Let Thanksgiving Be Our Dialect

Patience, humility, thankfulness, recognizing my weaknesses and His strength, surrendering inadequacies and trusting His exceeding proficiency. Lots and lots of lessons to learn.

I am an impatient dreamer. A visionary who lacks mundane faithfulness. I have a complete inability to remain in encouraged thanksgiving amidst the pragmatics of a daunting situation.

Working with the kids at McIlvain fills me with so much joy every week. I love being around them. But it has been hard to write about them each week, because even though I care about them, the whole program is rather chaotic. Our partnership with this afterschool program hasn’t been what we expected, and our efforts have seemed so inefficient. Sure, we were helping; but it has been so small. I couldn’t help but think, who wants to read about our small, seemingly insignificant efforts? Won’t it just be repetitive? It is an annoyance, really, to send the same thing out every week. So I stopped. But today two things happened.

The first was that when we arrived, the kids rushed with hugs, as usual. But amidst the noise little Antoine came over and simply said, “Can you read with me?”  Antoine! The boy who never wants to do homework, or anything even remotely academic. Antoine, who for the first time read with me last week, and now is asking me to read with him! Asking as soon as I arrive!

It caused me to stop and see that others were getting their homework out on their own and sitting next to us asking for help when needed. Others were getting out the books I brought and were reading them. Pulling out the flash cards I had brought and were excitedly competing with each other to solve the addition and multiplication problems before the other. So much had changed in these few months.

It was still loud.  There were still kids whose teeth had to be pulled to get them to take out their homework and actually work on it. There were still tons of things that could have been done better; but there were also a lot of really great things that were happening.

The second thing to happen was the Bible study. The message hit on a lot of things, but throughout there was this call to thanksgiving. The need to let thanksgiving be our dialect. To praise Him with thanksgiving continuously. “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.”

It might be one of those, you had to be there, for it to make sense, but throughout the message I kept thinking, I’ve lost my thanksgiving for this ministry. I don’t doubt that my love for the children continued, but my faith in His work there did. Somewhere along the way I stopped relying on Him, and began looking at our efforts from my perspective. I began relying on my competency. But seeing the dire situation for a better program for the children, I let myself become discouraged by my own inadequacy. The best I could do wasn’t good enough, so none of it was.

There’s this quote by Mark Batterson that I love, “go after a God-sized dream that is destined to fail without DIVINE INTERVENTION.” Going into this, I knew that my efforts would never come to fruition without Him. I knew that I was utterly inadequate to take on any aspect of improving the Philadelphia public education system, but that He was more than enough, to do more than I could imagine. I knew I would have to go into this with complete dependency on Him, and yet somewhere along the way I stopped. His timing, the situation, everything caused doubt, and I starting relying on myself instead. God is teaching me, He’s using this to show me so much. But what is even more unbelievable, He’s still using me.  What He is able to use to accomplish what only He could still astounds me.  And there is thanksgiving for Him, and gratitude that against all odds, He still wants to use me here.

I guess this post is more an explanation of my absence in updates, than an update.  But if you want to know how the program is doing, all I can say is God is at work in these children’s lives. He’s using inadequate us and working through us even when we let our own efforts get in the way.  He is present and I am thankful!

But continue to pray for us all. Pray for each of the students, that they would see His love and that it would transform their lives. Pray for their parents, teachers, the staff as McIlvain, and all the adults that affect their lives. And pray for us. Pray for a humble thanksgiving to grow in our broken, limited lives, that we would obediently and joyfully let God use us as He wills, and not let our own flaws form a resistance to His will and His timing.

I hope I can do a better job of keeping you all updated on what God is doing here in Frankford. But thank you for your steadfast prayers.