YouthFire Blog

It’s after 2:30 in the morning on the day I’m supposed to leave for Mexico for a week-long missions trip. I’ve been mulling over several verses this week in preparation. Instead of a blog post this week with me sharing my thoughts, I thought I’d just share those verses with you. Pray about, ponder, and enjoy the following verses:

Romans 12:1 says, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.”

Romans 12:9-13 says, “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.”

Colossians 3:12-14 says, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”

I’ve had a problem lately.

I feel like my faith has really been lacking. While I believe God can do anything, I don’t believe He will. Take for instance, my roommate. She’s Mormon. While I believe that God can lead her to the Truth, I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s really discouraging to me.

The other day I went to a Dare2Share conference. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Dare2Share is an organization that goes out to various cities to equip youth to share their faith with their friends. On Friday night of the conference, two of the people in the youth group I went with accepted Christ. It was awesome! I hadn’t even thought about those girls and their salvation.

I was reading a couple chapters in Blue Like Jazz the other day. Donald Miller talks about how these two different girls finally became Christians. He talked about their hangups with Christianity. They were basically the types of people that you would probably say would never become Christians. They did become Christians though!

This coming week I’m going to Mexico on a missions trip. I’m in charge of food for the trip, which is a really huge job. There are 50 of us, so I have to make a list and buy for that many people for an entire week. Usually I’d go to Sam’s and spend between $800-1000 on food. That’s insane. Anyway, this year I had this awesome guy on my food team. He knows the owner of a grocery store, and this guy gave us chips, bread, fruit snacks, sandwich bags, juice, etc. It was so awesome! I think he’s also going to bring me more food today. Anyhow, this same guy who’s on the food team with me asked his church for donations just for food. We may end up not having to pay for anything, which would be totally great. That way we can spend more money on the projects for the people in Mexico.

Anyway, the point of that story is…I had given up before I had even tried anything. I didn’t bother contacting grocery store owners or anything, because I didn’t believe that they would give us anything.

Anyway, these 3 instances have renewed my hope. God can, and does, work in people’s lives. He pursues those we’ve given up on, and He provides when we least expect it.

Don’t lose faith.