This year we gathered at our son Jim’s in-law’s home for Thanksgiving. After the meal, it is their tradition for each person to share the memorable points of the past year in his or her life and for what each is most thankful. It took a while to get all seventeen of us together. So those who had staked out their seating began to share what they had been reading.

Gayle, my daughter-in-law, mentioned that she had passed Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving on to Tess, our daughter, who is a 5^th grade teacher at a Christian school.

Tess decided to read the story of Squanto to her class the day before Thanksgiving vacation.  She wondered how the class would react to the story.

In 1608, Squanto was among Indians captured, in what is now our land, by English sailors and taken to Spain and sold as a slave. A Spanish monk bought him and taught him about Christianity. Squanto later made his way to England and worked as a stable hand. In 1619 Squanto finally found a ship that would take him home to Plymouth, Massachusetts. There he found that his whole village had been wiped out by an epidemic. It would seem that Squanto’s life was one trial, disappointment and disaster after another. But after all that happened, God used Squanto to bring glory to Himself and good to Squanto and others. When the Pilgrims arrived a year later, Squanto was there. He knew the land and he taught the Pilgrims how to live from it. Squanto was God’s provision to save the Pilgrims from starvation. The Pilgrims, in turn, befriended Squanto.

The students were attentive throughout the reading. When Tess finished there were a few seconds of complete silence. Then the students broke into loud, excited clapping.

I’ve been wondering what the fifth graders took away from Squanto’s story and how God will use it in their future. This I know: God can use our smallest act to ignite the fire in another’s soul. I may not see what God proposes for the future of these eighteen students; but I can pray that He uses Squanto’s story in their lives to change our culture for good.

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Twenty-six years ago, I moved south from Eureka, California, to Healdsburg, California. I had to establish new people and places for service. I found a hairdresser who would do my hair once a month. She was an excellent beautician but had a very different life style than I. She had a daughter born out of wedlock and was living with a man who was not the child’s father. She was seeking spirituality in the New Age Movement. We had very lively and interesting discussions. After months together, she informed me that she and her daughter were moving to Eureka with her boyfriend.

I spent time trying to figure out a going away gift that I could give her. I finally settled on a Bible, thinking that it probably would go unused. On Christmas Day ten years later she called from Eureka. She wanted to thank me for the Bible. In her New Age teachings she had run across something from the Bible that she felt was untrue. She looked it up in my Bible; and sure enough, she was right. She approached her teacher with the discrepancy and did not get a satisfactory answer; so she joined a Bible study and through that Bible study became a Christian. She later married a Christian man and all of her children were attending a Christian school.

What a wonderful Christmas gift I received that year! Sometimes God lets us see how He has used our small acts to bring Him glory and benefit others. At other times He doesn’t. Those are the times when we have to believe that He is still using our acts and hearing our prayers. We just don’t see the bigger picture or His timing is different than ours.

Squanto could not have imagined that he would be used to have a nation set aside a day in which its people were to thank God, just as I could not imagine my beautician would ever read the Bible I gave her.

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This year at our church Christmas Tea for the ladies, our speaker was Bev Liberman, a graduate of the Colson Center Centurion Program. Those of us who are in a group with her were praying that the listeners would partner with God to change our culture. We saw a few ladies write down the Internet address of BreakPoint.org., a small act, prompted by a short talk and nurtured by prayer .