Doing good.

I was the worship leader at New Life church; a church for the street, the drug addict, the felon and the beggar.  One day, I got a call.  My sound guy had overdosed on heroin and he was dead.  He had been clean for over a year and he was growing in his faith, but something happened.  He simply relapsed taking the same amount of heroin he did when he quit.  It killed him.  I had been serving for about six months and this would be my first funeral from an overdose.  A young man no more 30 years old.  I played at the funeral, I looked at his mother, eyes red, stunned with grief as she said goodbye to her son.  She would not see him again.

Don’t grow weary from doing good.

I have seen poverty.  I have met the children who suffer.  I have smelled the decaying garbage and the human waste from the dwellings of the slums.  I have seen the difference Compassion International makes.  I see what a simple offering can do in the life of a child.  I have returned home only to come across those who don’t care.

Don’t grow weary from doing good.

I have friends that have poured their lives into pastoral ministry.  They take less in their salary to serve others, they take on the challenge of working with people; people who conflict over matters of carpet, and worship styles and parents who complain that the youth pastor is allowing trouble-makers in their youth group.  They deal with volunteers with control issues and they counsel couples with infidelity.

Don’t grow weary from doing good.

Isabel spends 10 -15 hours a week pouring energy into sorting shoes, counting shoes, and answering emails.  She cares deeply about the ministry and she touches every single pair of shoes.

Last weekend, a few guys from the church moved the shoes out of the church storage pod because they needed the pod for some missionaries. A wonderful person from the church had put the shoes into a van and held them there for the week, then helped us transport the shoes to our new storage unit on Saturday (thanks to a donation we received).  However, somewhere along the way, a box of shoes went missing.  We went searching for the box, searched the church and asked those who cleaned out the storage unit.  We were missing a small box of shoes that had been put aside for Leadership Development Students with Compassion; 30 pair of dress shoes given to us by a church. Finally, someone told us what happened.  They said something that my daughter was not prepared to hear.  It would make my stomach sick.

“Someone thought they were garbage and threw them away,” a man said.

I looked at Isabel and I saw something in her face that broke my heart; her hard work, her time, her passion now in the garbage.

I wanted to get mad but at who?  I wanted to chase down someone and blame them…but for what?  It was a mistake…someone did not know those used shoes had a purpose.

Do you feel our pain?

It took several hours yesterday to come to grips with a mistake … an innocent mistake of some pour soul who cleaned out the storage pod for missionaries.

So I took Isabel out yesterday afternoon.  We actually went to Walmart and bought several pairs of shoes for shoesforkids.  We had fun picking out the styles and finding a deal.

I said to Isabel…

Don’t grow weary from doing good.

Galatians 6:9 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.