Too Small to Matter

When Emma, a young woman from Canada, signed up for a GO Trip to Pará, a vibrant state in Brazil's Amazon region, she carried more than her suitcase. She carried anxiety. She carried a heavy story she had only ever shared with a few close friends. And she carried a quiet lie she had believed for years: that her story wasn't worth anything, and that God couldn't use her past for good.

Still, she felt God calling her to go. So, she went.

She landed in Tomé-Açu, a town in Northern Brazil, and joined her team for a week of visiting local schools. Together, they would step into classrooms to share the gospel and a short piece of their own story with the children there.

Then came the moment Emma had dreaded, the very moment that had made her hesitate to even apply for the trip.

She had to stand in front of a room of five- and six-year-olds at ABC Evangelical School and share her testimony out loud for the first time.

Her heart pounded. Her mouth went dry. The words she had rehearsed tangled somewhere between her mind and her lips. She spoke anyway.

And when she finished, she felt like she had failed.

Her words felt too small. She worried she hadn't said it well, hadn't reached the children, hadn't shown them how good God had been to her. She walked out of that classroom feeling discouraged, embarrassed, and humiliated. The old thoughts came rushing back: You're not good enough. You're not qualified. You don't belong here.

Emma almost let that be the end of her story.

But God wasn't finished.

A few days later, the team returned to the same school. Emma began chatting with a little girl from that same classroom and soon met the girl's grandmother. What the grandmother said next changed everything.

Her granddaughter, she said, had not stopped talking about the woman who visited her classroom. The little girl had loved having Emma speak. She had been deeply touched by her words.

Emma was stunned.

The testimony she thought was too broken to matter had acted like a single spark in this child's life. She never saw it catch. But quietly, in this child's heart, it shone like the first star appearing in a dark night sky.

And that spark didn't stop there. When the team returned to the school, that reconnection opened the door for Emma to share the gospel again, this time using the ShareWord Spark magazine that the team gave the children—a Scripture-based resource designed to help children explore God's Word in a meaningful way. The words she almost swallowed back flowed freely.

But the fire was spreading somewhere else, too: in Emma herself.

She came home a different person than the one who had boarded that flight ten days earlier. The lie that had gripped her for years, that her story was worthless, had finally lost its hold.

This trip taught her that a single spark can seem too small to matter. But like the first light at dawn, it doesn't stay small for long. It grows, it spreads, and before you know it, it brightens the entire sky.

So today Emma shares her testimony freely, at home and out in her world, in everyday conversations she once would have avoided.

One trip. One trembling testimony. And a ripple that is still moving through her life as you read this story, today.

That's what God does with a willing heart. He takes your trembling “yes” you thought was too small, and He unleashes it, letting it blaze in someone else's life, and in your own.

So don't wait until you feel ready.

Go. And watch what He sets on fire.

“Now may the God of peace... equip you with all you need for doing his will. May he produce in you, through the power of Jesus Christ, every good thing that is pleasing to him....” Hebrews 13:20-21