Beyond What She Asked For

When Katie Davis moved to Uganda at nineteen, she had a simple plan: teach kindergarten for a year, then come home to Nashville and finish college. She asked God for one classroom of children. He had something immeasurably larger in mind.

Within months, Katie found herself unable to turn away the hungry kids who gathered outside her door each morning. She started a feeding program. Then a sponsorship program. Then she adopted one orphan. Then another. By twenty-two, Katie Davis Majors had legally adopted thirteen daughters and founded Amazima Ministries, an organization that now serves thousands of families across Uganda with education, medical care, and nutritional support.

In her memoir Kisses from Katie, she writes about those early days when she prayed small, careful prayers — prayers for enough rice to last the week, prayers for one more desk in her classroom. She never once prayed, "God, give me thirteen daughters and a ministry that transforms an entire region." That request would have terrified her. It would have seemed absurd.

But the Almighty does not work within the boundaries of what we dare to request. He works according to His power — a power already at work within us, reshaping our small willingness into something we never had the imagination to conceive.

Ephesians 3:20 is not a promise that God gives us what we want. It is the staggering declaration that what He is doing through us already exceeds anything we have the courage to ask for.