I have to admit, I have gotten away from listening and hearing from God. There are so many counterfeits in the world that you really do have to learn to be discerning to hear clearly from God. But God really does speak to us. We need to pay attention to what He wants to say to us.
One such time happened to me not to long ago. I am planning to put together (organize) an evangelism booth for our church, which is sponsoring an Arts & Crafts Festival on November 16th. I have a very creative mind and can go a lot of different ways with this. When I was first asked to do this, my first thought was to do what we did three years ago, when I did an evangelism booth back then.
Let me go back a little bit further. I always thought it would be fun to do an evangelism booth, but there was no way I could do one. I had some ideas, and our evangelism leader had the opportunity to do one at a fall festival our church was doing many years ago. Our evangelism leader moved away, and there really were no more events going on that would provide an opportunity for us to have an evangelism booth. But I really wanted to do one. It was on my heart, so to speak.
Three years ago, our church put on a fall festival. I got this bright idea to ask if I could do this 'evangelism booth'. Not realizing the expense that was involved, I made a lot of plans and had a lot of ideas, and God provided the money to put it all together! We had shirts made up. I got many to volunteer to work at this booth, which was amazing to me because anytime I have ever tried to do anything that involves people volunteering to help, I get a very low response. But this time, almost everyone I asked, eagerly responded to the invitation. It provided those in our church to branch out and share the Gospel with the visitors to the booth. Our booth really became a hit. People were flocking to it. Lots of conversations came about and the Gospel was presented to many that day.
Fast forward. A woman in our church is planning on doing an Arts & Crafts Festival. The money from the table rentals will go to the church and the ministries that it sponsors. When we were at a planning meeting for this festival, our financial director asked me if we could do this booth again, to which I didn't hesitate to say 'yes'. In my mind I was thinking we could use all the leftover material from the last evangelism booth event and just go from there. But as I was thinking about the plans, something in my mind was sensing that this time, the evangelism booth would not be the same theme as the last one. The last theme for the evangelism booth was 'Do you have eyes to see with?'. The point was that a person has to be born again in order to 'see' the kingdom of God. We had optical illusions, T-shirts, a carnival mirror, and a host of other things that worked with the theme. Why couldn't I just use the same theme? Maybe God was doing something different this time, maybe something fresh. So, I am open to what He wants, not whatever is convenient and cheap for me.
I came up with the theme as I was ordering helium balloons. I had thought of helium balloons about a week before I made this order. When I decided I would look into helium balloons, the prices for imprinted ones was kind of high. The lowest quantity you could order was 1,000. I really don't need 1,000 helium balloons, but even more than that, $230 is kind of steep for balloons. Let me think about this more.
Along with trying to decide about the balloons, I would have to come up with something to imprint on them. What could I put? I know, I will put Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. Or maybe I could put, 'God is uncreated. He never had a beginning and has always been in existence.' That probably would be too many letters. I was also looking for cheaper helium balloons that I could have imprinted. Finally, in my email box, I received a notice of items available for imprinting that were on sale. I get a couple of these notices every day. I always like to see what is going on sale, and if I had money, I would go to the recommended web page and try to order. Well, I opened up this email and it said that the offer was for helium balloons! I went to the web page (you have to go quickly because the offer is offered to a small amount of people only, for a very short time. First come, first serve.). When I clicked onto the following page, I made it in time! Now I would have to come up with something to imprint. Maybe the BIBLE thing? An idea quickly came to mind. It was this; Jesus is the Lamb of God. I found a picture of a lamb on the internet and put the words with it and sent the order in. It all took about 5 minutes.
Now I am going with this theme. I made a slide-show up the other day on Jesus being the Lamb of God in the Old Testament and New Testament. I finally got the slide-show to work on my I-Pad today, so that will be great too.
As we were having our planning meeting this afternoon, one of the volunteers created a tract, so I let her bring it and explain it. I had no idea what it was going to be on, but as she explained it to me, she is going to use this homemade tract to explain Jesus being the Lamb of God, as shown in the Old Testament and New Testament. Wow, could that be coincidence? Her mind was blown when she saw the imprinted balloon. No coincidence at all! God is orchestrating all our activities as we commit ourselves to Him.
Last thing is that I decided we needed a backdrop for the tent. We used an evolutionary one that looked kind of strange, the last time we did this. But now, we have a different theme. So, I decided to look for shower curtains to use as a backdrop. Through doing extensive searching, I found one place that sells shower curtains with pictures of lambs on the curtains. They were quite expensive, but there was a discount available until midnight (Got on the Columbus Day weekend sale!). So, now I ordered the curtain and will use that as a backdrop.
It is amazing to see how everything is falling into place for this. God is working all the plans and difficulties out for us. And we are grateful for His allowing us to do this.
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