GOD EXPANDS HIS PLANS

Hello Neighbor. Thanks for stopping by.

I'm a little late with this next installment.  Last week I spent every day doing a VBS at Fairmont Health Care. It was a good time and the residents really enjoyed it.

Well, the last thing I wrote was our moving from the Buffalo area to Hollywood, FL.  We joined the First Baptist Church of Hollywood.  This church was mostly an older congregation. We were the youngest members except for one younger woman with her children.  There wasn't much there for a Children's Sunday School, but God had other plans for me.

About a couple of blocks from our place was a four floor tenement apartment facility.  It was a low income place and had lots of kids,   I had started a  kid's club at a small house right next to that apartment building.  There were a number of families that I got to know and taught their children. I looked at that huge apartment building and hoped God was not going to put me there. But of course that is just what He did.

The manager allowed us to use an empty apartment for a club meeting place.  I would walk down there a couple  times a week, always bringing some Skittles or something to pass out to the kids. We had quite a little club going there.  Some of the people from the church would get involved and help out.  We had cook outs and parties.  Finally we were able to get some of the kids to church by picking them up.  It was quite a different environment for me, but it was exciting, too.

Another new adventure that God had me do was to go to Dominica to do a kid's club there. A member of our church had a son that was a missionary. So I flew to Dominica and stayed with them for a week.  We had a nice little kid's club in the church next to the missionary's home. The children were so different from those back home. They really were interested in sitting and listening to the Bible story and the songs etc.  The children in the tenement apartment were not as interested in learning about the Bible and it was more difficult to teach them.  Anyway, it was a great experience and added more confirmation in what I was doing.

We were there for 12 years. By this time, we had decided that perhaps it was time for us to move to Yakima, WA where we would be close to our oldest Son and his family.  I also was beginning to feel sort of burned out with all the work that was involved at the apartment complex.

It was hard leaving some of the kids that I had gotten to know so well. I kept in touch with a couple of them for awhile. When we went back to visit five years later, a couple of my "boys" would always try to be there to see me.  One in particular was my favorite. His name was John and he had come to know Jesus as his Savior. I was sorry to learn that he had been killed in a motorcycle accident, but it was good to know that he had shared Jesus with his best friend, who became a Christian, too, and also joined the church.  I also received a letter from another young man that was one of my "boys". He just wrote to thank me for all I had taught him and for caring about him.  These are what makes following God's plan for you worth all the time and effort that went into His training.

Anyway, it is time for us to move along to the next step in God's plan and for putting His training to work in a different place.

Stop again sometime soon and we'll have another chat.