After the Gauntlet '08

Well, I'm back after a week in Panama city with hundreds of middle schoolers and I'm still wrapping my mind around all that happened there. I can't believe I got to be a part of all that God did this past week. It blows me away how mature our ministry is becoming. We're seeing high schoolers reach out to middle schoolers and teaching them and I'm seeing younger students grasp concepts that there's no reason they should be able to grasp. They're opening up about things that they wouldn't have a year ago and I contribute that greatly to the boldness of the staff to address the hard issues and give the students the platform for big confessions and complete honesty about their lives.

Overall, this year was much more spiritually heavy. The spiritual warfare was crazy. We definitely went beyond surface level Christianity and traveled to the depths of some of these kids' souls. I could see hardened hearts in these kids that were being kept shut. But I also saw these hearts start to be softened by the Spirit. Not every kid accepted Christ that I had prayed for, but I'm trusting God. He's bigger than the Gauntlet.

God taught me so much this past week and I think I'll dedicate some posts later in the week to talk about some of that, but overall, the main issue has been to just do what God wants me to do and trust Him to take care of the rest. Trusting God has definitely been my theme of the week.

In my quiet time this morning I read about the parable of the mustard seed and the leaven. And I want to talk about this for a second to encourage any youth leader that might be reading this. In this parable Jesus explains how the smallest of things can have the biggest results. So if you feel like you didn't accomplish anything with your kids this week, don't get discouraged. I know exactly how you feel. Far too often I feel like there's really no point in even working with them. But just remember that it might take a while to see it, or you might not ever see it, but some small thing you said or did this week stuck with those kids.

I got the privilege of getting to see this when I got to serve my kids on Tuesday in a way God showed me to, and then I saw it demonstrated in the lives of two of them on Thursday. And the things is, those kids didn't even realize that that's what happened. And I know that happened more than just that one time too. It has or will happen in the lives of your kids too. What you did mattered this week. And that'll be true outside of youth camp too. God uses the little things.