All Glory to God!

This past Sunday, I realized that I do not need to travel to a distant country, raise lots of money, or even venture outside my city of LA to experience and be a part of God's mission to draw others to Him!

A couple weeks ago, I received an email from one of the leaders at my Church, inviting me to serve the neighbors around our church site in La Puente by passing out 2013 calendars and inviting them to our Christmas festivities.  At first, I said that I couldn't make it because I wanted to spend time with family (the previous and following Sundays I was scheduled to lead the worship at the college fellowship).

Anyways, the night before they were scheduled to go out to the neighborhood, I awoke at around 2:30 am, and just thought about a bunch of things.  I couldn't fall asleep for another 2 hours, so you could imagine how much I was putting calendar reminders and events in my phone!  One of the things I thought about was the service opportunity the next day.  I wouldn't have any transportation home unless I went to the college fellowship afterwards (and thus arriving late), asked someone who was guna be passing out calendars, OR if John (my brother) was willing to go too.  I put it in my to-do list to ask him about it, and went to sleep.

When I awoke later that morning, I forwarded John the email and asked him if he would be interested in doing it later that afternoon.  When he woke up, he replied and said he would be, if Dad didn't have anything planned for the rest of the afternoon.  Besides finding out that we were visiting Lake Avenue Church again, there wasn't anything planned.  On the way to Lake Avenue Church, I called the leader who was facilitating the service, and she was glad I called because she was going to postpone the service since no one had confirmed for that afternoon.

Fast forward a couple hours, the three of us are sitting down eating some Lee's Sandwiches and discussing what the plan for the afternoon would be, when a young married couple walks in asking about where the calendar-distributing service was.  After talking a bit more, we prayed and prepared to go out to meet our neighbors and offer them the 2013 calendar, as well as invite them to our Christmas services.

As we went out and offered the families and residents the calendar, Christmas program fliers, and prayer, we all experienced God's grace!  Despite a bit of nervousness, all our interactions were very smooth, warm, and exciting!  Surprisingly, so many of the families accepted our offer to pray for them.  Overall, we all had a WONDERFUL experience.

Afterwards, me and John found out that the young married couple would not have come if they had not seen Pastor Kyle after the second service.  Their story went a little like this...

The wife woke up early the morning before startled by something, and couldn't fall back asleep for a while.  They had planned to attend the first service at 8am to have the rest of the afternoon for a company picnic and a potential job position for the husband.  However, in the morning, the wife was still sleepy from her late night fright.  They decided to go to the later 11am service, and ran into Pastor Kyle after the service on their way to receive prayer.  That's where he told them about the opportunity to serve & pass out calendars/pray for the neighbors.

This domino effect was pretty cool to see how God orchestrated this event...SOLI. DEO. GLORIA. :)