Well, tonight was the night. I finally started serving others at Southeast. Tonight has been a long time coming. I went to the youth gathering tonight to check it out and get a feel for it to see if it would be something that I would be interesting in doing to serve others and begin this whole ministry journey. Honestly, it went nothing like that as God had something completely different in mind.
I got there and they started up by playing back slap. Brought back some memories of wrestling, since the last time I played that game was when I sprained my ankle in high school. Finished up the game and they went into worship. And let me tell you, that was the most intense, heart felt worship I have been a part of in a while. I haven’t rocked out for Jesus like that in sometime. They all had high schoolers in the band playing, singing, and leading worship. These kids were off the hook! The guy leading worship was totally a natural at it and the guy on the guitar shredded it! I was thinking that these kids need to be on stage on Saturday night and Sunday morning, not on Wednesday nights…lol.
Anyway, I was set up with a cool South African guy named Dean and I were going to hang out with his small group that he lead after worship was done so I could see how things worked. Well, we had to many guys that they were short a leader so they asked me if I would be willing to lead the group tonight. So I decided to go ahead and jump off the diving board to dive into the pool unsure if there would be any water below. I looked at the notes for a whopping 10 seconds and just winged it to my group of 9th and 10th graders. Not only was there water in the pool, I didn’t have to wing it because I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit guiding me like never before. All small groups are starting a study of James. Our conversation went from greed to Megan Fox to Jesus. I can honestly say our small group of guys was awesome.
A couple of the leaders said some very encouraging things to me, so that was cool (but I wasn’t there for the affirmation, which is another blog post for another time). The high schoolers had an after hours even tonight over at Wingman and they invited me to come along. I decided to go and the wings were suprisingly good. After we were done with wings and everyone had left, Charlie (Southeast’s youth paster) hung out in the parking lot (since I was showing him my bike) and we talked for a while. It was a very different connection while we talked like the Holy Spirit orchestrated everything and all the events of the evening.
All I can say is, thank you God for giving me the courage and strength to do what you called me to do 6 years ago. (Yeah, I’m a little slow on the get go sometimes.)
If your interested on the passage we went over tonight in our small group, it was James 1:2-12