July 10, 2006

 

Dear Praying Friends,

 

Thanks for praying.  The battle is the Lord’s.  We see it so much clearer now on the other side.  Can I report what happened at Kids Club?  You stood with us, strengthened us, supported us … made it possible for these outcomes.  Thank you! Thank you!

 

 

A Changed Life

Victor and I were sitting outside the Hamilton’s house with the work crew. It was the last regular night of Kids club, before Lake Day. We were reviewing all that had happened this Kid’s Club. Few of us could really grasp the significance of the past two weeks. You would have to be able to go back to the early days of Kids Club to the late ‘80’s to appreciate what "God must be doing". Those were Victor’s words, "what do you think God is doing? And are we ready for this thing, that He is about to do?" He and I were referring to the extraordinary presence of the first generation of kids clubbers in my sixth grade class, sitting as group leaders. Veronica, Panda, Isela, Vanessa, Hao, Luis, Victor and Marcos … all first generation kids clubbers, four with children in the program already, now giving back, and some, coming back, like Marcos. Last prayer letter, I mentioned the cliffhanger. I am reporting the next chapter. Thanks for praying. We could feel it and God gave us breakthrough.

Marcos began Kids Club in 1988, our first two week kids club. He was nine. As the years went on, we tracked his family during many moves, included all his eight siblings and settled in for the ride of loving each one of them individually now for over 18 years. There are many stories to tell. When I first began to speak at churches or conferences, I would tell his story. No body’s life described the kids in the ministry as well. His spiritual hunger was undeniable, but the traumas of his life would probably end up telling the story. Could this kid be saved? Could any of our kids be saved? Life in the hood then, was only death. There were many years where it didn’t look like any of them would make it out, years we would be burying most of his homeboys.

Around 12 Marcos’ gang involvement and street life developed. It got really terrible. He wandered, and like he said yesterday, he eventually became lost. A terrible crime put him in prison for almost ten years. He and I tried to stay in contact but it was difficult. Like I said, he was lost. When he got out, it was only a few months before he came to see me. Victor happened to be downstairs in the office, and the word got to him quickly that his old homeboy had stopped by. I think we both thought that this day would come. How desperately we both wanted to welcome him home, to say he was forgiven to watch him wander back into the arms of his loving, forgiving Lord. And it really was something like that, lots of tears, reassurances, scripture, prayer … love. And then he was gone, for almost two years. Until a week before this Kids Club.

He had been calling me and I couldn’t find his phone number to call him back, so he came by the office. There was something different about him. A light shining from his eyes. I instantly remembered the scripture about the eyes being the lamp of the body. I had never really witnessed this truth so clearly until just right then. I blurted out, "Have you made a new "yes" to God, telling him something important … like He can have your life, something like that?" He smiled. Can I just tell you that this young adult hasn’t smiled much in the last decade, a smile of life coming from within, and now that’s what we were in the presence of. We prayed for him, welcomed him home, helped him get connected to GED, stuff like that and … by the way, "want to do Kid’s Club?" He said, "If my story can’t be used to help others, it will only haunt me". I want to see it help kids.”

He showed up everyday, calling if his ride was late and then finding a way there. His boys were really receptive to his leadership, and his gentleness with them was worth seeing. They learned their verses everyday, and you could tell there was teaching going on at that table. Sometimes they would have their heads together like some sort of secret was being passed on, the secret I would often overhear, was how Jesus is the only way … out!

The first day back of the second week, Marcos called me over, his hand in the air with something in it, just like the child I can still remember. Victor had been spending hours with him, in the van, on the way in and out of kids club, walking through the process of how God can really transform lives. He was telling Marcos how God had done it with him, how we learn to surrender all … how hard it is, but easy too … readiness is all you need. Lake Day baptisms came up. Marcos was ready, he said, he wanted to be baptized. He wanted to make his decision to follow Jesus, permanent and for "reals", and he had begun to write his testimony. That’s what he now held in his hand and wanted to show me.

The last day of class, Thursday, it is the day where many children make decisions for Christ. All ages. Vanessa was already crying. Vanessa is also one of our old kids and she is just months out of prison herself. It is perhaps hard to understand the destructive life cycle of a nineteen-year-old girl who has spent the better part of six years in adult prison. Could she find peace for her guilt and shame … was it possible that she could experience the cross. She walked up to me. "Help!" The class was hammering away on a piece of wood, a tactile engagement with the lesson and making their cross necklaces. The kids club CD was playing a lovely song in the background for today’s lesson.

I needed to find a little solace in this room filled with 60 sixth graders. Over there in the corner … I grabbed Marcos. "Ready to be a minister?" I asked this newly born again gangster. He had no clue what this meant but shook his head; "I’m ready". We sat at a corner in the back of the room. Vanessa poured out her pain. Marcos related to everything she said, responded with seasoned truth, comforted her, told her Jesus could and would forgive her, and that the guilt she knew could be given to Him. I didn’t realize until that moment that we were sitting right underneath the large cross that almost covers the wall in the worship room. Somehow she knew, like we had walked right there on purpose, because she reached up and touched it. To Marcos, she said, "at the foot of this cross I want to give it all to Him, to let him take my guilt and shame, but only if you will pray with me." So all three of us knelt at the foot of the cross, Vanessa praying out loud fervently, Marcos interrupting her, wanting to help her pray, praying himself with strength and conviction, my prayers small and unneeded, but allowed.

