After needing some weeks away to spend with the Lord, I now have some time to update you on what happened in my trip to Southeast Asia (aside from the encounter with Jesus in the orphanage – which you can read about here).
Our main portion in Thailand was speaking in schools. We would come in, entertain the children with games and songs, teach them English in smaller groups, and finally we would preach a message from the Lord. This all made sense hearing about it, but the kind of responses we would get in those children were far from any of my expectations. We tend to have such low standards on what God wants to do that many times we are blown away because He had something much bigger in mind all along.
Every school we went to had kids just anxious to see what the foreign Americans had brought them.
A program would start with us introducing ourselves and what we loved to do. Some of these ended up being really humorous to the children.
After our introductions had finished, we would commence the gaming! The children had such a fantastic time playing games with balloons, ping pong balls, and even styrofoam rocket launchers.
As the games ceased, fun continued with dances and songs!
After the music and laughter, it was time for Jesus to come into play. This would come so unexpectedly because the children were only focused on how fun it was, not how life changing the event may be. As a message would be told to the kids, all of them listened intently as life was entering their spirits.
The message was simple. Many of these kids have hard lives at home with parents who abuse drugs and overall live hard lives where affection isn’t given much.
“Who here would like to feel the love of their mother or father again?”
This was all it took to have children break down into tears at the thought that they were loved by someone they hardly even knew. Just like the orphanage experience, we became Jesus to those children as we came up to them and they to us to receive love from the only One who knew how to love perfectly.
As much as I knew that God would move, I never would have expected He move like this. These children had experienced pain beyond what some of us may know ourselves and yet God Himself would take a moment of time to show someone who felt like a piece of dirt that they were worth more than the stars in the sky. This is how great Jesus is. I wouldn’t be wanting to do anything else with my life than to serve the One who is capable of mending even the most broken of hearts. A decent god would give good gifts to those who could act right in their eyes, but a perfect God would choose us amidst all we have done and all we have experienced around us. Yes, we might be “made from the dust of the Earth…” but to God, we are more than just dirt. We are His.
Do you realize your worth to God? Do you know you are valued beyond fathom? No matter who you are, where you are, or what you’ve done, at a place of repentance and receiving we can realize our true meaning of life in this universe. We live to know Him.