Confidence in God

I have been with CSC for more than 25 years now and I have seen God meet the needs of our ministry in so many ways. Some have been routine and some have been quite miraculous. Some have been in ways that we wanted or expected and some were met in much different ways than we could have imagined. Some met the needs of the whole ministry, others met the needs of groups of kids, and countless have met the needs of an individual child. If we gathered our whole staff around and reminisced about the way God has provided for CSC through the years, we'd have a many-volume set if we put it to paper. The dozens and dozens of visitors we have each year would be enthusiastic witnesses to it all and maybe could add a few volumes of their own.

But to have that many needs met and to have been blessed in so many ways means that there originally had to be several hundred thousand or more needs over the past thirty years that needed to be met in the first place. Where would we have been without God?

Now as I sit and write this, my head is beginning to spin. I can think of need after need after need God has met with a blessing in some way. I think of one need God has met and 20 more come to mind. I wonder if we take it for granted sometimes or if we also have an extraordinary amount of confidence that God will continue to provide. I think of the hundreds of children who have come through our doors, eaten at our tables, slept in our homes, called our homes home, been taught in our school, gotten hugs from our staff, discovered they are important, been taken to our doctors, had their first birthday party, kicked a ball on our playground, worshiped with us in church, called our God Father, learned what Christmas and Easter are really about, and left out those same doors with a family. The number of times that God has met the needs of even just one child who has experience all that and so much more, and blessed the ministry of CSC to make all of that possible for just that one child, makes my head spin even more.

The needs of CSC are very significant working in a country where there is poverty beyond description, a great chasm of spiritual and ethical depravity, and thousands of children who pay the price and face terrible neglect, abuse, abandonment, and homelessness each day. Our confidence comes in the fact that God is infinitely greater than all of those needs.

During the past few months the donations to CSC have been down very significantly, resulting in less money coming to Cebu for our operations than we need and have budgeted. The global economic crisis has affected so many people and surely many of CSC's donors are among them. This causes us to worry and be concerned when we consider how many children are counting on us. We wonder if things could possibly get even worse before they hopefully get better.

We need to keep our confidence in God that He knows all of our needs and that He will provide according to His will. He has blessed us so much in the past three decades. If we remain faithful I think we can expect God to do even greater things as we look ahead!