Being a light

I realized I never talk about the Junior High kids on this thing. Which is weird because it is such a big part of mine and Matt's life. Matt is the intern for the Junior High youth group at our church and I am a leader along with some of our best friends. The group is called convergent and it is probably made up of about 120 or more 6th through 8th grade kids of all different shapes, colors, and backgrounds. I started helping out in June or so and the more I started to get to know some of these kids the more I thought "How are they ever going to get it?".

Now don't get me wrong, I didn't think that because these kids were incappable, I thought that because they just didn't want to hear it. They didn't want to listen. They didn't want to learn. I started to think that maybe some kids just couldn't get it in junior high and that hopefully God would just reach them at a different place in their life like He did me.

On a side note, Chad Holladay is a really close friend of Matt and myself. He is also the junior high pastor (and at one point in time my bible teacher at CHS). He is so inspiring and so fun to be around. He and his family are just a huge blessing to anyone that knows them. But recently our church merged with another church in bountiful so that we could help show God's love down there. Since this happened they needed some people to go down there to help get Bountiful Heights on its feet and to get a youth group of 3 to grow and to hopefully multiply into 4, 5, 6 etc. So they sent chad down there to help and so our much larger youthgroup was left without a pastor, and Matt was given the oportunity to step in and give the sermons and kind of be the go to guy here in Washington Terrace.

Matt has been teaching in Convergent for about 3 months now and it is amazing just how much difference there is in the power of his messages now from when he just barely started. The first little while all the leaders were having to tell kids to stop wiping boogers on their friends and lifting chairs above their heads. But lately... I've just seen a massive change in these kids lives. They not only know what it means to love, but they are being love. One of our leaders, Charlie Poe, has a daughter that went into brain surgery last week. Those kids signed up for a certain time during the day so that Charlie's daughter was getting round the clock prayer for 24 hours. These kids are talking to God during school. They're shining Jesus' light on their friends. They know they need Him.

The past few weeks Matt has been teaching on the advant Calander. Which is the lighting of the candles each week to symbolize something. The first week was the candle of Promise, last week was the candle of Light, and this week was the candle of Love. These kids sat silent the entire time. And when Matt asked questions, some of the kids that I thought would never get it.... got it. It clicked. What a blessing it is for me to have these kids in my life. I suppose most of the people who read this wont really understand why this means so much to me or why I am so "obsessed" with my religion. I honestly wouldn't expect you to. But I would be happy to explain, and so would any of these kids.