Children's Day Miracle

Working in Asia one cannot ignore the massive number of children. They are all so charming and always smiling. The population, when we arrived in Thailand in 1962, was 26 million. Now it is closing in on 70 million. This represents a lot of children.

Unique to Thailand, they have a designated Children's Day. A strong conviction came to us that we should do something special to reach the children of Thailand. We got the idea to produce a 12 page colour booklet showing the salvation of the Lord for children, followed by a special Bible Correspondence Course, in a simplified form, for those who responded.

Because the Child Evangelism Fellowship, led by four single ladies, were working directly into this field, I approached them to see if they would be willing to take on this project if I provided the funding and the artist to help them in the production. I said as this was their calling I wanted to help them do it. If they chose not to do it, I would do it anyway. They agreed and we began to prepare.

Bunty and I, with the children, went to New Zealand where we were due at a Conference in the city of Nelson. During the Convention I was asked to share about the work in Thailand. So I spoke of the planned Children's Day project. After I shared, David Shock, a visiting ministry from Long Beach, California, jumped up and said...

"I will give the first $100 to this outreach" (this was before New Zealand had changed from pounds to dollars).

Well, the place went wild. Someone jumped up and said "I'll sell my TV". Another, "I'll sell my car". The taking of offerings was very conservative in those days and the leaders of the convention were totally unprepared for this response. They looked around for boxes and pens and paper and encouraged the people to give cash or a pledge and to have it in by September (It was April at the time of the Convention). It was a great time of joy in giving. They put it all in a large box and gave it to us.

The organisers had given us the use of a house for our whole family to stay in during the convention and when we got back there we tipped the box out onto the lounge room floor and began to count - 21,000 pounds! (around $200,000 to $300,000 at today's rate). What is even more amazing is that 24,000 pounds actually came in - more than was pledged.

We went back to Thailand with a goal to print 1 million, 12 page colour booklets. However, we found we needed twice the money to do the follow-up than the initial printing of the booklet, so we were able to print 600,000 and these were distributed throughout the 71 provinces of Thailand in one day. Soon we were to leave Thailand and move on to Hong Kong but we heard later that the team from the Child Evangelism Fellowship took three years to handle the follow-up from that one day! How powerful is the Word of God!