Lesson of the day: keep doing the small good things. Because it’s right, and because you just never know what’ll come of them.
I’m a bit stunned, eyes welling up in fact, because I just found out that a tiny* thing I did 25 years ago – and had forgotten -, while working in a children’s home in El Salvador in 1990, turned into a partnership between two churches that has lasted for more than two decades!
In honor of the work* I was doing at the children’s home run by Iglesia Bautista Emanuel in San Salvador, the church sent a painted wooden cross to Leavesden Road Baptist Church in Watford, UK, from where I had come (and had only spent a very short time before I went travelling). That cross sparked a partnership in the gospel, expressed in the common cause of social justice, between the two churches that has lasted ever since! Kind folks from the UK church tracked me down on the internet six months ago on my blog here but I only just saw it!
I can’t describe the feeling. It’s like a precious, completely humbling, gift of grace. A unexpected and undeserved ‘reward’ for something I can barely claim responsibility for doing.
* ‘tiny’, ‘work’ – two months in a children’s home where I started only with 2 words of Spanish, had no idea how to ‘organize sports’, or deal with 100 children from ages 2-18, or how to process the sound of bombs and bullets, or anything. Felt like a chump almost the whole time but was overwhelmed with love and bewildering generosity from the Salvadoran people. Can’t even begin to say how the experience changed me.
(I nicked the picture from the Leavesden Road Baptist Church facebook page. UPDATE: Very gladly this has been confirmed as the actual cross by Allan Humphris, and Len Holmes, two of the long-time members of the church who tracked me down, and who were visiting El Salvador earlier this year with a delegation from LRBC. How thrilling to realize this is the very same cross.
UPDATE 2: Len just sent me a photo of the back of the cross!
