What would you do if someone handed you $600 and said, “No strings attached. Use it wherever you need it.”?

That exact thing happened to me two weeks ago. 

Actually, she didn’t hand ME the money, per se. She gave it to me as the leader of our intrepid little band of mission trip do-gooders preparing for our trip to Guatemala. It was money she had tried to give to another church member who provided her with some timely nursing assistance. That woman refused the money and said, “Give it to the folks going to Guatemala.”

Hmmm. What to spend this sudden windfall on… 

Our team had done fundraisers and reached into our own personal stashes weeks and weeks ago. Every expense we anticipated had already been covered. Sure, we could just hand it over to the non-profit director and say, “Do something good with this!” But maybe God had something specific in mind.

Time for a little prayer. “God,” I said, “Show us what you have in mind for this money.”

Two days after receiving this gift, I got a text from the Guatemalan-based project director. He said, “This may be a total long shot, but I thought I would reach out to your team just in case. We just found out about a 22-year-old woman here who has a very serious kidney failure condition. She has been approved for a kidney transplant and a donor – her brother – has been located. The problem is, she needs to take a very specialized anti-rejection medication twice a day for three months. Our staff has searched all over Guatemala, Mexico, and Central America and cannot find this medication anywhere at all. Is there any way your team might be able to help with this?”

Thanks, God! Question answered!

I reached out to one of the medical providers on the team and explained the situation to her. In true “can do” spirit, she said, “Let me check.” She called me back a couple of hours later and said, “I found about ¼ the amount we need here at the WalMart Pharmacy in Fort Collins for $800. The problem is, I can only get it at that price if I buy it with a GoodRX card. I don’t have a Good RX card and it will take four weeks to get one. Otherwise, the price of this medication off the shelf is $8,000 for the whole three months’ worth.”

End of the road, right? Maybe not. God clearly had something in mind here. Just maybe not at the Fort Collins WalMart. 

It was a long shot, but I thought, “What the heck?” and called a second doctor on the team. I considered this call a long shot because the second doctor lives in Smith Center, Kansas. Smith Center – for the two or three of you not familiar with it – is in north central Kansas at the intersection of state highways 36 and 281. The population of Smith Center was 1,571 at the 2020 census. It is truly a small, Kansas town in the middle of nowhere. 

What are the odds. Right?

I posed the question to Dr. Joe, who also said, “Let me check.” In two hours, he called back and said, “Yep. I found the drug, all 180 pills, at the Smith Center pharmacy.”

I was stunned. Way to go, God! 

But then I dropped the other shoe. “Joe that’s great. But I know this medication is really expensive and I only have $600 to pay for it.”

Once again Dr. Joe said, “Let me check.” He went on to explain that he had done a lot of business with this pharmacy over the years and might be able to convince them to sell it to him at their cost. Another two hours passed and then I got the call I had been waiting for. It was Dr. Joe on the line telling me, “OK. They are going to give it to me at their cost. All 180 pills for $387.”

HALLELUJAH!

We still had to figure out how to carry the medication through customs and get it into Octavia’s* hands, but after what we had already been through, that seemed like a minor hurdle.

On Tuesday morning of our week in Guatemala, Octavia*, her mother, doctor, and two brothers came to our hotel to receive the medication from the hands of Dr. Joe. There was not a dry eye in the house as the doctor explained that this gift – the medication that at one time seemed impossible to obtain – would give Octavia the new life she had almost given up on.

“Very cool,” I hear you say. “But what about the other $213? What did you do with that? Throw a party or something?”

Turns out, God had something in mind for those dollars, too. The portion of our team who was building a new home for a single mom and her son went on a little mission of investigation. They talked to the mom and found out that she had a dream. Her dream was to start a bakery so that she could sell cakes and cookies to neighbors and friends.  

For that leftover $213 and another $87 we pulled out of our pockets on the spot, a new propane-fired oven was purchased and installed into her new kitchen.

Best $600 I have ever spent.

What a good, good week. And what an even GOODER God!

Abundant blessings;

• Not her real name