Giving ---> Receiving

I have been feeling under the weather today and therefore spent the majority of the day (basically since after school) in bed. I'm not contagiously sick, I just have horrid allergies after sleeping on a hotel floor for a couple of nights in a row. :)

I went to OK City last weekend to watch the end of the national basketball tournaments (my brother was playing and Saturday was his birthday). What I didn't know when I left was that I would have so much fun giving to others during my trip. Now, I don't want to "toot my own horn" because I definitely didn't have a good attitude the entire time, but I saw the Lord using me to help others rather than myself. I prayed that God would use me where He wanted to use me, and I saw the answer to that prayer through a few conversations I had with friends and just putting me in the right place at the right time. Only God can work like that. It is amazing how great giving can make you feel, and how by giving one is actually receiving so much!

While lying in bed earlier, I was watching Oprah (I was one of the daily 10,000,000 viewers today) and I just had to laugh at something that Simon Cowell (judge on American Idol) said after he gave away $162,000 to a needy family. He said, "I never knew how good it felt to give!" When Oprah asked him when he learned this, he told her that it had hit him just after he gave away that money.

Yes, Simon! Isn't it incredible that what the Bible says is actually true?!

"In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive'" (Acts 20:35, ESV).