I need to ask forgiveness...for a small vision. As a leader for NorthPointe it is my responsibility to have a big vision. Let me explain. Last week as I was preparing for a sermon on serving it occurred to me that by just asking people at NorthPointe to give money we may be missing an opportunity for spiritual growth. I felt that we needed to go ahead and ask people to collect food and other supplies to send down to Haiti. Sure, it's much more difficult than just sending money. It involves more energy, it's a logistical nightmare, and it's expensive...but the real question is one of value. Is it worth it? I say yes!
Here is where the forgiveness part comes in. My goal was just to have our own people make the collection and bring it in on Sundays and during the week by dropping donations by the office. It's a good thing the rest of our staff thinks outside the walls. At the end of last week our host, CinemaWorld, expressed interested in co-sponsoring this project with us. The project was nameless at that time. By late Monday Starbucks in Lincoln, enthusiastically jumped on board as a local drop off point. By the end of the day today, Stop and Shop, a large grocery store in the Lincoln Mall, and two local fire departments, Albion and Manville, have joined us as drop off points in our community.
The big question was still out there. How would we deliver these supplies to Haiti? I decided that if we began collecting that God would figure that one out and reveal it to me when He thought I needed to know. Thankfully, the piece of the puzzle was provided today in the form of Lifeline Christian Mission. There are still some details to work out, but it looks like we will be able to connect with their ongoing efforts to establish churches as regional drop off points. Now more chruches throughout New England have increased accessibility to this project.
By the way, our project is called Help Haiti. You can check it out on our website.
We talked about this project tonight in our community group. Our text was Matthew 14.13-33. Too quickly the disciples were willing to send the crowd back to the villages to find food, when Jesus calls them to feed the crowd. He takes five loaves and two fish from his 12 disciples and feeds over 5000 people. We can't lose sight that this is a outrageously disproportionate number. There is no way the disciples could have relied on their own ingenuity or creativity to pull of this miracle.
Helping Haiti is way out of our league. Will we pass this responsibility off to someone else because the job is just too big? What can we do? I am not sure what God will do with a three month old church in the smallest state. I do know that we have a choice to make. Will we serve the cause of Christ and trust him to multiply the bread by multiplying us?
A great scene is the 12 guys holding baskets full of leftover bread and looking at Jesus differently. I wonder if in a few weeks from now we, just like the disciples, are knee deep in supplies asking ourselves, "what just happened here?"
Jerry
