20 bucks.

$20 is a lot of money to me. But for my friend Luis, $20 is way more than it is to me. He has a very hard time finding enough work to sustain him(not because of a lack of effort, I promise you), and that one bill would feed him for a very long time.

So last night I gave Luis $20. I did this because he came to my house this past Friday to help me clean up our yard for a party we were having for our friends Jon & Erica. I handed it to him before the service and thought nothing else about it.

Until…we were cleaning up after the service, and my friend Kelly Guillen comes up to me to give me a check for her deposit for our mission trip to Mexico. She has been praying about going for a while now and worried about getting enough money to go, so I was ecstatic when I realized she was for sure turning in her deposit.

“Awesome,” I said. “I’m so pumped that you are going.”

As she finished writing her check, she told me she had a really cool story to tell me. She tore the check off and beamed up at me, looking as though she were about to tell me the way God had worked and spurred her to take the financial leap of faith and go. She said, “The coolest thing happened tonight before church. Luis came up to me acting very seriously and I thought something was wrong at first.  Then, he handed me a $20 bill. He said he wanted me to use it to go to Mexico. I tried my hardest to give it back to him, but he wasn’t having it. He told me, ‘Please, Kelly, I want you to go. I want you to enjoy Mexico.’”

I could do nothing but smile on account of my friend and fight back wet eyes. How I love that man, and it seems that I never stop learning from him.