Every Thursday night for the past three years or so, New Horizons Church has been involved in a ministry at Daybreak, a teen rehab facility here in Vancouver. The staff open the doors for an hour from 7 to 8 p.m. for Spirituality Night — a time when anyone who has checked in can come and participate in discussion about the Lord.
Rainier Camina, our youth pastor, and his assistant Cris Birch — both good friends of mine — lead the ministry up and usually will bring Cris’s wife Rachael and myself with them for moral support or to chat with the kids one on one and pray with them if they need it.
I am a firm believer in the Daybreak ministry and I love it, but I hadn’t been able to go for the past two weeks as I had been helping out with laying flooring at the church. This week I got to go back, and I did with somewhat of a bang.
Cris gave me a call yesterday around 5:30 p.m. saying he wouldn’t be able to make it as he was feeling a bit under the weather, and asked if I could take his place and be Rainier’s right-hand man for the night. So I called Rainier up, and he said he was just about to call me and ask if I would lead the devotion for the night and share a personal testimony.
5:45 p.m. was a bit of short notice, so I got to praying and went with the first idea that popped in my head…the omnipresence of God in our lives no matter where we are and what we do, wrong or right.
I picked up Rainier at 6:30 and we made the 20-minute trek to Daybreak. We prayed on the way over, Rainier helped me find the Scripture references I needed, and we were golden.
Once there, we had six guys who joined us and we made our way introducing ourselves to all of them. (I was particularly delighted one of the guys had ties to Longview!) Tonight we had a good crowd of people just hungry and willing to hear a message of hope…I’m not the best reader of body language but all of them seemed to need some good encouragement.
I only took about 20 minutes, but I crammed the Reader’s Digest version of the Reader’s Digest version of how I grew up in a Christian home but never fully stepped out on faith in my own until my early 20s. I spoke of how that faith paid off when I deployed to Iraq and God saved my life there on multiple occasions. Psalm 139:1-19 was the passage of the day, with David speaking of how he absolutely could not escape from the Lord and His love.
We all shared some dialogue about what we all thought God was, the choices he gives us in our lives, and how we are supposed to strive to live for Christ and serve others as well.
I ended with Romans 16:19-20, and paraphrased it a bit: “Be excellent and do your best with what you know is good, and don’t be deceived by evil. Enjoy the best of Jesus!” I encouraged the guys to seek after the Lord…if they didn’t know him, all they had to do was accept His forgiveness for their sins and commit to following His Word and they would be saved.
At that point, Rainier shared a short but brilliant analogy of someone trying to operate a complicated vehicle, yet needing a manual to do so. He closed by saying the vehicle is our life, and to get the most out of it we need to study the manual — the Bible.
Rainier and I then prayed with the guys, where four of them accepted the Lord as their personal Savior. We may see them at church this week…I pray we do. They were great guys.
Over the course of the night, I had shared that I was going through personal frustrations of being unemployed…that was my reality even right as I was speaking. But while sharing the Lord with the Daybreak guys, my faith was renewed because I saw what was truly important…people finding the Lord and wanting to know more about Him.
When a couple of the guys shared about what brought them to Daybreak, I couldn’t help but feel ashamed at the fact I was complaining about not having a job while I’m still relatively taken care of. It kinda changed my perspective and I shared that with Rainier on the way home.
It is times like last night’s Daybreak outreach that reinforce why I’m here in Washington, because even through helping others the Lord ends up ministering to my spirit as well. I am so thankful for the renewed hope for my personal life that the Lord blessed me with, and I am VERY thankful for the young men finding the Lord.
And to think the other day you were frustrated enough to think you should have stayed in Missouri. ;)
Sounds like a powerful time man.
In times like this, it can be difficult to remember how much we do have and these problems are only temporary. I have to do this everyday, and God always finds a way of reminding me that things could be much worse.