The other week, just before the road into Jindalee was cut by the rising Brisbane River, we did a mercy trip to take our friends, Andrew and Jess, a stack of drinking water as their supply got cut off. While on the road to their home, we received a text message on Richie’s phone which read:
Pastor Richie – found ur camera @ Camporee. Camera ruind, card ok. Address 2 send 2?
As I read it out loud to Richie, who was driving at the time, I screamed,
OH MY GOODNESS!!!!! THEY FOUND MY CAMERA!!!!!
This was a total answer to prayer.
T-O-T-A-L ANSWER TO PRAYER!
I almost started crying with excitement. Not because I was getting my dodgy point-and-shoot back, but because of the photos that were on that memory card.
You see I lost my little Sony point-and-shoot on the day that the monster storm hit our camp and we had to relocate 1000 of our 2500 kids off the camp ground into dry accommodation. For the life of me I couldn’t remember where I had sat it down, in fact I thought it may have got knocked off our table and taken away with the flood water that washed through our tent. It was a gushing river that ran through our tent that day! I had prayed about it for days and then I kissed that thing good-bye and accepted that I may not see it, or the photos from Christmas and my personal Camporee photos, again.
SO!… we rang the person who sent the SMS and the lady told us that she had attended Camporee and picked it up from the mud thinking it was some poor little Pathfinder who had dropped it. It was all dented and soaking wet and, of course, muddy. She thought instead of handing it into Lost Property she would dry it out and work out who owned it. She was one of the mums who came down to Toowoomba with the Mackay Central Pathfinder Club.
This part of the story was the incredible part…
Once the card was dry, she checked the photos and she didn’t recognise us. That is the first time I’ve heard that an Adventist Queenslander has NOT recognised Richie! So she jumped onto the AUC Camporee “Under Oath” website and found the “Under Oath” Blog and saw this media article from Toowoomba’s “The Chronicle” and THEN she recognised our faces.
She Googled my husband’s name and found Richie’s Ordination announcement in some random church bulletin and then hunted his phone number down through the Conference!
With all the flooding in Queensland, this lady and her family couldn’t get back to Mackay, and it turned out that she had driven south to Halliday Point where her in-laws lived to wait it out. This was exactly on the road home from where we had been staying post Camporee. So we swung past and got to meet her and her kids, and re-live the Camporee mud stories for a short while. Now the camera and the card are safely in our arms!
This might be minor in the scheme of the things with the flooding etc, but I felt this was a total answer to prayer for me.
Have you had an answer to prayer of late?