"Daddy, you said..."

When we moved to Jacksonville, our four children ranged in ages from elementary school kids to babies in diapers.  And, as a young family, we were always on the lookout for cheap (free?) family-friendly activities for weekend adventures. Hello, Atlantic Ocean.

It was an easy 20 minutes from our house on the Southside to the beach. So, we often enjoyed Saturday morning trips to the beach. These jaunts usually included a picnic, sand castles, and splashing in the tidal pools. Collecting seashells was always an optional activity.

One week, after planning a Saturday morning beach trip, we had to cancel our plans on the morning of the proposed journey to the shore. As I recall it, the weather was rainy and windy, not exactly kid-friendly conditions.

Obviously, our kids were disappointed – they had been looking forward to the promise of making sand castles and running through water. But, we had no choice but to cancel.

As we sat at the kitchen table that morning to break the sad news, I made the paternal pronouncement, “Kids, we can’t go to the beach today.”

Silence. Then our 7 year old looked up at me, with wide eyes and a scrunched up brow, and said, “But daddy, you said.”

Going to Church

Does God really care about your address? Does he really have a preference for where you live?  Or does he have more important things to worry about in running the universe than your zip code or house number? 

Here’s a story that demonstrates how God arranged the address of a church building and an apartment complex, just to help a refugee family find a new life.

The church is Main Street Baptist, and the apartment is University Gardens; they’re one mile apart, easy walking distance for the Rafutos.

The Rafutos left everything they had known as “home” to escape the violence of civil war in their homeland of the Congo. They were given a temporary home in a refugee camp in neighboring Tanzania. And after 17 years of living in that camp, they resettled in the U.S. through the work of World Relief. 

While living in the refugee camp, they joined a mission church, and found friends in a worshipping community in the midst of an uncertain future and a dangerous lifestyle.