Logistics - How Exciting? :- / Have you seen the UPS commercials over the last few years? Probably not. Few people seem to notice. The headline is We Love Logistics. A real attention getter - right? But I have felt their pain. I can visualize their marketing group brainstorming a public-relations campaign to solve an inherent problem. People pay attention to the source of the stuff they order. Like Amazon. And certainly, they take notice when it arrives in their hands. But how it got there, well...at best, its only a side-bar - a thing that is just expected to happen. Ho-hum. But, of course, the package is opened with gusto. Great. I really needed it. The best commercial was a football re-creation of the legendary 1984 Doug Flutie hail-Mary pass, which only takes the final seconds to watch. He scrambles. He throws. And in mass confusion, its caught for the winning touchdown. Wow! Now, the UPS folks were clever. They used a chalk-board approach, with stop-action and zoom, showing the little things happening in order for the BIG thing to happen. I loved it. Certainly, Vine is a grain of sand in the FedEx-UPS-world. But if youre a young girl in Guatemala, home-bound her entire life, and gets her first wheelchair - youd be hard pressed to convince her its a small thing. Or a mother with a very sick child that gets the antibiotic her little boy needs. Or a sugarcane worker, whose body is worn out. And for the first time in his life he meets Gods compassion head-on through a medical missionary...and discovers a new life in Christ. And then multiply that by tens, even hundreds-of-thousands of those moments, when people are impacted physically and spiritually over the course of Vines 20+ years of work. Significance is a relative thing. So, take a minute, and think about logistics. No kidding. Even on just a surface level. Think about all it takes to get that wheelchair, or that medicine, from some place or person in the US - into the hands of one of Gods servants in remote Guatemala who treats some of the poorest of the poor. And the gospel is shared. Simply put - when youve met a need, youve earned an ear. The early Jerusalem church got this. Remember Galatians 2:10 - as they sent Paul out to spread the Good News to the Gentiles? They only asked me to remember the poor - the very thing I was also eager to do. And we all have to remember. Case in point: Recently, I plowed through all the details of logistics and paperwork to ship and deliver two containers of wheelchairs. And the truth is, even doing this work daily, I still had to remind myself - Hey. Remember now...thats much more than 420 wheelchairs. Its 420 people. Got it! See more of the mid-2014 report at --- vineinternational.org/blog/logistics-exciting/
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 21:45:21 +0000