God has taught me a very important lesson while I’m waiting to follow Him on the World Race…..
Before I can tell my story, I have to explain what the ROCK is. A couple of amazing Godly people that I know started a student center in downtown Monroe. There is absolutely NOTHING for teenagers to do in this town and their purpose was to give students a safe place to hang out. Thursday nights are free, so the kids just pile in. Thursday night is also when they hold a service. They sing some worship songs and a speaker speaks. This opened in the middle of October and already something more than 20 teenagers have been saved.
At first, I just showed up on Saturday nights. I wasn’t willing to give up any more of my time than that. I didn’t want to go on Thursdays because I already work with the youth at my church and I’m attempting to prepare for this amazing mission trip all piled on the already back breaking daily demands of being a teacher.
My students began talking about the ROCK more and more and some of them had seen me on Saturday nights. They began to talk to me about it at school, often in the middle of class. This thrilled me because they were advertising it to a captive audience. Well, they kept asking me to come on a Thursday night. See, many of them can only go on Thursdays because they can’t pay to get in on Friday or Saturday nights. So, about three weeks ago, I relented and told them I would go.
It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen! I knew about half the kids that showed up from school and the most amazing part is that I saw kids there that had been kicked out of school. I saw kids there who I knew were involved in gangs and that caused major trouble at school. I watched them talk through the entire praise and worship but then settle down when the speaker came to give them the Word. My heart was just filled with a Godly love and passion for these kids. I saw them so much differently that night. As teachers, sometimes it is hard to see past the trouble maker exterior. I saw their potential that night. I saw them pay more attention to the speaker than I’d ever seen them pay attention in school. (Ok…SLIGHT exaggeration there) There were about 80 kids there and a huge percentage of those kids are ROUGH kids!
As I was listening to the speaker and praying over those kids, I began to feel God tugging at my heart. He wanted me to prepare a message for these kids. I was really struggling with that and the speaker was talking about Luke 16:10….”Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much”. Well, I totally felt convicted. God is about to send me out to do big things for him. I felt like he wanted me to be faithful in the mission field that I am surrounded by every single day before I go out and serve him in a bigger way. And then God told me again that he wanted me to teach. I told him that I didn’t know what to talk to these kids about. I was kinda hoping to buy myself some time, but God gave me a message. And so I went home THAT NIGHT and wrote it all out. It totally came from God. Even though I am a teacher, it is VERY different to teach God’s word, and in the past it has taken me 5 days to prepare a message.
Well, God worked everything out so that I spoke the very next week. I was SO NERVOUS. That was a rough group and I knew many of them. It is one thing to teach them about governments and the origin of conflict in Africa, but it is another thing entirely to teach them about God!!! I typed out every word that I wanted to say. I created a little powerpoint to go along with my message. I prayed that the Holy Spirit would just take over my mouth and that I could do justice to the message he had given me. I walked up there and I stumbled my way through it. My hands shook nearly the entire time. I forgot what I was saying as it was coming out of my mouth. I said a bad word (not a curse word, but not a nice word), and I drooled on myself. It was horribly embarrassing. I paced back and forth and pretty much read the whole thing from my notes. I had never felt so horrible about delivering a lesson in my entire life. I felt like I butchered it all to pieces.
However, now that I look back on it, every time I looked up, they were looking at me and listening to me. I saw some kids actually leaning forward while they were listening. They heard what I said. I planted some seeds that night. Or rather, God planted some seeds through me. Even though I felt like I did a horrible job, God moved through me anyway.
The coolest thing is that I have seen results at school!!! A couple of them complimented my “speech”. I had a student totally interrupt my fantastic lesson about the different types of governments in Africa to ask if I’m going to “preach” again at the ROCK on Thursday night. She began to tell other students that I “preached” at the ROCK. God is opening doors to bring in more kids. He did that through me! My students got to see a different side of me just as I’ve seen a different side of them.
God has used this experience to teach me an important lesson. Even when I feel like I’m at my weakest, as long as I am leaning on God, he can make good things come from it! I haven’t told my students about this mission trip yet, but I’m hoping that I can be a witness to them once they know! I never thought that God would use ME to reach people, but I’m seeing that nothing is impossible with God!
WOO HOO!!!!!
