Lift your eyes

Some good, funny, and others crazy

Quiet, serious and terrifyingly weighty

From the highest high, falling fast,

To the lowest low, when in my own strength

The disappointments, hurts and wounds

From rebellion, abuse continuing in painful cycles,

Fatherlessness, teen pregnancies and drugs

Bondage, brokenness, evidence of a terrible dieses

Sinking fast in my own unrighteousness

No way to prevent or for damage control

I am as broken as they, lost in this world

Tossed by the waves, of these rapid pains

But there is one, who stands above

Whose grieves and hurts we cannot describe

He was broken over our broken state

He bled over our dark lives

His love reached out, to touch us

His righteousness alone, covered us

His life redeemed our very souls

Arise, His precious child

Lift your eyes, to the King on high

The reason behind everything

It was a typical Friday night and the kids where spiraled across the floor after finishing up our group bible study on the story of Peter walking on water. The instructions had been for them to choose a part of the story that they would take away from this evening. They were also told that if they wanted to have the opportunity to prayer about it with a leader they were welcome to that. The leader of the bible study had previously told me that she had asked God to be able to see just one kid who desired to be prayed for.

I proudly watched them as they focused and carefully thought as some eagerly and some more hesitantly wrote out their thoughts. I wondered over to one of the younger boys struggling with this activity and tried to help prop idea by asking him questions. As we finished one of my girls walked over to me with a very determined expression on her face. I assumed she was going to ask for permission to get a drink or use the washroom or something of the typical nature but instead she asked if she could share what she wrote and if I could pray for her.

We went to the edge of the room and I told her how proud I was of her for coming forward. This young girl has been growing in leaps and bounds since last year. She has such an interest and desire to learn and is always fully participating and asking questions without any hesitation. Yet she comes from such a broken place, a place of family members being involved in gangs and having been in and out of jail. Her life is filled with lies and poverty of true value and respect. I asked her what she took from the bible study and how I could pray for her. She opened her paper to reveal the words, “Oh you of little faith, said Jesus, why did you doubt”. I want to have more faith in my life, even when things are hard, I want to believe that Jesus is with me and I want to not doubt.

Oh what a childlike faith! The deep desire for faith, if she only knew the depth of her own words.

Bitter reality

It’s was one of those days that at the end of the day, as I board the bus on my way home I could do nothing but tune out. I turned out from the noise and the business, closed my eyes and wept inside. Silently praying against all the wrong, wickedness, difficult circumstances, pain and wounds that were brought to my attention this week.

It was a heavy week, difficult choices being made my kids in camp, disunity in community, hurts between team members, unexpected pregnancies in past kids and leaders, walking with fellow interns through hard personal decisions, kids having to leave camp for broken family reasons, bitterness building in hearts and insecurities destroying courage. My heart aches for the hurts that I see happening in or against people in my life.

Tears, lots of tears, grown men crying and becoming broken before God, young men crying over bad decisions, tears because of hurt and offenses, of pain and misery. Tears of reality.

What do you do with so much wrongness? The longer I am here the more I realize the answer is nothing. I can do nothing, I can only pray that God uses these things that seem so wrong and so messed up, lives ruined, destroyed and damaged to make them beautiful in His time. That He uses all of the pain and all of the hurts and all of the hardships for the purpose of drawing His own to the foot of the cross where they can rest secure in the Savior’s loving arms. This is my prayer.

Leadership retreat

As a second year intern I have not only the responsibility but the opportunity to help lead weekend leadership retreats for our high school aged street leaders. 

This weekend was went up to the great white north also known as Muskoka and had an awesome opportunities to continue building relationships, encourage them spiritually but also to experience with them a weekend of leadership training provided by Muskoka Woods.  

Their beautiful leadership studio has a motto of "A leader is some one who looks at their world and say it doesn't have to be this way and does something about it".

This weekend we experienced a jam backed schedule Friday night till Sunday afternoon of studying Shackleton an explorer in 1922 who lead an 28 men through an incredible, inspiring journey to the south pole. Even though Shackleton never completed the purpose and goal of his journey to the south pole he did complete his own personal goal of bring back every single one of the 28 men alive which is something that rarely happened on these excursions in that time. We learned how to chart a course using only a map and ruler, experienced the personal roles of the 28 men and talked through the many challenges and unique way Shackleton had of leading.  We also talked about self leading, personality types using the DISC test and spend an afternoon building a very challenging bridge representing the fact that as a leader you also need to be a bridge builder for your team.  

Beyond all of this my favorite part of the weekend was during of debreifs a time when we sat down and reflected on what we learned and shared. As normal people tend to be afraid to speak up and share their thoughts and ideas but our trainer had an extraordinary gift of calling people out and asking the right questions to help them working through the things they were learning as well as challenging them to not stop there. One young lady who was only 14 was very hesitant and also said statements like "I don't have a dream", "I don''t know", "There is nothing I want to do".  As she kept prodding it was discovered that she did have a dream, in fact a very big, very specific already thought out plan. She wants to go to Korea and teach English in grade two and has already started learning some Korean.  The debreif times are designed not only to help discuss the things we learned but to ignite passion, to give room to voice dreams, step out of boxes and to be stretched to confidence. 

As we finished this weekend before we walked over the suspended bridge to represent us as bridge building leaders as re entering the world that we came from we each had to stay one thing we would as a leader say doesn't have to be this way because we are going to do something about it. These young leaders also have coaches who will be checking in with them and helping them to be moving forward in their communities to be involved in a leadership role of some kind and to start chasing their dreams.