When I walked into my Twinkle program yesterday, one of my fourth grade girls ran up to me holding something behind her back. She was talking so fast that I could barely understand, but I finally figured out that she had made me something. She produced a paper cube, obviously homemade. It had been carefully taped together and adorned with “Miss Amy Beth” on all sides in light pencil. Her grin grew wider with every exclamation I made about the paper cube.

After the little girl walked away, one of our volunteers who had been watching the exchange told me that the girl had been very upset when I wasn’t already in the school library when she walked in for Twinkle. The little girl had given our volunteer a peek at the paper cube and explained how it came to be:

“A long time ago — months ago, Miss Cara! — I started working on this paper cube. I kept adding things to it and fixing it until it was perfect. I didn’t know who I was making it for, but I kept it safe and made sure it didn’t get smashed in my backpack. When I met Miss Amy Beth, I finally realized that I had been making the paper cube for her all along even though I didn’t know her yet.”

One of the interesting things about a bloggy is that it only gives you a brief snapshot of what is going on in a particular day. Many days I post our “best” moment of the day. I don’t usually put our dirty laundry out for all of the interlings to see, mainly because a lot of the time, it isn’t my laundry to share.

The truth is that ministry can be tough. Really, really tough. I remember going to a conference a couple of years ago and listening to the speaker talk about how, in her early years of ministry, she’d desperately want to walk right out of her office and just give up. She said that on some particular days, she would have to lay on the floor of her office gripping the furniture to keep herself from leaving.

I’m not quite to that point today, but I sure have been on other days.

I don’t want to get another call telling me that a girl in our middle school program is being violently abused at home. I don’t want to listen to a 3rd grader ask me for another portion of snack to take home because she knows there won’t be food on the dinner table that night. I don’t want to watch one of my college-aged volunteers sit across from me and sob because she can’t change the decision she made last night.

I don’t want to wonder where the money for the future will come from. I don’t want to be the one making the tough decisions and setting the rules into place. I don’t always want so much responsibility when I’m so young and still lacking maturity and discipline in so many different areas of my life.

But this? This thing we call Starlite? This is my very own paper cube.

Just like that fourth grade girl, I started working on my paper cube a long time ago. I made phone calls and sent emails and begged for money and painted office walls and sat in principal’s offices and wrote proposals and did without personally and cried and laughed and failed some life tests while I passed others. And the whole time I was doing it, I didn’t know who was going to benefit from my attempt at a paper cube of a ministry. But God held onto it and He protected it from being smashed in my figurative backpack until the day came when He could pull it out and offer it to the girls we serve today.

And, quite literally, thank God He did because there’s no telling what kind of mess we’d be in if He had left things up to me.