My New/Old Friend Paul

This past week at our state missions training center I got to talking with some other church planters about our location dilemmas. I had just received a call from... (well I'll tell you from who tomorrow, but it was an exciting and amazing call). We got to sharing ideas on how to make the best use of a school facility to set up for church. I mentioned that our ability to meet at North Landing is dependent on finding two teachers that are willing to let us use their rooms on Sundays for our nursery and preschool. Two guys in the room looked at me like I was from another planet. "What do you need rooms for, the hallways work so much better!"

This was another one of those G-incidents (God/coincidents). I had just thought of using the hallways last week on my own, but didn't think it was practical or would look nice. I shared my concerns with them and then got an education. They started telling me how they did there set up in the hallways and who else I could talk to that does it also. Then another church planter walked in and overheard our conversation. He chimed in, "hey we use the hallways too, here's how we do it."

One of the guys in the room was Paul McDaniel, the pastor of Family Life Church in Mechanicsville, Virginia. Paul's the kind of guy that you're convinced you've known for years after spending five minutes with him. Why, because he treats you like you're a friend that's he's known all his life. He said to me, "Hey my church equipment is on you way home, you want to stop by and look at what we use to do our set up?"

I of course took him up on the offer. I tell you what, they know what they are doing at Family Life. They share my same heart for making something look like a million dollars, but finding a way to buy it for a million dong. (Dong is the currency of Vietnam. One million Vietnameese Dong equals about $60.) I can't thank Paul enough for taking the time to show me what they do and how they do it. And I am simply amazed at how God contually puts me in the right place at the right time.