Promptings

When I go out to yard sales on my stuffed animal safaris I tend to be pretty focused.  I breeze into a sale and scan quickly for those prized animals for our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes.  If there aren't any, I head back to my car pronto.  This past Saturday I left a sale that had no animals and was all the way back to my car parked a half block away when I had a prompting.

I felt I should return to that sale and look for children's clothes that would meet the dress requirements for City of Erie school district--solid colored polo shirts and navy, black, or khaki dress pants or skirts.

For once, I didn't have an internal debate about this prompting.  I just went back and scrounged through piles of clothes (priced at only .25 per item) and found ten pieces of nice clothing for a young girl.

I took them home, washed them, and took them with me yesterday when I went to volunteer at a local clothing pantry.  It was raining yesterday so we let the shoppers come in early.  A harried mom with four young kids in tow hurried over to ask me, "Do you have any school clothes?"  The only ones we had, really, were the ones God prompted me to bring in, so I told her, "a few."

I was working the counter a half hour later when she came through the line with all those items of clothing.  Her eyes sparkled as she gushed, "This is SUCH a blessing.  I didn't know what I was going to do for school."

But God knew.

Meanwhile, on Monday I was discouraged, overwhelmed.  Then I got an email from an Operation Christmas Child fellow-area coordinator in Kansas.  She wrote to ask if she could have her prayer team support our upcoming packing party.  I felt a weight lift from my heavy heart and wrote to tell her how timely her email was.  She didn't know how much I needed her encouragement that day.

But God knew.

My friend said she felt a prompting to contact me.  She said she wished she obeyed all God's promptings that readily.  I wish I did, too

But God knew.