Last Minute Scramble
Has this every happened to you? You are at the retreat, and people are arriving. They are coming to the registration table to check in, pick up keys and name tags and booklets and you are checking them off your list. Everything is going smoothly, until….someone shows up who is not on your registration list!Well, this year that happened to us, and there was a mad scramble which I missed because I am not normally involved in registration at the retreat, and I wasn’t even present when this was happening. So today, my guest blogger is Pam, one of our leaders who was there:
Here’s what happened: Two women showed up, saying that they had registered for the retreat, but they were not on our list. We didn’t have money for the two of them, we didn’t have a registration card for either of them and therefore we did not have a room for them! We questioned them a bit to try to track down the mistake, but they were adamant that one of them had turned in their forms and paid.
We were tempted to panic. How had we possibly overlooked these two precious women? We had reviewed the registration cards and the rooming lists numerous times prior to the retreat. How could we have made this error?
This year our retreat was held at a retreat center. Had we been at a hotel, it might have been easy to get another room. Here we had to guarantee that we would occupy a certain number of rooms and pay for that number, regardless of our final registration numbers, and the place was full. Fortunately, we had one extra room that no one was assigned to, and we were able to give these two women that room. Had the Lord not provided in this fashion, we would not have turned them away; we would have doubled up on some other room and made a way for them to stay.
Our prayer in the months before the retreat is always that God would make a way for those He wants to come to the retreat. And He certainly did this time.
A week or two after the retreat, this lady came to the office between services and sheepishly help up the two registration cards that she had forgotten to turn in and the credit card payment slip. We were so relieved that it was not our error, and we had not overlooked her.
This particular situation had never happened to us before, and we pray it will never happen again. But if it does, we will let the Lord lead us though it and He will be given all the glory!
