Pick Up Truck of Pillows

Today was another great day...absolutely wonderful!!  My group got up this morning and we went to work at the Los Angeles Mission in downtown.  This is a mission that is right on Skid Row.  Today we were sorting through donations at the LA Mission and we had box after box of extremely nice throw pillows and designer fabrics and curtains and sheets...like full sets of sheets..with the fitted sheet and top sheet and two pillows cases...and blankets.  All that we were keeping for the LA Mission was the blankets.  We were supposed to throw all the other stuff away....yeah throw it away.  And as my group was going through all the donations..we just could not throw all this really nice fabrics and pillows and sheets away knowing there were so many people that would love these things.  So we decided to pray about what we could do with all of this stuff...and after we got done praying..i said.."hey guys, we are on Skid Row...why don't we just pass it all out."  So we loaded all the pillows into the back of our pick up truck.  The kids were shoving pillows where ever they could fit and the truck was FULL of pillows.  Then we separated all the sheets out so that we had made all the nice sets and filled a huge box and put it in the back of the suburban and then filled another box of curtains and nice fabrics and put that in the suburban.  So we all loaded into the cars and drove down San Julian...a street heavily populated with homeless people.  We pulled over on the side of the road and park and got out.  We were in front of a small park...the park has large iron fences surrounding it and people sitting inside the fence...filling the park...people outside on the streets...filling the sidewalk.  We opened up the back of the people and people flooded to our car.  The kids were handing out pillows left and right and people were so excited to have a nice new pillow.  People were yelling to us from inside the park fence and so i started throwing pillows over the tall fences to the people.  They were so grateful for the pillows.  Seriously in no less than five minutes our truck full of pillows was all gone.  We went from almost throwing these pillows away and not using them at all...to handing out a truck full of pillows to many people.  God is so Good!

So after that we moved on to our afternoon kids site and took out our boxes of sheets and fabric and set them out in front of the Salvation Army Red Shield.  The Salvation Army Red Shield is a community center and after school type program for kids and families.  We thought the women dropping off their kids might like these new sheets and nice fabrics.  If it has been hard to make ends meet in there family a blessing of beautiful bedding would be wonderful...and we were very right.  God had directed our thinking well and these women could not be more happy to get to pick out new bedding for their housing and for the kids and pick out beautiful fabric that they could make curtains out of..or table cloths..or couch covers...the ideas were flowing.  Within 15 minutes in front of Red Shield our two over sized boxes were depleted and many people's spirits filled.

I learned a great lesson today about being obedient to God's Spirit.  I know that God had a plan for all those fabrics and blankets and pillows all along but he just needed people to listen and obey.  I was so proud of my group for taking time to ask God what was His plan here and not just fulfill a task of seperated out blankets and thats all.  

What a joy to bless so many people today with needed gifts!!