While in Jamaica with our first-ever women’s missions trip (a tremendous experience!), we stopped at a grocery for supplies. Several of our team members struck up a conversation with Donavan, a 20 year-old store clerk. They discovered that he had grown up at the very orphanage that they were in Montego Bay to serve.

Because we’ve been working with the abandoned children of Blossom Garden Orphanage for 20 years, it’s entirely possible that one of our teams held him as a baby, another team chased him around the playground as a toddler, and other teams played soccer with him throughout his childhood.

Their kindness toward him could have been simply the latest touch in two decades of God’s love.

Galatians 6:9 encourages us with these words:

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

As Mission Discovery enters 2013, we are energized to participate in God’s work of sowing, tending, and reaping. It’s gratifying to realize the many ways that lives have been changed: widows and orphans have been cared for, the homeless have been given shelter, the broken-hearted have been encouraged, those living in darkness have welcomed the light of Christ, 35,000 participants of all ages have learned what it means to be the hands and feet of Christ.

This week a team will return to Jamaica and Blossom Garden Children’s Home.