Pastor Ben’s Christmas Testimony

When I was around 8 years old my father was laid off from the steel factory he worked at in Lansing, MI. At the time he was also the senior pastor of a small church in Ann Arbor, where we lived, that was not yet able to support him financially. So things were really tight for us financially and to make matters more stressful for my parents, Christmas was also approaching.

One day during the same season my mother went shopping for groceries. As she went up and down the aisles she would pick out the things she knew we needed looking for the best possible deals to save money. One by one as she picked out the best bargain item, she felt a prompting of the Holy Spirit to put it back. She thought it was the strangest thing but had learned to trust this feeling and so she put each item back on the shelf and came home with almost nothing.

Not ten minutes after she came home a car pulled into our driveway. My mother & I didn’t recognize the man or the family that got out of the car and approached the door. They were all smiling and carrying grocery bags. I called for my dad to come and see and he immediately recognized the man as a co-worker from the factory in Lansing.

They delivered the groceries to us and as my mom looked in the bags she saw everything she had put back on the shelf. It was all there. We eventually found out that they were believers, something my father hadn’t know about his co-worker until then, and that God had placed it on their hearts to deliver groceries to us. My parents could tell you even more stories of God’s provision during that time.

That was a special Christmas season for our family, not because of what we received, but because of how much we learned to trust God as our provider and witnessed His faithfulness in action toward us.