I Believe in a Small Group of Women

By Mary Ann Lau

It’s been almost a year since we took that trip to Molokai.  Our Women in the Word (WITW) small group of 12 had been together for 3 seasons by God’s grace.  We were all individualists, but as each began to feel comfortable sharing her heart, and as prayer cemented our bond, we began a dynamic interchange of e-mails during the week, corporately praying through the specific needs for each one, encouraging each other through written and verbal form, believing that our lives had been entwined for a purpose, and that God was maximizing our journeys through it all.  It was with that kind of armor that we set off for Molokai, hoping to bring through our hands some kind of blessing.  Our magnanimous spirits would soon be tempered with the beauty of His Sanctuary. 

We participated in WITW’s project called “Giving from the Heart.”  Each small group shepherd was given the assignment of collaboratively planning with her group of women a selected effort to meet some material need of the community at large.  It took a couple of brainstorming sessions before we decided to do a fundraiser and use its profits to decorate one of the cabins at the Molokai Oceanside Retreat.  Our purpose was to provide a feminine haven for the woman who needed to get away for a few days to rest and restore the inner sanctum of her soul.  Thus we poured over home catalogues while planning for our hot dog fundraiser at one of New Hope’s Friday movie nights.  Our effort yielded about $800, and all we needed was the perfect design scheme for this “haven.”  Our idealistic minds, however, became quickly disillusioned as we realized that shipping costs to Molokai would prohibit shipping furniture or decorative accents from the mainland.  We needed to go to Plan B...we would each assume the cost of flying over to Molokai to bring the sheets, towels, curtains, and our personal touches to this cabin makeover.  Plan C was right around the corner.  Our women were informed that the Molokai Oceanside Retreat was to be sold.  We decided to scrap our efforts and send a check to be used to hire workers from a nearby rehab center to maintain the grounds for the sale.  Our airline tickets still in hand, eleven of our  12 women with uncalloused hands would go to provide free labor doing yard work and cabin cleaning.  We would also fit in devotional times in the evenings.  Thus we set off to do our good deed, unbeknownst to us that Director of the Retreat, Kyle Lum, would be holding Plan D.  We arrived at the retreat with warm greetings from the Lum family and their edict that we were to simply enjoy the retreat and that there would be no work assignments for us.  God provided Molokai as His Sanctuary to us!  So we hiked and swam and did the bread run and had our devotional study over the view of Kalaupapa, and even produced a short film called “The Sistahs Cordeiro” (not shown in a theater near you).  And we came to realize that when God builds a small group of women, He doesn’t waste a soul.