The Experience of a Lifetime

I got back on Saturday from my week with our high school youth choir strangely energized. I had gotten very little sleep the entire week due to my determination to have video to work with for our homecoming concert on Sunday. Plus, I rarely will fall asleep on buses. It's just one of those weird things. But, I had all the energy I needed to work feverishly on the video and got a 4 minute clip ready for Sunday (and for those of you who don't know, I'm a bit of a perfectionist so it took a long time to get it just right).

I attribute all of this to a group of amazing high schoolers who showed me time and time again the love of Christ on this trip. This was the trip that left us wondering whether or not we could pull it off. Granted, we have a lot of faith but at the same time you can't help but wonder especially when you're planning on taking this group of 58 kids + 8 adults to New York City. But it went well, drama was a minimum, and God is good!

The high of the week for everyone was at the Interdenominational Church of God in Gaithersburg, MD. It was a black church near DC that had hosted us in the past. And the Holy Spirit was alive and well in that congregation as we found out right away when we started. I was a part of the choir for the week so I got to experience this all firsthand. Someone would say a profound line like God would say, "Let me handle the truth" and you'd hear "Amen's" and "Hallelujahs" called out from the audience.

Now mind you, even though Christ Lutheran is a pretty contemporary church and we can get people clapping with a little effort, I'm guessing most of us have never experienced anything like this before. But it gave us that little extra and all of a sudden we were all feeling it. We knew that they got it, that they were feeling God through what we were doing, and all of a sudden we were feeling it more too because of them and their reactions. It brought everything to a whole new level. We weren't performing anymore, we were worshipping with this congregation that is so different than our white suburban congregation. We got it, we were all on the same page and suddenly what we were singing took on a whole new meaning. Granted, I'm sure many of believed what we were singing before but now we got to feel it in a whole new way. There's really no good way to explain it but I'm positive that every single one of us felt God that night.

The funny thing is after the show as we were talking and interacting with the congregation they kept on thanking us for being such a blessing and we were turning around and telling them that they were the true blessing for us. I felt like they had given us so much more than we had given them. They had showed us God in a whole new way that night and had also allowed us to see God in ourselves and in what we were doing. And that was perhaps the greatest gift anyone could have given to us, to these high schoolers. They were hopefully able to see that they could make a difference, that what they said and did mattered to these people and what mattered the most was that they were telling the story, they were proclaiming the Gospel. They all have the potential to be Christ to their neighbor. The church had done it for us and had shown us that we could do it as well.