Recalculating

I am praising God for all He has done this year and this collection week. I read this morning in 2Chronicles 15:7 these words that are an encouragement. "But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded." God is rewarding our work in wonderful ways.

I hope to see all of you who can come at Chick-fil-A tonight at 6:00 to celebrate God's harvest. I want our time at CFA to be completely exciting and to that end, while we don't know the final total yet, I wanted to share some thoughts God has been working through in me. First of all, while we don't have final numbers and we know God can do ANYTHING today, it seems to me that outside of a miracle we won't reach the goal of 30,333.

So, like my GPS tells me, I'm 'recalculating'. My new goal is that God would give us at least 26,815 boxes--which would be a 20% increase over last year. As I looked at the numbers yesterday I was, at first, somewhat disappointed. We prayed hard over what goal to set last winter and I felt God was leading us to set the goal of 30,333. It seems like it would be in His will to grant that.

Yesterday I listened to a CD about the life of George Mueller who said that if God doesn't answer your prayer it's because He wants to give us something better. He believed that our GOOD God always does the best for us, even when it doesn't seem so to us. So how does that apply to our shoebox goal? At first I couldn't figure that out but then last night I looked at the truck at Covenant which is very nearly full. If God miraculously blesses us with another 3500 boxes today, what will we do with them? Are we prepared to handle that? We need to do some tweaking with our collection system and some re-evaluating in order to receive larger numbers, I believe.

On the other hand, everyone be on alert in case we have to put out an "all hands on deck call" today to process thousands of boxes!!!!!! It's not over yet but I wanted you to know my thinking before we get to CFA tonight. God has done GREAT things among us. To go from 11,999 boxes in 2007 in our first year as a team to whatever God brings to us by tonight is nothing short of miraculous.