Morning Thought 1 for Monday February 8^th 2016

Good morning. 2 months ago I was in Romania with Mustard Seed Jersey distributing Christmas shoeboxes.

Virtually all our shoebox distributions for children take place in schools, and this time, one of the schools opened on the Saturday so we could give out the boxes. That particular group of villages were very needy, most families struggled to survive, their most usual source of food was the city rubbish dump.

Later we went to the next village which was even poorer and here we loaded the shoeboxes onto the back of a lorry and walked behind the lorry, following the Romanian social worker’s instructions as we gave a shoebox to each man woman and child.

We went into a number of the homes which were invariably single room dwellings made of mud bricks. Most had a smokey wood-burning stove for cooking and heating. A few lucky ones had electric light. None had indoor plumbing; normally each block of 4 dwellings shared a stand-pipe and they were grateful for that.

It was also bitterly cold in the village and I felt guilty and privileged that after we finished that distribution we left and drove in a warm car to a warm house, with hot water to eat a good meal that had not be collected from the rubbish dump.

Yes it was a challenging day. But maybe the most challenging thing was seeing the gratitude and the joy of people on receiving a shoebox full of things like toothbrushes, soap, socks, etc. There was no grumbling among the villagers, just gratitude.

In the Bible we are often encouraged to be thankful and grateful to God for the good things in our lives. In that village where they had so little materially, I saw people who had a grateful and thankful attitude.

A Prayer for us today: Lord help us all to be grateful and thankful for the good things in our lives.

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