Oh Happy Day!

Do ya know the song, "Oh Happy Day....Oh Happy Day.....When Jesus Washed...My Sins Away"? I particularly like the African Children's Choir version of this song, and the one sung by Whoopi Goldberg (or whomever)in the old movie "Sister Act". Have I lost you? Well, the song plays a part in the day described below.

Last Wed the book ministry rec'd a request from World Vision (the Latin America branch) for 4000 books for Christmas to give out to kids. No prob. The next day, we rec'd another call from the same person at World Vision (WV) saying that they had a grant for $$$ that they'd like to use for order additional books. However, there was a catch. Isn't there always a catch? The money needed to be spend my noon on Saturday (and this was Thursday), and it needed to involve at least 3 publishers (so all the money wasn't spent in one place). They would need the books in hand by Nov 10th so they could use them for Christmas. If they didn't use the grant this year, then they'd never get it again. Therefore they wanted us to call them in 2 hours (1pm) to guarantee that we could (or could not) come through so that they could get another book distribution center to do the work if we couldn't. Now, exactly how much gets done anywhere in the world between 11pm and 1pm....and that's if you can get someone to answer a phone?! Anyhow...are you ready for this? They wanted to order 92,000 books! No joke! They were completely crazy over one of our Christmas books from Zondervan, and wanted 40,000 copies of it. Then they order 2 other books from 2 other publishers to total 92,000 books. Teri about dropped the phone. She called her Zondervan contact, Peter,(luckily, a very good and long time friend), and found him and the #2 guy in meetings in the Dominican Republic for the week. Just so happens, Peter told her, that this book is actually printed in China and the normal turn around time for books from China was 3 months. It's safe to say that essentially nobody ever runs an extra printing of a book, just for one client, but he would call the main Zondervan office and see if there was anything that could be done. However, it was currently the middle of the night in China, and there's no way we'd know anything in 2 hrs. We called WV, and they were determined that no other book would due. They agreed to wait one day, until Friday noon. Calls were made to the other 2 publishers for the other 2 books. All said they'd get back with us tomorrow. We'd really like to put Christian books in the hands of kids via WV, and the $$ would be nice too, particularly after the cost of the Expo. Teri was making all sorts of calls. I told her all I could do was pray. And pray I did.

The next morning....Friday...Teri picked me up and broke the news, with a huge grin on her face. China was indeed going to do a separate printing of the 40,000 books and have it shipped directly here before Nov 10th, guaranteed. This, in and of itself, would more than cover the debt which we incurred with the Expo! I could hardly believe it! We were thrilled! It's so cool to see God do God stuff.

Teri is really into music, and her tastes are extremely varied. Her MP3 player is usually close at hand. On this particular morning, she had the song already picked out and ready to play. You guess it..."Oh Happy Day", done by 3 different artists. We Oh Happy Dayed it all the way to work, and were were humming it even when we left the car.

After lunch, Teri got a call from her primary sales rep at the office. Both other publishers had come through and guaranteed that they could provide the books needed. Plus, one of them was throwing in 20,000 kids Bibles and bunch of other books for free. Yep, we got the music turned back up and we did the Oh Happy Day song for the rest of the day, (even though we didn't leave the office until after 10:30pm.) Teri had a lot to prepare before she would leave on Monday to fly to Columbia for a week of meetings. We were still singing Oh Happy Day all the way home that night, and to be honest, it's still running in my head. I've become rather fond of the song.