Virginia
Virginia has served on our team for several years, and for 2020, joined our core planning team. As part of our activities when serving, we will often “prayer walk” (walk and pray for the neighborhood) while we’re working on our respective houses. In 2019, her group worked at a house whose neighborhood included a man that was familiar with similar volunteer crews…
Mr. Joshua
On our second day of working at Mr. Sam’s house, Mark (our site supervisor) told us we were going to eat our lunch at Mr. Joshua’s house. We grabbed our sack lunches and walked up the street to this house that had the garage door open. Sitting there in this empty garage on a folding chair was a gentleman smiling as we approached him. We were introduced to Mr. Joshua.
A previous ReachGlobal team met Mr. Joshua on a prayer walk. Since then, most teams that have worked at Mr. Sam’s house have walked over to his house to visit with him during lunch. Mr. Joshua said he looks out his bedroom window watching for the green ReachGlobal shirts or listens for the sound of the chop saw and then will go down to his garage and waits for the team to come over to his house at lunch.
We all grabbed a folding chair and sat in his driveway as this 77 year old man shared stories of his life. In the midst of heartbreak, grief, joy, struggles, hardship and discrimination, Mr. Joshua stands firm in the fact that God has been and will always be with him. One of the things he said that really convicted me was that he would not change anything in his life, especially the bad stuff because it was all used by God to make him who he was. I so often wish the bad stuff never happened and forget that God is using these things to help me in the sanctification process. I need to stand firm in who He is, a sovereign loving God and remember Is. 55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Mr. Joshua loves sharing with others about God and he especially loves to talk to all the ReachGlobal teams. We took a picture with him and printed a copy for him. He asked for all our phone numbers so he could call us the following week to make sure we got home safely. True to his word, he called each one of us to make sure we arrived home without incident. It was so nice to get a call from him and to talk with him again.
It was a blessing to meet someone who loves God and genuinely cares for others which reflects the joy in his life.