You will never know the positive and profound influence you can have on a child’s life just by an act of kindness or a right word spoken at the right time – let me tell you a story to prove my point.
Video Transcript
And welcome back to Daily Bible promises with a Twist. And as always, we’re going to start off by reading a Bible verse from these cards. And today’s verse is Psalm 23 verse 6. “Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”
Today I’m going to go off script. I’m going to be sharing a little bit of my personal testimony, and why this verse is so meaningful to me. You see, this verse was given to me when I was 10 years old and I was in the hospital and I was there for several weeks.
Every Wednesday night, Two ladies from a local Baptist church would come to the hospital and offer Wednesday night Sunday school classes. To me, it was intriguing because the denomination I belonged to, we didn’t have Sunday school because we had religious education every day of the school year. And it was Wednesday night. So, why were they calling at Sunday school? And so I went for a couple of weeks.
And during those two weeks, these ladies loved me and I loved being in that Sunday school. We played games and we coloured, but they also taught us Bible songs and I remember them teaching us a very old chorus, now that I found out goes way, way back, but it was based on Psalm 23 verse 6. I only attended that class for two weeks. And to be frank, I totally forgot about that class and about these ladies for many, many years.
I grew up in quite a traumatic environment and there are many years of my life that are either completely forgotten, or there’s a lot of holes in my memory about those years. And these two ladies and the Sunday school classes they taught fell into one of those holes until I was around 30 years old when I asked the Lord a question. “How come I was the only one out of all my brothers and my sister that did not get into trouble with the law, didn’t get involved with drugs, didn’t get involved with drinking heavily, and didn’t hang out with the wrong crowd?” It just didn’t make sense to me because we grew up in exactly the same environment.
And when I asked Him that question, I remembered that in my teen years, I would be walking into potentially dangerous situations and something inside of me would warn me to get out of there. That same feeling, that same urgency, would well up inside of me when my friends would introduce me to their friends, and that same sense went overwhelm me. Don’t allow those people into your life, there’s trouble there. As I was processing that truth, because I remembered those circumstances, the Holy Spirit whispered to me. “I was speaking to you during those years.”
All of the sudden, those long buried memories of those two sweet Baptist ladies rushed back and I now know that those two ladies must have led me to the Lord at that point. The Holy Spirit kept His bargain. Jesus was my Saviour, and God the Father was my Protector. Even though I didn’t even have a clue that they were guiding and protecting me, no matter that they even knew what my name was, they knew me and they kept their side of the bargain.
I want to give a shout out to all of you Sunday School teachers, Vacation Bible School volunteers, outreach workers and youth workers. You have no idea the profound impact you are having in the lives of children and teenagers who might just cross your path for a couple of hours in their whole lifetime. But you have planted seeds in their heart that the Lord will be faithful to water, and he will bring that harvest in due season.
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt and I will never forget this verse. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in his house forever.”
You can read more about this snippet of my life and 89 other short devotions and reflections in the first of my three published devotionals. “Seasons” is available at a greatly reduced price in Kindle format and it’s also available in paperback.
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©2018 Katherine Walden
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