my presumptions of who I’m supposed to be ministering to, and how to go about that.

So the other day, after our first trip to Kenscoff was delayed, someone knocked on our door. It was an elderly man who cleans my grandma’s yard, and he asked if she was there and/or if she had left his pay with us. I replied that she hadn’t and left, thinking that encounter was over. But my mom started talking to him and invited him to sit down. I could tell immediately that he was really poor, by his attire and the evident strain on his face. But when my mom told me that we were going to make a meal for him, I was exasperated because 1) we didn’t have much food and she didn’t check what we had before she offered him food and 2) we didn’t even know how to turn on the stove here (external gas valves involved). Can you tell my heart wasn’t in the right place? Finally, I find him a coconut to take with him, my mom finds some food and we figure out how to turn on the stove. And as we sit down and he begins to share his story, my eyes were slowly opened to my callousness. And the verse that came to mind was Hebrews 13: 1-2: Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares". And I realized that we probably gave him the only meal he would eat that day. He shared about how he hadn’t been able to go to church for a long time, because he had no money, and that no one had prayed with him specifically. We sang some worship songs and prayed with him; one of his last statements were, “I don’t know where you guys came from, but I know God sent you here, to pray with me.” I’m so grateful that my mom took the initiative to minister to him; through her and that man, God helped me realize the narrowness of my vision and reminded me how every knock, every encounter, could be an opportunity to do a small thing with great love. I’ll end with the man’s name: MesiDieu, which means “Thank you God”. Thank you, God.

Gabrielle