Pictures: Children play with a parachute during a 5-Day Club in Boston; a teenage student counsels a child for salvation during a 5-Day Club.Never before have I been asked by over 70 people per day about the welfare of my nose. I'd taken a break with the teenagers who were attending a two-week training in which I was participating as a teacher, dorm mom, and guest missionary. After hours of learning how to teach Bible lessons, counsel children for salvation, and teach all the components of a 5-Day Club, the teens were ready for an active game. They had picked a game best described as team tag. Someone from the other team was about to make it across our line, so I sprinted full force to tag him, failing to notice that another teammate was coming from the other direction with the same gaol. We definitely gout our opponent out, but in the process the side of my head collided with my teammate's shoulder, toppling us both. The most visible result was a nose bleed that persisted off and on for acouple days. Of course the black eye and swelling that followed also attracted a lot fo attention. Someone said the changing colors of my eye reminded him of a blooming flower; I was reminded more of a rotting vegetable.
I didn't realize until six weeks later that my cheek bone had been fractured in two places. My body had already healed enough on its own to prevent the doctors from doing anything else. The sides of my face are no longer completely symmetrical, but the injury helped me appreciate God's family. The concern that these youths showed at an age when the normal teenager is self-consumed reminded me that the good I see in other Christians is always a sampling of the God who is living in them. I was also able to see God's power working in their lives as teens who had never taught children before learned how to use a Bible story to present the Gospel message and make applications for saved children. At one club, a student was teaching children the sotry of Naaman, who was told that the only way he could be healed of his leprosy was to bathe in the Jordan River. As he was explaining that similarly there is only one way to Heaven, one of the kids exclaimed, "So Jesus is like our Jordan!?"
In addition to the training I helped with in Kansas, I stayed busy over the summer working at at training in Michigan and acting as a team leader and teacher in a 5-Day Club ministry in Boston designed to connect 30 churches with children and families in their neighborhoods and provide them with training to begin weekly Good News Club in their neighborhood schools. This week I moved to Elizabethtown, Kentucky where I will be interning with the Child Evangelism Fellowship state director, Kari Ash, for about nine months.
Praise God That:
Over 2,000 children heard the Gospel and over 200 children were saved during the initial week of ministry in Boston.
70 teenagers and young adults in Kansas and 70 in Michigan have been equipped to teach children, along with other youth all around the world.
Please Pray That:
God will grant wisdom as I learn and work in many new areas in my internship.
God will continue to provide opportunities and workers for the pioneering work that CEF is doing in Kentucky.
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