On Saturday, a mom walked into our hospital, her water broken, and 28 weeks pregnant with twins. We admitted her, gave her antibiotics and steroids to mature the lungs and waited for their now imminent and inevitable arrival.

The same Saturday, a team of nurses from the US brought 6 bags full of essential medical supplies for hospitals in Kenya. They had organized them meticulously in individual plastic bags . My mouth dropped open at the abundance.  I sat on my porch for three hours, going through the bags, organizing, and dividing them. I separated one bag with an odd looking nasal cannula I had never seen before.  They had asked if I wanted and on a whim I had said yes, but I wondered if we would ever need them when we had a system that worked so well already.

This morning, the mom delivered tiny twin girls. One was just a pound, only 20gm heavier than our smallest surviving preemie. Her sister was a little bigger. Both cried right away and we carried them to the NICU.

Our CO, Michelle called me from the NICU and said, “Our new baby’s nose is really small – we need to put on CPAP, but our smallest prongs are not small enough. Can you come help me figure?”

I walked in and saw that they had pulled one of the strange looking cannula out of the bag and it fit perfectly in the nose. One of our more experienced NICU nurses, Maureen, was saying, “if only we knew how to adapt it to fit our CPAP bottles, this baby would do so much better.”

I stuttered, remembering the ziplock bag at home, “I think the nurses put together a sample bag with an adapter. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I left it on the floor in my bedroom.”

The little group around the twin girls went silent, and Maureen laughed and said, “Then, I guess you should go get it. ”

I ran home, picked up the bag full of tubing and plastic adapters that had been lovingly packed in America weeks before, and brought it to the tiny baby girl just two hours after she was born in a tiny town in Kenya. Her labored breathing calmed, the bottle bubbled, and Maureen looked at me and asked, “Can we dance now?”

So Maureen and I danced in the middle of the nursery, celebrating a collision of worlds, a community of people that span oceans, and evidence that He sees us – from the tiniest new human to a hardworking team – and He knows what we need before we ask.