Monday Minute: Prayers to start the week [5.17.2021]

Today we are praising God for His goodness. For three years, we’ve had a van that needed to get to El Salvador. That’s it in the picture above, along with a young man named Jonatan. Three years is a long time to wait. It’s not biblically long (like wandering through a wilderness for forty years), but, to be fair, we don’t live quite as long as our Old Testament forebears. And, much as we try to be, not all of us are super patient.

But, that’s not important anymore because our beautiful new (to us) van is in El Salvador. So please join us in thanking God for the blessing of this van and for keeping our driver, Jonatan, safe throughout the trip.

This van will be a huge blessing to our ministry in El Salvador. We’ve really needed it for moving big groups. The van we already have works. But, after years of being used as a work van, it’s seen better days. Imagine the frustration of having the ideal vehicle in one country but needing in another country and not having a way to get it there. Add in a global pandemic, closed borders, and whatever else has happened over the last three years, and you get the sense of discouragement we were feeling.

For an added example, we sent a vehicle to El Salvador in 2012, and we’ve only seen it once since then. It’s in a lot somewhere in El Salvador, and, while we do have visitation rights, we can’t get it out. Usually, we forget about that vehicle, but, occasionally, one of use will ask, “Hey, whatever happened to that Isuzu?” Basically, shipping vehicles is a tricky business.

The cool thing about sending this van is that, throughout the whole process, we have gotten to see the small, seemingly insignificant events that led to this blessing. It kind of started with a garage sale. We’d posted about a garage sale we were having here in Texas, and someone from our El Salvador Missionaries group on Facebook was interested in a dining room set we were selling. It turns out that this person’s family has served as missionaries in El Salvador for 50 years, which is a little longer than the dining room set had been in our family.

The dilemma: We had a dining room set in Texas that they wanted in El Salvador. We also had a van that needed to go to El Salvador. I’m sure you see where this is going. What if both things could get to El Salvador in one trip? Two birds, one stone. It turned out that Jonatan, grandson of the missionary couple who wanted the dining room set, had lots of experience making the trip from the US to El Salvador. He’s driven it many times.

So, this is a story of how God used a van we got a good deal on, a Facebook group we happened to join, a garage sale in Texas, and a family in El Salvador we’d never met. All of these little moments and little actions led to this blessing. And, while we haven’t become fans of waiting, we are fans of seeing the things that God does in His time.