Twenty four Twenty | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Twenty four Twenty | Previous Challenge Entry
By John Esposito
04/14/14
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For those of you who have ever had to fund-raise for anything know that it’s not easy. We have all washed cars, had bake sales and tag sales. We have all sold boxes of candy and sold Christmas trees and wreaths. We have all served breakfast pancakes and spaghetti at pasta dinners. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of work.

Can and bottle drives can add up quickly, but they are dirty and time consuming. Plus when you go to redeem your items there is always an old lady there with her elbows aimed at you ready to cage fight you over a machine. I don’t have time for “cowboy grandmas”. Then there’s all those tropical birds, I can honestly say that I have put more flamingos on more lawns than you have had hot meals.

The cool part about all this of is that no matter how many hours you have put into something or how tired you are of doing the same things over and over again is this. The Lord is with you every step of the way. He is telling us that it’s important for us to keep going, that the time that we share with one another is also important. That the revolving door that keeps pushing you into the lobby of fellowship will someday have you standing upstairs in the Master Suite.

About ten years ago I worked with someone who always said everything was twenty four twenty. So I asked him one day what that meant. He told me that his vision was twenty four twenty and that it’s all good and that he could see everything clearly. I used it a couple of times in youth group because it was fun to say and then we kind of adopted it for a while.

Now that same summer we were fund-raising so we go to Appalachia to bang nails and repair homes for a week. One of our fund-raisers was called “Tell your story day” and we would sit in front of Wal-Mart with our photo books and tell our story. People would stop by our table and ask us what we were doing and if the Spirit so moved them, they would drop a couple of dollars in our collection jar

One year though we we’re about five weeks from our trip and financially it wasn’t looking good. We weren’t even close to having the money we needed to go. Our book keeper kept telling me that this is bad and that I would have to start asking people for more money or tell some of them they couldn’t go. We have had tight years before and the Lord has always provided, but this one was different.

I was being asked to draw a line in the sand and to then step over it. I was being forced to cross a bridge that I couldn’t come back across. I was being asked to do something the human way and not Gods way. I couldn’t do it, and I was running out of time. Everything that I do, I bring it before the Lord first. So before our tell your story day began I went to church that morning and I lit every candle I could find, prayed and cried until I was so exhausted my knees locked and I fell over.

Later that afternoon my oldest son and I were counting the money that we collected from the day and my son yells out “dad look”. He held in his hands ten one hundred dollar bills. Someone that day had dropped a $1000 dollars into our bucket, and that’s not all, it gets better. As I was double checking the cash and checks, my son was counting all the change that we also collected. He looks at me and says “This is cool; the change came to $24.20, that’s what we always say in youth group.”

I then sat down and told my son how that morning I prayed for our trip and asked God for some clarity and to let me know that everything was going to be all right. As long as I did it His way, and He did. It was all good and it was all clear and everything was now twenty four twenty. Always trust and believe in the Lord, have faith and believe in your faith. And never trust and believe what you have just Googled.

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