Lost and Found, Part 1

"And who is this?  She looks like someone I know,
but she has been lost for a long time."

Once upon a time, there was a girl, a girl whose tender heart and willing spirit were being cultivated by Jesus himself.  As a tweener, her social calendar was relatively empty, and when her youth group planned summer activities, she naturally attended.  The activities were often service-centered, and it was here that the girl first learned that doing something for others with the right group of people can be even more fun than doing whatever you want.  One of these activities was picking blueberries.  The blueberries were then sold, and the funds raised sent to Uganda, which the girl learned was a country on the continent of Africa.  In Uganda, there were kids her age who wanted to go to summer camp, but had no way of paying to attend.  How a few dozen pounds of blueberries were going to solve this problem, the girl wasn't sure.  But the grown-ups said it mattered, and picking blueberries seemed like a lot more fun than fighting over the tv remote with her little brother, so she went.  And then she watched as people bought the blueberries at church on Sunday.

And time passed.  And the woman who came with them to pick the blueberries came back to the girl's Sunday School class, and showed them pictures of the kids in Uganda going to "Blueberry Camp."  The kids and the camp were unlike anything the girl had ever seen before.  Another grown-up who went to camp with the Blueberry Lady shared that she was making dolls for the little girls in Uganda to play with, dolls that had brown skin and dark hair like they did.  And the girl thought, I can do that.  I can make dolls.  Where this thought came from, and why she suddenly felt compelled to contribute, can only be attributed to the Holy Spirit.  Her mediocre sewing skills and mounting frustration when the project turned out to be more difficult than she thought can only be attributed to her long line of strong-willed, stubborn female relatives.  But persist she did, and in addition to learning that you always have to remember to account for the space the seam takes up, she learned that giving something requires sacrifice, even if it is only a couple summer afternoons and some complex mental math.

And time passed.  And the girl continued to work on the dolls as she could, and before long she had completed three or four.  Eventually, she gave them to the Blueberry Lady, who promised they would go with her to Uganda next time she went to camp.  And that was that, or so the girl thought.