LESSONS LEARNED

One thing I’ve been learning over the last few years is that anytime we enter into a ministry or service to someone else, we’re also submitting ourselves to God for instruction. In other words, I might be doing a Kid’s Club for children on my street, but God is planning to teach me something in the process.

That’s what happened last week when our family opened our home for four days to host our neighborhood kids for a four day Kid’s Club ministry. We got the house ready, decorated the den with a large painted refrigerator box, practices our object lessons and skits, assembled all of our props and games and costumes and prayed for God to fill us with the Holy Spirit and bring the kids he wanted to be there.

On the first night no one showed up. No one. We were all ready to go and not one kid showed up. We were pretty disappointed as you might imagine. First of all, it made no sense. The kids were asking us for weeks to do this. We had passed out flyers the week before. We had talked to parents to make sure they would be in town on those dates. Wendy had even spoken to a few of the girls that very same morning to remind them about it. But still, no one came.

Later that night we got a call from one of the moms. She explained that Emily’s father, who had been on hospice care, had died that morning. They had all gone over to be with Emily’s mom and family and all of the kids were disappointed that they were missing the Kid’s Club.

Wendy and I have witnessed the strong sense of community that already exists on our street between various families and their kids. It’s not as if we were sent there to teach them about community. Not even close. What we’re seeing is that they already have a very powerful community built up and our hope is to become grafted into that community so we can share the love of Jesus with them.

So we decided to start over on the second evening and we adjusted our plans to turn a four day service into a three day service.

On Friday we had two people show up. One of them was Emily. We talked about how Jesus loves us and how he would rather die than live without us. It was like a private ministry targeted specifically to this little girl whose father had just died the day before.

On the next evening we had four girls. We shared with them about how the love of Jesus fills us and empowers us to keep on loving people, even when they’re sometimes hard for us to love.

On Sunday evening, our final Kid’s Club, we had six kids. Our hope was that parents would join us for pizza dinner and then stay for the lesson time and even play games with us. Only one parent showed up and then left before we started eating. That told us something important: that our ministry on this street was specifically about the kids. We’ve tried over and over again to have parents and adults join us for things like this and time after time it falls flat. Now we know that Jesus has given us a ministry to these kids and that’s more than enough for now.

During one of our skits that final evening I shared about how Jesus can heal the pain in our hearts when we lose a loved one, or a friend, or a pet that dies unexpectedly. One of the girls (not Emily) spoke up and said, “Can you work on my heart next?” She had just lost one of her pets a few weeks ago and was still feeling the loss.

The timing of our Kid’s Club, and our subject matter, seemed to have been ordained by God to address the very real needs of these kids on our street. He loves them more than we do, or anyone else does, and our calling is to show that love to them while we are there.

Another revelation to us during the Kid’s Club was how great it was to serve alongside our two teenage boys. Dylan and David each had their own object lessons and skits to perform. They both did an excellent job and it was a true joy to enter into this service with them.

Special thanks to everyone who prayed for us and for these kids on our street as we served last week. We appreciate your prayers going forward as we continue to seek the Lord’s guidance and direction for the future.

 

-kg