Meeting the needs of others

Debbie and I hadn’t seen each other in many years.  We’ve both had our trials and challenges during that time of not seeing one another. But we reconnected about a year or so ago when I saw her post on the Facebook page of the Christian radio station I love to listen to.  Turned out she’d remembered the station from when she used to work for me many years prior, and when looking for something more uplifting on the air, she turned the dials till she found what she was looking for.

Yesterday, she and her son, Joel, came here to visit. She’d sent me a message via Facebook to find out if I was going to be home and if that was OK. Joel is having to build up his hours of driver learning before going for his license.  So we had a cuppa together and a chat. Joel has become a keen photographer, and as I am also a keen photographer, we shared information.  And then I took them for a walk around our property when Debbie suddenly asked if we had any wood?  Do we?  Graham and I have a lot of it from fallen trees and branches.

We’d had a tree lopper here over 2 weeks before who had levelled and chopped up a dead tree, and also a live tree that was leaning precariously over our garden and left the wood lying on the lawn where they’d chopped it up. Due to our own physical disabilities, and lack of time as we both work full-time, the chopped up wood had been left lying on the lawns for the past couple of weeks and we weren’t sure how much longer it would be before we could find someone who would like the wood and could take it away. It turned out that Debbie and her family were in need of wood for their fireplace as their heater was no longer working but the cost of buying wood for their fireplace meant they couldn’t afford to get very much.  Graham and I were delighted to let Joel and Debbie load the wood from one of the trees into their wagon to take home with them. That’s a relief to us. We don’t have to try and pile it into a corner somewhere and Graham will be able to mow that part of the lawn again now.  Isn’t God good? We (Debbie and I) both had a need and our needs met the need of the other. What a blessing.