Ever been in that situation, when you ask God something, it may be help with finance, it may be help with a promotion, or family issues, maybe addiction or anxiety, and you ask and pray but then nothing happens!
Because Carey Baptist Church is a Church in the centre of Preston we felt God wanted us to do something for the people around us in Preston. With the summer holidays underway, as a father of four i know myself and my wife would scour facebook to find entertainment for our Kids!
And so Chill & Play was born. We wanted to offer something that was completely free to the families around Preston that need a place they could bring their children to be entertained, a place where the parents can Chill and the kids can play (see what we did there!). We finally launched it on Saturday 25th July, as a team we waited for the thousands that would surely come!
As time ticked by we realised that the turnout would maybe not quite meet OUR expectations. Nobody would have blamed us for being discouraged, nobody would have blamed us if we thought this isn't working lets quit...nobody except (I believe) God.
You see as we planned this out we where thinking nows the time, this is it, this is where we start to build Gods Kingdom by social action! But God had different plans and we had very few people there. But a strange thing happened NONE of us where discouraged, in fact we were all good! We shouldn't have been but we were, in fact we saw it as a success because we realised we needed this to learn lessons on what we should be doing and all the other stuff that comes with launching something like this. We realised that actually if the number of people we expected had of turned up, we may not have been able to handle it very well! We understood that even though what we wanted immediatly was not provided...IT WAS A GOOD THING!
When our patients are tested, when we expect something but it dosn't happen lean on Isaiah 60:22: "When the time is right, I, the Lord, will make it happen. We lean on this as a team at Chill & Play and we will be there again next month, and the month after that,and the month after that! The doors will open every last Saturday of every month for the foreseeable future. Because we believe that when the time is right our God will make it happen!
If you are waiting for God to do something in your life, don't be discouraged just because it's not happening in your time instead know that "When the time is right, I, the Lord, will make it happen."
God Bless