I was the speaker at a middle school camp all last week. It’s a pretty sweet gig because my family gets to tag along.  During one of the days we had some time and took the kids to a beach near Tacoma.  While the kids hunted for crabs, Miriam and I spent the afternoon searching for sea glass. As we were collecting it, I felt I needed to use it during my message that evening.  The message was about the sinful woman (Luke 7: 36-50) who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and breaks open a bottle of perfume to anoint his feet. It was a message calling for these students to lay their own brokenness, wounds,  and pain at the Lord’s feet.

As I was talking that night, I brought out the glass and began to form it into the shape of the cross on the ground. Then, what happened next was all of the Lords doing. I offered an opportunity for the students to come up and to simply kneel at the broken cross, offering their own brokenness to the Lord.  It was quiet for a moment, then something in the room broke open.  Not something out loud, it was something breaking within the hearts many of these students. Tears began to come.

I’ve been through emotional services before, but this was something completely different. It was a real, raw, painful hurt that just came gushing out. I’ve never been around something so filled with agony and yet so healing at the same time. The The Lord made his presence known and touched many of those students that night. When you open yourself up to the Lord and experience Him you always walk away changed.

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Tags: broken, brokenness, camp, cross, healing, Jesus, life, Ministry, pain, raw, real, story, youth ministry

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 5:02 am and is filed under Blogroll, Christianity, Jesus, Uncategorized, broken, cross, general, life, people, religion, youth, youth ministry.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.