Praise and Service

Praise

Ok, so last night was the first real youth group of the new semester and we decided to do an all praise night with jr. high and high school together. The students leading the night had been preparing for months - learning new songs, replacing music equipment, setting up new lights, and who knows what else. I was in the States for most of this, so I was just really excited to see how the night went. We've never done an all singing night, and while the night wasn't perfect, I think it was definitely the start of a tradition. One of my favorite moments of the evening was during a really upbeat song with everyone singing and in the middle of it all were two little 6th grade girls jumping up down and singing with all their might. They didn't care that they were surrounded by a bunch of non-jumping high schoolers or that they looked silly, they were just enjoying praising God! And it challenged me so much because how often am I more concerned with what others may think instead of just praising the Lord? And I thought about how much He must have loved that, the purity and innocence in their hearts.



Service

Over Christmas break a few people had the idea of collecting extra blankets and passing them out to people in need, so today we finally had a chance to do that and what a blessing it was! About 15 students met at the youth center at 10am this morning (it's Saturday mind you!) and headed off to an area where homeless people are generally at. We split up into 3 groups and spread out. I was on "team red-head" and we headed down the street looking like one big family. We quickly found one lady sitting on the street obviously in need but trying to sell a few pictures. We gave her a blanket and some bread to which she replied "xie xie, xie xie, xie xie! (thank you)" with a huge smile on her face. Feeling pretty excited, we kept walking to see who else God would bring our way. One student knew of a section of the street where people usually are, so we headed there. We found several people in a row doing whatever they could to earn money: an armless boy drawing with his toes, a handless man singing, and a blind man playing a traditional instrument. To each one we gave bread and a blanket and received huge smiles and words of gratitude in return. My favorite story of the day though was when we found a blind mom and her approximately one year old son. We knelt down and offered food and the blanket and the son immediately began to eat it and the mom just started crying and saying how thankful she was. So, did we tell each of them about our faith and beliefs? No. But were they impacted by the love of God anyway? Heck yeah!