Stawberries and Prayer Anyone?

God’s Providence Strawberries and Take It To The Streets: By Jesse Williams (June 1, 2010)

I love to see the impossible things made possible with God which glorifies him- because God’s timing is perfect.

I call it a God incidence but some would call it a coincidence or serendipitous.

The full service project today was a powerful testimony of the Power of God and how He works through his Body of believers. Several connections were made all because our heart is for serving the Lord and our heart is for seeing things how Jesus sees things. A missionary team had planned to come to Charleston from Hebron Baptist Church in Georgia they met with me around February of 2010 and I introduced Take It To The Streets ministry to them at North Bridge Baptist Church (a small Baptist Church) in West Ashley who is passionate about outreach.

So we planned on them coming into town on June 1^st, 2010 and doing a neighborhood revitalization project, but the neighborhood revitalization project leader decided to move to North Carolina two weeks before the date when Hebron Baptist would come in. Well God knows my heart and knew I wanted to provide an organized day for these missionaries and be able to show them the neighborhood. So Fields to Families needed help on that Tuesday they needed volunteers to pick strawberries to give it to the community and they would be starting at 9:30 AM. This was the time we planned on hosting the missionaries from Hebron Baptist.

So I was able to bless Fields To Families because their director was going out of town on that Monday and through God’s power I was able to facilitate the strawberry picking. Myself, Sarah and Sarah’s daughter Addison who is four years old went out representing Take It To The Streets and a big bus and van followed my little red truck to the strawberry farm six miles from Holly Hill, SC. It was cloudy and I prayed it would not rain and it did not for the whole time we picked strawberries. The group had to be downtown at 1:00 pm and we needed boxes to put the strawberries in…I had none when I arrived so I drove to Holly Hill’s Piggly Wiggly grocery store and on that day they had 9 boxes lined with plastic, old banana boxes. So we filled all the boxes by 10:40 AM and decided we would bag up the fruits and take them out to Ranger Drive and to the outreach area. I drove through the rain to North Charleston and again prayed for clear skies so we could bag up the fruits. It did not rain for the whole time we bagged up the strawberries by this time Martha Martin came to help us from Sarah’s house. I’d call this the missions house.

We bagged all the strawberries and filled nine boxes then drove the bus to Mrs. Sheila’s house off of Ranger Drive, who was ready to do yard work because I did not let her know of the change of plans. So we broke up into 8 teams of about 7 people in each team including little Addison who is 4 years old, walking down the street of one of the most crime ridden areas, but blessed by God. We walked for about 15 minutes passing out strawberries and praying with residents, then it began to rain. We passed out about 60 pounds of strawberries and we blessed the whole neighborhood with the joy of Jesus as 60 people strong walked around the neighborhood in the rain, motivated by the love of Jesus. The residents’ hearts were warmed to us and embraced the young missionaries. The chaperon's told us we have done an awesome job, they recognized the soil we had tilled through past efforts of taking the love of Jesus to those streets off of Ranger Drive.

In the end, we went back to Sarah’s house to pray and rejoice in what God had done on this Strawberry picking outreach day. I was even able to take a box to Without Walls Outreach Ministry to bless Pastor Gordon and his team with God’s bountiful harvest of Strawberries. I believe it was a symbolism of God’s divine providence and love for the Take It To The Streets family and for the people of Charleston.