By April Terry (http://faithwarming.blogspot.com)

I used to walk during my lunch hour in the area by my office.  Usually, I didn’t walk alone, but on one Friday afternoon a few years ago, everyone had plans.   So I put my headphones on and proceeded to walk my regular course.  About twenty minutes into the walk, an object struck me on the side of my head near the temple and another object struck my chest with great force.  Instinctively, I reached up to catch my glasses and instead caught a hard, green lemon in my arms.  I watched a green Jeep Cherokee speeding away down the street.  As the pain sear through me, I froze waiting to see if I would remain conscious.  When I realized that I wouldn’t pass out, I looked up at the street and waited knowing that the dead-end street that the vehicle was on would force it to come back.  I stepped closer into the street and struggled to get my brain and my eyesight to focus so that I could see what the license plate number was.  I couldn’t.

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My dear friends, Jay and Cathy Robinson, have been on the Young Life staff for a long time now. I get their digital newsletter from Tulsa, OK, where Jay is the metro director. This is an except from the most recent issue, which I thought gave some really powerful examples of what ordinary attempts can end up looking like in the adolescent world. Young Life volunteer leaders know that evangelism is a spiritual practice.

From the Front Lines

When we invite people to volunteer as a missionary with Young Life, we have a four week training process where we give them all the tools they need to effectively reach kids with the Gospel. But as with any “real life” scenario, the theoretical and the practical are not always the same. Here’s what it’s meant to be a Young Life leader in Tulsa in the past month…

* You have a girl in your campaigner group who has recently been in drug rehab. Late one night you get a text message from her. She doesn’t want to talk on the phone, or in person, but she’ll text (it’s what kids are comfortable with). So you spend the next hour texting back and forth as she’s wrestling with addiction and questions. “Why do I feel this way?” “Does God care about my addiction?” “Why shouldn’t I just give in to the temptation?” You don’t have all the answers, but you love her and she knows it.

* You have a high school friend who loses a loved one. You show up at his house late in the evening and sit with him and his family. The four other adults in the room are smoking which puts enough of it in the air that you’re smoking too. You don’t mind because it’s a small price to pay as an expression of love.

* You sit with a group of teen moms trying to have a Bible study. There are 5 kids running around in the room so it’s difficult to lead a discussion the way you’ve been trained. Somehow you end up discussing tattoos, specifically the ones all of your girls are wearing. You don’t really have a personal reference point, but by listening you discover that for each of these girls, the tattoo is an expression of who they are. They want to be known, so they put a little bit of their story on the outside in the form of body art. Now you know them better, and love them more.

* You have a kid that comes from a difficult family situation. You are aware that this kid doesn’t eat on a regular basis (there’s no regular basis for anything in his world). When he shows up at a lock-in, you knowingly ask if he’s had something to eat. When he responds “no”, you give your credit card to another leader and tell him to go get the kid a meal, no questions asked, it’s just the right thing to do.

We can train all we want and we can prepare for every situation, but when real life hits, love wins the day. Thanks for supporting Young Life, and allowing us to love kids right where they are.

Dear Lord, Give us the Leaders

In the above article, you read about the heart of a Young Life leader. We’re praying for 60 leaders by March 15th. There are 8300 students in the schools were we currently have YL and there are 17,500 in the schools where we do not have a YL presence. The Harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Will you join us in praying for 29 new leaders and 6 new YoungLives mentors by March 15? And let us know if you are interested or if you know someone who is.

Young Life, Tulsa
10010 S 70th East Ave | Tulsa, OK 74133-6221 | 918 665 8525

By April Terry (http://faithwarming.blogspot.com)

When I was a kid, I loved to try to touch the bottom of the swimming pool.  We swam in a large, Olympic-sized pool in our small town and it had a twelve foot depth at the deep end.   We use to dive below the surface and try to hold tea parties at the bottom.  It wasn’t always easy to stay submerged that way.  I have learned that diving into people’s stories is much the same.

Someone told me a story once about an experience they had in a restaurant when a sourpuss of a woman came in.  After dealing with her stony countenance, someone commented that she was very difficult.  That was when someone came by and mentioned that she had just lost a loved one and at that moment she went from being just another sourpuss to being a person suffering.  The story always made me think about the things that are going on beneath the surface of those around us.

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