Taco Truck to Africa
Almost every year I have gone to Winterfest (a big youth rally in Gatlinburg), it’s been a faith-building weekend for me. It may be geared toward teens and I may serve as a chaperone, but after the first year, I have gone for myself. This year, it wasn’t just the usual quality presentations that boosted me – it was visibly seeing God in action. Here’s what happened:
Our youth group went this year with a project. We want to send a taco truck to Africa. The women in our ministry there need a way to support themselves and they’re being trained in a commercial food business. However, the corrupt government of this particular nation will confiscate any land with nice buildings, so there’s no point in building a restaurant. What kind of restaurant doesn’t need a building?. A food truck. And guess what? Someone in St. Louis donated a food truck! But we’ve got to ship it to Africa.
For months, our youth group has been making leather bracelets and keychains to sell in a booth at Winterfest. With 10,000 people at Winterfest, we were sure we could sell out. We also had a boatload of t-shirts and hoodies that had been donated to us. All we had to pay for was the screen printing of the Bible verse in an African silhouette on the front. Everything we were selling was almost 100% profit and we priced it all cheaply: $2, $3, or $10.
So we set up our tables with our big Taco Truck backdrop and waited for the kids to come. And waited. Unfortunately, we were in a remote corner of the convention center and had almost no traffic. So we started going into the crowd to promote our stuff, but no one really knew what we were doing, so sales were very slow. I knew people would buy if they only knew what our mission was, but the flyers explaining the Taco Truck got left out of the leaders’ packets.
We were discouraged after the first night. And the next morning, and the next evening. We were down to the last session on Saturday night and had made only a few hundred dollars. Our kids were even chanting “Taco truck to Africa” and jumping up and down to bring people over, but not much was happening. I was personally pretty down at that point. Then God came to our rescue.
One of our kids, Ashton, decided to take some initiative, so she just went to the stage and asked the Winterfest organizer if she could make an announcement about what we were doing. Before she even finished explaining the mission, kids and adults were flooding to our table. Every kid in our youth group had to jump in and work. We were selling so fast we couldn’t even stop to look up. Finally I glanced up and the line to buy our wares stretched across the convention center! In less than 20 minutes, we made over $1000. I was reminded of this verse: “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.” I Corinthians 3:6-7
God gave Ashton the initiative, but not until the last minute. He wanted us to wait to see what He would do. He wanted us to see the Holy Spirit work on all those kids. As a result, we had so much wonder and joy as the tables emptied and we wrapped up the selling. It was far better – more rejoicing and more bonding for our group – than if we had sold steadily all weekend.
