Found Cargo, Worry and added grace

This past Wednesday I attended a local womans bible study. We were looking at the life of Esther and specifically worry and the way it can be used to manipulate us into fear instead of trust in God. After arriving home with verses still fresh in my head from the study I got word that four large luggage containers of our supplies that had gone  on ahead in a cargo plane were not in Melut but were missing. I quickly inventoried the items and realized it was 117 kilos worth of goods. These kilos contained our home school books for the year, all of Daniel’s diapers, our knives from our wedding and various other sentimental things in addition to items that we could re-purchase here. The next day and a half my gut response was to worry about the luggage but it was no coincidence that I had just come from a place where the Lord had given me scripture to pray through. It really was beautiful to put into practice what I had studied. Don’t get me wrong I thought about the luggage alot over the past few days and prayed fervently they would be found, and developed a plan for what to do if they could not be located but I didn’t find myself worrying about it. What grace that was! And the grace continues…

     On Friday morning we received word the luggage had been located (yea!) all 117 kilos if it. It was in a small airport in Loki. We decided (with the logistics team…I cannot sing their praises enough) that the best way to get it into country was to save room on our charted plane for it which means that the amount we were allotted to carry in with us would decrease by 117 kilos. Our charter was flying through Loki so it would be a relatively simple pick-up. This plan was do-able for us but meant not taking in anything that wasn’t what we considered “priority one”. We had thought when we charted the plane we would have room to bring in some things to make life a bit more “comfortable” along with some additional home school supplies so we wouldn’t need to bring them in and take up weight later.

I need to stop and explain here that each plane can only safely carry so much weight. This includes everything from “carry-ons” to body weight. You don’t want to be overweight or it puts you in danger so weight is everything! We walked into the storage locker to weigh each of us and realized that we had almost exactly UNDERESTIMATED our body weight by 117 kilos. This meant not only had our luggage been located and we could bring it in with us but that the extra 117 kilos did not take away from our projected weight at all. This is not just grace but added grace.

We could have lived without a table to place our buckets on when we wash dishes, we could have made due without diapers, knives, or even home school books. Extra peanut butter and coffee could have been taken off the manifest and we would have been fine but God allowed us the gift of bringing these things in with us. It is a gift we hope to not take for granted. Like the Israelites who placed stones in the river as a testimony to what God has done we are writing this post as a testimony to a God who lavishes grace, upon grace to us. This is the God that takes our worries and fears and comforts us with Himself. A God who is bigger then our plans and expectations. A God who holds cargo in Loki and makes a way for it to get to Melut. We pray we will not take these measures of grace for granted and that we will use this as a reminder to not hold our possessions or plans too tightly but instead cling to God himself