Article Provided by Vision Christian Media

A small-time crime in the US state of Virginia has prompted a heartfelt community response and a message of Christian faith and forgiveness.

The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) reports during the northern summer 10-year-old Rebecca Caldwell and her 8-year-old brother Joshua were selling lemonade in front of their home in the city of Chesapeake, Virginia, when a customer stopped to buy a drink — or so it seemed. “He seemed super nice,” Joshua recalled, but he changed his mind when the man grabbed the jar containing the A$60 the kids had collected, and ran off.

The entire family was upset, but chose to focus on prayer and forgiveness. “We prayed for the man who stole our money because I wanted him to become a Christian,” Joshua said. Rebecca told CBN News: “I think it’s better to forgive than always be mad at the guy. Otherwise, you’ll keep thinking back on that day and stay angry.”

The local community rallied behind the Caldwell kids and organised a special lemonade event that raised nearly A$10,000 in donations. Their father Ryan said: “Immediately there was just so much support coming out of this. We’re blessed by this whole thing. Something bad happened in that moment, but ever since then, it’s been blessing after blessing.”

As their story spread from the community to national news, the Caldwells used their platform to share the Gospel. “We’ve talked a lot about forgiveness in our interviews. Some people have asked why we choose to forgive,” said mother Annetta, reading from a heartfelt note they had taped to the lemonade stand. The note pointed visitors toward the cross, as a sign of the family’s faith.

“If God can do it through a lemonade stand, He can do anything. He can do the impossible. We just want people to know that God forgave us, and we want to forgive other people. If we hold onto bitterness, it hurts us more than it hurts them. So, we wanted people to realise that it’s more important to forgive,” Annetta explained.

Rebecca and Joshua plan to use some of the funds raised for their oldest sister’s missionary trip to Asia. CBN News concludes that the Caldwells’ story is a powerful reminder that “when life hands you lemons, with faith and love, you can turn them into something far sweeter.”

Grammy Award winning Christian music artist Rebecca St. James who has maintained her prominence in the music industry for more than 30 years, believes there’s a powerful “momentum in the arts” right now when it comes to transformational Christian content.

“There is a kind of ground that’s being regained, I would say, when it comes to faith … leading in culture,” she told CBN News and referencing the success of films like Jesus Revolution, I Can Only Imagine and Unsung Hero — a movie that’s about to be released in her birthplace of Australia that tells her family’s story.

It recounts the rags-to-riches journey of the Smallbone family from Australia to America, showcasing their struggles and their faith before the meteoric rise to fame of both Rebecca and her brothers Joel and Luke who formed the hugely successful group for KING & COUNTRY.

CBN News writes: “Unsung Hero pays homage to the incredible ways God worked in the family’s life after they came to America with nothing, how they worked hard cleaning homes and doing yard work, and eventually landed record deals.” Rebecca told Crosswalk Headlines how she “pretty quickly moved into babysitting and cleaning houses” and eventually found a career in contemporary Christian music and changed her name from Rebecca Smallbone to her stage name to appease music executives.

Just three weeks into its US release, the film has grossed A$26 million at the box office and achieved a rare A+ CinemaScore. Rebecca believes faith-based movies like Unsung Hero are attracting big audiences for a reason :“People are hungry for these messages. When we show up in the cinema, we say to Hollywood, We need more of this. We need more family content. We need more clean content. We need more God-honouring content.”

The singer told CBN News she’s proud of the impact the movie is having, and reiterated her belief Christians need to show up and support projects like it. “Where there’s a call to action with us is, we have to vote, go on these weekends to the theatre, bring your family, celebrate your mums. It’s this moment in time where we can kind of say to Hollywood with our vote, with our movie ticket: We want more of this.”

Rebecca St. James also hopes the movie inspires and encourages people to see how God is at work in their lives and leads them to treasure their families. She told: Crosswalk Headlines: “God redeems our story, no matter how hard it gets. And I think a lot of people are discouraged in our world today. They’re discouraged about marriage, they’re discouraged about family life, they’re discouraged about faith. A lot of people, I think, need hope and need to be reminded that God is the Great Redeemer of our story and of our life. I think that’s why people are responding to the film the way that they are.”

“We in the Western world live such frantic, busy, achievement-oriented lives. And I think that we can almost start to think: My family, maybe they’re keeping me from this thing that I want in career or the certain thing that I want to achieve financially or whatever. And I think the film really kind of undoes that mentality. That joy is not found in stuff or in achievement or career. It truly is found in relationship. God gives us relationship with Him, and then relationship with each other. And the family, the health of the family, really is what the health of a nation is built on.”

Rebecca St James believes this is just the beginning of faith surging in Hollywood: “I feel this sense of anticipation of what God’s doing and about to do, because I think there’s this wave that we’re going to ride. And that’s very exciting to me.”

Photo: Facebook – Rebecca St James

Article by Vision Christian Media