A House Built on Love: Answering God's CallSample

What Have You Got in Your Hands?

At Hope into Action, we house people who need to be given a chance, a break, hope, and a future. We work alongside churches to support tenants, encourage them, and empower them toward a brighter future. 

Sometimes as human beings, we can want to fix people, to sort out their problems, to make everything better, and then send them on their way. But actually, that’s more about making us feel better than it is about the individual. 

When Ed worked in Africa, he and his team joined in a workshop with local men and women who were leaders in their community. They shared their terrible experience of war, displacement, and brutal violence. They went on to give a long list of their needs from medical care to education. It was a sad, sad story. 

Ed and his team took them through an exercise of analyzing what they had. "On the surface, they had lost everything. But as the questions were asked in different ways, they began to see their strengths and resources . . . Soon we came to see there were a great many resources that we could build on; our woe turned to hope and resolve."

When Ed was looking at setting up Hope into Action, Ed had little no knowledge of or experience in what it meant to set up a charity to rehouse the homeless. But he gathered a community together who shared their skills and knowledge, and from there the seed that God had planted was given the impetus to grow and (eventually) flourish. 

The key question is: What have you got in your hands? 

What do you have to offer? Skills, time, money? Are there people around you to join forces with to share your community assets?

Think about the resources God has blessed you with and ask Him to show you how to use what you’ve been given.