“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore, be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.  Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me, welcomes the one who sent me.  If anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.” Matt. 10:16   

I believe that God guides me in all that I do ( even though I stray from that guidance sometimes). I also believe that God puts people in my path to help and guide me. At first I resisted this notion, believing that I controlled my own path and that the people that I meet are just by chance or coincidence. But, after encountering so many examples of this, I can’t deny it. For example:

My wife and I have been on over 30 mission trips. With each trip we seem to find challenges, and miraculously we find people to help us in our time of need. We were in Montana past Glacier National Park heading to Libby, Montana. We had an old Church bus full of enthusiastic youth and adults when our bus over heated and broke down.  When we asked in this small town that we broke down in, where we could find help with our bus, they said “you are in luck, we have a school bus garage just two streets over. We limped our bus over to the bus garage and asked if he might have this certain part, and he said that he didn’t but he could order it and it would take about a week to get it. We told him who we were and what we were doing and where we were going and he said, “let me see that part a little more closely.”  We talked for about half an hour to this manager as his mechanic manufactured a new part with the same bends and twists as the old one and replaced it on the engine. When we asked him what we owed him, he said “nothing, just keep doing what you are doing, spreading God’s word”. If we would have broken down 50 miles in either direction from this small town with a bus garage, with a Christian supervisor, we would have been in big trouble. 

The list goes on and on and on. How can all of these things be a coincidence. God has always been there in our times of need. He has put the right people, with the right skills, at the right time, and with the right connections in our path to help us out. These people as the reading says, have given us more than just a cup of cold water, and these people will certainly not lose their reward. We have to also be ready to help people if God puts us in the right place at the right time with the right skills and connections to help others. You may think that it’s just a coincidence, but I say “How Great Is Our God”. Be ready with your cup of cold water for others and accept it from others when you are also in need of that cup. “With God, all things are possible”. But that’s another story.

Prayer: Dear God, Help us to recognize when you have put us into the paths of others, so that we will help others, as others have helped us. Also Lord, continue to guide us in all that we do. Amen.

Tim De Jardin