This morning my team had the awesome privilege to go into the schools today and preach the Word to students. It is so different from America where God can’t even be mentioned in the classroom. And there I was standing in the middle of a classroom preaching to a room filled with beautiful African 7th graders.
Before I arrived at the school, I really had no idea what I would be talking about. All I knew, from what God had told me, is that it would be something about LOVE. And theLOVE that He has for them and wants them to share with those around them.
I walked into the classroom at 8:25am and saw thirty 7th graders…a pretty normal classroom, not that big of a deal, right? I was feeling pretty confident. Then all of a sudden the teacher told me that she was going to go get the others. What did that mean?? Within 3 minutes, the room was filled with 3 or 4 times as many students than before. My heart started racing. For one, I had no idea what I was going to talk about, and two, my voice has a hard time projecting! I recalled those days back at church camp when other counselors would make fun of me for “whispering” (aka, my version of shouting) to tell all the girls to get their pj’s on. God just didn’t make my voice to shout. Or at least in normal situations. The room was very loud and I had no idea how it was going to work out. I didn’t even have a teacher in the room with me to help keep them quiet so they would be able to hear my voice.
So… I took a deep breath and prayed to God that He would somehow make my voice louder & give me the words He wanted me to say to these young students.
LOVE your neighbor as yourself.
I really have no idea what I really actually talked about except what it means to LOVE your neighbor the same way that you would treat yourself. I talked about the LOVE that God has for us and how He wants that to be reflected into theLOVE that we give to others. I talked about what LOVE looks like, especially using 1 Corinthians 13 to fill in our own names for LOVE (ex: Carmen is patient, Carmen is kind…).
Each time I struggled with what to say next, God came to the rescue and put His Words in my mouth. The next thing I knew, it was already 9am, I prayed for the students & the bell rang. Pastor Ezekiel came into the room to get me and asked them if they would allow me to return next Friday morning. They all shouted very joyfully, so I’m assuming I wasn’t that bad. ;]
I can’t wait for next Friday morning! :]
This is the first group of students before the classroom became packed full of them with no room to walk!
