(Written on the airplane en route back to Philadelphia)
Cindy and I spent an entire week in Florida at The Wycliffe Bible Headquarters, being trained to raise support as full time missionaries through a great organization called Great Commission Ministries (GCM). What’s funny is that prior to going on the trip, so many people said, “Oh wow! Florida. . .so you’re going on vacation. Doesn’t seem fair that you’re getting to go on vacation in the middle of October.”
“It’s not going to be a vacation,” I kept saying, “We’re going to be working.”
Maybe it’s that people have selective hearing or the assumption that anytime anyone here’s the word ‘Florida’ they automatically think Mickey Mouse, Universal Studios and orange groves. Well, for the record, I did not see Mickey Mouse (which I’m happy about), but I did see at least fifty speedy, little salamanders; none of them could save me any money on my car insurance, even though I asked several times. We did get the chance to go to Universal Studio’s City Walk, but that was because it was our new friend Charlie’s 40th birthday. Furthermore, I saw no orange groves, or oranges (go figure) and I drank no orange juice (mostly Starbuck’s coffee and water). It was officially not a vacation and God’s grace was all over the entire trip.
God’s grace was evident in “small ways”--Cindy and I are on a budget. This means that we were only traveling with ex-amount of dollars and weren’t planning on spending anymore. We walked into Philadelphia International Airport with sixty dollars and after checking our bag and getting coffee (which, in the airport, costs twice the price of every place else in the entire world) walked off the plane in Orlando with thirty dollars in cash. Our pre-trip GCM instruction manual told us that a cab from the airpot would run us close to thirty dollars, so Cindy’s budgeting skills were on point. We hopped into a cab and immediately I thought, “there’s no way this thing is gonna cost thirty dollars. I’m gonna have to wash the cab to pay off the rest of our trip.” You’re probably familiar with the feeling; the meter is like a guillotine only it moves in slow motion. You watch it and hope that doesn’t reach your neck before you have time to squirm free and get out of harms way. As I’m watching the price on the meter ascend at what seems like an unreasonable pace, I get a text from a faithful friend. It read, “I’m prayin’ for u with the body...any requests? You got five minutes.” I know this means that my friends are at church and they’re going to pray in five minutes before service starts. I text, as fast as my fingers can move, “That God would give us a unified growing faith and that we would increase in the fruits of 2 Peter 1:3-11 while we’re here...And that the cab fare would be thirty bucks or less cause that’s what I have in my pocket.”
Cindy didn’t know that I asked for prayer, she just watched the meter and gave me the “oh no babe” signal (a squeeze of the leg).
With faith in the prayers of the righteous I said, “We’ll be fine.”
As we approached Wycliffe, the meter seemed a little “sluggish” (What could it be?)--The meter read, $26.43.
“Oh wow! That’s great!”, Cindy said.
“Yup, yup,” I said.
I am someone who doesn’t really make a big deal about things like that. In my unbelief, I don’t always see God in them. Something like that will happen and I’ll think, “Well, that’s just the meter...” or “It was only ten minutes away, what did you expect?” I see God’s grace in big things, not “little” things. Often times it is the “little” outpourings of God’s grace that are the greatest testimonies of His Sovereignty.
The clincher for me was when Cindy and I were riding back to the airport with some friends from the training to catch our return flight to Philly. We caught a ride with a friend and were talking about how other people decided to catch a cab to the airport instead.
“I caught a cab from the airport to the training when I came in,” someone said. (The same airport and same cab service Cindy and I used--there’s only one).
“Yea, we did too,” said someone else.
“So did we,” said Cindy.
“That cost too much money,” someone number one said.
“Yea!”, said someone number two.
“Oh...how much did it cost you guys?” my wife asked.
Both someones said, with raised voices, “Forty dollars!”
