For the past week I have been on a mission trip with the kids from my church here in College Station, Texas, particularly with the junior high kids. This trip consisted of 5 churches youth groups that came together to form a camp and were divided into work teams to go into the community and work for their clients and to show them a little bit of God’s love for them. This trip stresses student leadership in way that I have rarely seen in practice. The students design the camp from the t-shirts to the menu for the week; they lead worship and lead the work that we do in the community. We were working in the Houston area particularly helping people to rebuild after hurricane Ike. We did any number of things from painting to building a wheelchair ramp to replacing siding.
On Thursday night we invited the people we have worked for all week to come have dinner with us and worship with us. The kids from our church had the honor of leading this particular worship service. There are so many cool things to share from this service from the awesome skit performed to show the importance of being intentional about serving and telling people about God’s love, to the clients sharing how God has moved in their lives, to getting to see discipleship happen in amazing form. However, the thing that stuck out to me and to so many others was the sermon that was given by one of our youngest students a seventh grade young man that just joined us in youth after being confirmed back in May. He talked on the passage in Matthew 28:19-20- The Great Commissioning. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
He gave a great analogy of a dandelion how we
all being from different churches that week were like the roots of the plants system and we all came together to form one JUMMP camp the stem of the dandelion. We grew and formed new parts of ourselves during the week as we grew closer to the Lord in relationships with each other and clients and as we grew in our desire to serve in order to bring glory to the kingdom, and when the Holy Spirit blew the seeds that we had grown were able to spread the love of God throughout the community where we were working. He talked about how we are not just supposed to be this self contained plant
that keeps to itself we are told to make disciples of all nations not to keep the gospel to ourselves. These kids had the opportunity to learn what it meant to be a dandelion this past week. I remember sitting there and putting the analogy together in my mind as he was discussing this idea of his with us and I got so excited because it is such and awesome illustration of how we should be living our lives growing together as a united church body and growing new parts that are designed to spread the Kingdom into new places.
You know I have since early childhood enjoyed dandelions. It is so gratifying to grab one by the stem and hold it in front of you and blow it and watch the puff spread to the four corners. In recent years though it has been presented as more of a nuisance; it is a weed, it is not good for whatever else is growing in the area. I remember watching the commercial (I think it was for Lowes Home Improvement) where the father watches in horror from the other side of his well manicured lawn as his young daughter blows the dandelion and the seeds spread. How awesome it is that our father wants us to, in fact He commands us to, spread the seed. He does not want to keep this well manicured lawn, he wants it to get messy and see his sons and daughters blowing the infectious love throughout the lawn.
Thank you, Sam, for this awesome analogy. I love it and pray we can all learn more about what it means to live life as a dandelion.
