Two weeks ago I had the privilege of attending a one-day ladies retreat at Life Path Church. The theme was "Joy", and the room was packed!
But, not only was the speaker amazingly oh-so-relateable to every woman in the room, but everything leading up to the event itself was 100% God, and boy was He moving!
I had the honor of being on the team that pulled the whole thing together. Originally we had planned on 35 ladies max. We didn't expect the advertising to make it beyond word of mouth, (especially when one of our bigger advertisers said their new policy didn't allow that them to advertise for church events other than their own.) But do you know what happened? By the time that message came through, we had already blown past the 35 person limit and were well on our way to maxing out our tables.
Things that were bought had to be bought again, and then again.
Panic moment came the last week when we had reached 63 ladies. We didn't have table space for 63 women, but God kept bringing them.
Everytime someone canceled, within an hour someone else would call or text and ask if we had any seats available??? We quit counting at one point and just kept writing down names.
Our biggest hang up were the tables. We had 6 large round tables the church uses for potlucks and such. We needed a round table format since half the retreat involved roundtable discussions. We thought, "well, we will just squeeze 10 to a table and count on people canceling the day of". (Spoiler alert, we found out the tables can only seat 8 chairs! Yikes!)
So math time. 6 tables x 8 chairs = 48
Two small round tables were loaned to us by the speaker, they would only seat six.
So, 2 tables x 6 chairs = 12.
Grand total of 60. We needed to get down to 60 ladies, or we needed a miracle.
But, no matter what happened, we stayed at 63 women. Names changed, but the number never moved off of 63. We REALLY needed more room!
In a flurry of text messages two days before the event trying to figure this out, God spoke.
He told me He was orchestrating this. And then He said "Fishes & Loaves". So I sent that message on to our fearless, panicking leader.
So we let go of all of it (again) to God and just let Him Be Big.
Karen, our fearless leader, even joked and said, "what is God going to do? Make a table mysteriously appear?!?!" But, she left it in His hands to do whatever He had planned.
The night before the event we went to the church to setup. We rolled out the table cart, (holding our six big tables,) and then I looked back behind it. Tucked in the corner of the closet (but by no means hidden,) was a seventh table. Fishes & Loaves.
A quick poll of church people who dealt with the tables, and everyone said we only have 6 tables. But apparently God had the seventh.
That seventh table was exactly what we needed.
On the day of the event we had only 3 ladies who didn't show up. (If you are following the math, that got us back down to the 60 which was our maximum goal.) But then we had 4 walk in who weren't on our list. And we were able to give them a warm welcome and a place to sit.
Many hearts were healed and many ladies were brought together in the most unusual ways..... all of them with a purpose and a prayer behind it. The miracles are still happening and it's been two weeks! God did some pretty mighty things before the event, during, and after.
And if you are curious, we still have the seventh table. But then God let there be left overs when He fed 5000 from one boy's small lunch.
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