Provision…

Youth With a Mission (YWAM) has a long history of being plagued with goofy acrostics with which we poke fun at ourselves. There is of course, ‘Youth With a Marriage’, or ‘Youth With a Meeting’, but my absolute all time favorite is ‘Youth Without Any Money’. As most of you know YWAM is the worlds largest missions organization and unlike many other similar groups YWAM does not finance or support their missionaries. As such, missionaries usually are supported by the local or global churches in which they are affiliated. This allows the mission to be versatile, decentralized, and quick to multiply and pioneer. You may be wondering what this has to do with anything, but it will become apparent in a minute. As many of you know, I am currently working with a teaching ministry called Titus Project and am leaving for a teaching outreach in Ukraine next week. Although God-Orchestrated, all of this was very last minute and raising support with such short notice was a daunting task. God has a great sense of humor. I currently hold all of my finances, roughly three thousand U.S. dollars, only a week and a half after the word to go. And the majority of this came from a most unexpected source. Lets backtrack to thursday the 8th of October. This was almost our final day of training and most of the teams were leaving early saturday morning.  Between the twenty of us, we were short eight thousand dollars. I was short fifteen hundred dollars. God’s unexpected provision started in a peculiar place. We took an offering within our class, of poor missionaries, and raised nearly three thousand dollars. That same day, though unknown to us, the School of Biblical Studies took up an offering of around seven hundred and fifty dollars. Later that evening Titus Project ran the weekly community meeting. After worship, notifying the base about our outreach locations, and promoting Titus Project, Ron Smith took up an offering for us which came to three thousand nine hundred dollars. All this coupled with a few late donations from supporters equalled exactly eight thousand dollars. So God provided for this outreach from, in my opinion, the least likely location. People I had only met days before were the largest contributors to making this trip possible. Youth Without Any Money, indeed.