During my childhood, I was a Boy Scout for several years. It was drilled into me—and it is still with me—that I was to turn a good deed every day. That means do something good for someone every day. Right? We should seek opportunities!
So in discipling our five-year old son, I said, “Zachariah, here’s the deal. I’m going to challenge us. You and I are going to look for an opportunity to do something good for somebody else.” He said, “Okay, Dad.”
As some of you know, my wife and I own a small business. A little bit later that morning we received a call from someone whose carpet had been cleaned by our company, and they thought that our technician had damaged their carpet. There was a big puddle of water in their living room, and they called us to come and take a look at it. They’re regular customers, and they weren’t coming across as angry, just concerned. So I said, “Hey, let’s go over and look at it.” Vickie and I went to check it out and said, “This is not our doing. There’s no way; you have a lot of water here. It appears that you have a serious problem. This wasn’t just a little bit of water leaking from a hose. You still have water coming in here.”
We were walking on the carpet, and this was not water that had come in from the top; it was coming up from the bottom. So we began to scrutinize the situation and pull the carpet up. The padding was drenched, and there was about an inch of water on the living room floor. I said, “You know, you really need to get this water up, and we can help you, but I assure you this didn’t just happen ten days ago. This is an accumulation. You’re going to have a structural issue and a major problem here if this isn’t dealt with, not to mention mold and/or mildew. She said, “Well, can you get someone over here to get the water up?” I said, “We can! But we normally charge for that.”
So she asked, “Well, what do you charge to have somebody come over and do an emergency extraction,” and I’m thinking, ‘Ca-ching, Ca-ching, Ca-ching.’ I love the word, “emergency”; I’m just being honest. That’s the business side. I said, “Well, normally we would charge “x” amount of dollars, and my wife looks at me and interjects, “However, just this morning we were talking about charitable deeds, weren’t we, honey?” I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “And wouldn’t this be a great opportunity for us to do a charitable deed? How about we get somebody over here and take care of this situation at no cost?” And I said, “Okay, okay, how about we do that? We’ll call the technician and see if she can be there in about fifteen minutes and extract all this water.” We thought this was great; we were able to do a charitable deed!
We said, “Ma’am, this is not going to cost you a dime. We’re going to pay for the gas; we’ll pay the technician.” She was like, “Oh man, you guys are such a blessing, thank you, thank you.” We said, “You know, it was kind of coincidental that we were teaching our little boy about charitable deeds, and we even prayed for an opportunity to do one today. It looks like you are God’s answer to our prayer.”
As it turned out, she got on the phone with her insurance company and said, “I have water damage, etc.” What started off as a charitable deed had now turned into a profitable situation for our company. Now, I’m only sharing that to make a point, not to boast. All we wanted to do was a charitable deed, and God turned that whole thing around. It was as though He said, “Because you sought to do something good by committing yourself to meeting the needs of others, I am committed to meeting your needs.”
How many of you believe in sowing and reaping? Do you believe in that principle? Here’s the point: we need to be committed to meeting the needs of other people. When we commit to meeting the needs of others, God demonstrates His commitment towards us by meeting our needs, and much of the time, He’ll go way over and above our expectations in doing it.
~ pg
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