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TEAM TALK
The Lord will Provide
By Graham Ries
It’s a quarter to four in the morning. It’s dark outside and raining. The weather is bitterly cold. I’ve just made myself a
cup of hot tea because I cannot sleep. I lie there and I worry as I turn this way and that. My nerves are a mess and I’m
scared. I’ve just taken some Lemon’s Jamaica Ginger to calm my rattling stomach. It tastes foul but it works. If I were
still a smoker the floor would have a carpet of cigarette ash. Life has had its challenges. God knows that. And now I’m
faced with another one.
I’m about to lose my home. Again.
10 years ago now I lived in an annexe at the back of a church in the Quigney, in East London because I had lost every-
thing I’d ever worked for and was rendered absolutely destitute by a woman I’d loved. Literally 10 minutes before I’d
have had nowhere to lay my head but the cold street pavement, the head pastor of a church there found me this ac-
commodation in the annexe of his church – I say found because someone else was living there at the time who could
quite easily have turned me away forcing me to the pavement. But she didn’t. And today Lynette is a pastor herself.
The Lord had provided.
Once when I was walking down the Beacon Bay road towards the ocean after just having been looking for work at Retail
Park, still in East London, I was hungry and in tears, crying out to the Lord, telling Him that I was sorry for what I had
done in coming down here to be with this woman who had taken my life’s material possessions from me, and that I
would do almost anything for a decent meal. A hot meat pie and gravy would be so wonderful!
I was very near the Spargs supermarket at the time and they opened their bakery ovens just as I was walking past.
That’s not a nice thing to do to a hungry man. The aroma of fresh baked meat pies assailed me and I cried all the more.
As I continued past the store, lying in the busy path I saw what looked like a R20 note. Increasing my pace to pick it up, I
saw that it was not a R20 note but rather a R200 note!
This is a lot of money to a hungry man. I remember how I got to my knees right there on the grassy verge of that main
road with people coming and going, and reached up to heaven, waving the money in my hand and calling out, “Thank
You JESUS!”
I immediately went across the road into the supermarket and bought myself a hot meat pie and gravy and chips and
food to last a week, not forgetting to set aside R20 for my tithe.
The Lord had provided.
Years later, now living in Port Elizabeth, having quite forgotten about the R200 note, I was honoured to be able to
organise a ministry outreach called The Matthew Lunch, so named after the apostle Matthew.
Please follow this link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb ctwttyL4Q
When the Lord told me I was ready to do this, He told me it had to be for 200 destitute and broken people or more, but
definitely no less. I told my pastor and several people, many of whom tried to talk me out of it but this was what God
had told me and I wasn’t going to budge.
In the humanness that is me, I’d forgotten the R200 note and when it was brought to my mind, I could not for the life of
me see any connection between the money and the lunch, other than the figure of 200.
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