Both of them were baptized on Lake Day. Both gave testimonies of such conviction, so filled with truth, you had to be as lost as they had been to not be certain that "Jesus is Real". Only He can transform lives, can truly take someone from the old to the new.

"What is God doing"? This Fall Victor and I will continue to ask this question as we seek God for what he desires and how we are to prepare. All of the old timers in my class witnessed these transforming moments. "What is God up to?"

 

 

 

 The Treasure in the Field

"Jesus is Real" is the theme of this summer’s curriculum and just like it does every year it ends with a story that presents the way of salvation. We usually tell about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, pretty concrete and visual, after all, that’s how children think, black and white. So when Wayne finished the curriculum for this year’s stories, I balked. He used Jesus’ story about the man who sold everything to buy the field with the treasure. "The kids won’t get this", I complained. "It’s too abstract. We have to go back to tried and true." "No", he resisted, "This is the right story. Trust me".

The first time I told it during Jr. High kids club, I cried. It caught me off guard how powerful an illustration this story is of God’s love. The kids got it. They identified with the man who sold everything down to his shoes to get every last cent, because he had discovered on this land, this treasure. To think he might be able to buy the land and get the treasure was pure joy to him even though it cost everything he owned. "Who is the man?’ I asked the children. Somehow they knew it was Jesus, who sold everything. Every teacher asked their children, "Who is the treasure?" Somehow every kid knew. "I am the treasure!" Somehow in the vast scheme of things, Jesus said that I am worth it all and that He would sell everything to buy me.

All of our kids got to experience this amazing "Jesus is Real" discovery, not just the big kids. The little pre-k children (3 and 4 yr. olds) were also told about the field and the treasure. Their teacher, Jeremy knew this story wouldn’t be too tough for his kids to grasp. He didn’t balk like I had done. What’s ironic is that I somehow believed I was advocating for these very kids, the smallest of concrete thinkers. To illustrate … he hid a postcard size picture of his children in our big ball field. A field just like in Jesus’ story and then … out they went, searching for the treasure that is them. Not gold, not some fake jewelry, them, they’re the treasure Jesus paid everything for. And they found what Jesus is searching for, each one holding onto the picture of themselves, the treasure of God! I love this story!

Community

Over the years you have heard me describe the work crew for kids club. This 80-person team spends two weeks with each other and us, and inevitably leaves changed.

So much changes them. For suburban kids, who have for the most part been isolated from the harsh realities of the city, they are now forever what we call "see-ers". They can no longer live in their comforts knowing that so many are suffering right outside the gate, so to speak. One work crew this year put it this way: "I will forever remember these children’s pain. Forever".

For urban kids, it is almost always about their own process, how God is using them, and wants to use them. How trusting God and others is critical to making it as Christians. One indigenous leader articulated this brilliantly: "I am learning that in order for me to grow, I have had to accept that I need to trust others with me. This was so hard to do, because I have been so betrayed all my life. But I know now that I can trust. God is teaching me how."

But what changes everyone is community. Living together, finding that the only way to survive in mission is to do it together, standing alongside one another, always believing in each other. But this is messy. A few work crew had run ins with each other. Race comes up, life experiences, hurtful things. For the most part these were corrected during the two weeks. A few wanted to quit, but almost to the last, everyone crossed the finish line.

The diversity of this team is a wonder to behold. One work crew said, "this must be what heaven is like". Another whose grandparents were in Japanese internment camps was overwhelmed with the suffering of this community. Chol, the Sudanese lost boy (now a grown man) struggled with the anger in the African American community. One Native American leader couldn’t believe how another native leader could allow so much ethnic teasing, and some older immigrant leaders struggled with the apathy of the native born. Community is what we need, all we have, and will take a lifetime to learn to do it well.

Which leads me to love. One work crew from California, who has done kids club for three years exhorted us. "Do you know what you have here?" she said. "You have something here, in the way you love each other, that is unknown in other places. Don’t take it for granted. You love each other unconditionally and all of us long to find a place where that exists in the body of Christ."

Chol closed our night of debriefing with all 80 of us on work crew on the last day of kids club with a Sudanese song and Arabic prayer. He stood in the middle of our large circle and wove us together as only a lost, but now found person can do. "We are thankful, O Lord, for what you have done …"

 

 

 

Tying it all Together

 

Do you ever wonder how kids club ties in to the rest of the ministries of N.M.?  In one way it is the glue of the year.  There is a crescendo with kids club, a coming together that nothing else quite does.  People surface, troubles get exposed, mentors are matched, leadership is developed … in some ways kids club both kick starts and reinforces things we have been doing both for years as well as all year long.  There is always a “now what” now that kids club is over.  Here are a few:

 

• There are too many girls ready for the first five spots at Hope House, two more coming out of the pain of lives just today.  Pray for the critical decisions that need to be made for the selection and for the temporary living spaces for each girl who stays on a wait list until her spot opens.
• Interest in the two year internship is at its all time peak.  Pray for the fund-raising of six new interns, many of whom want to begin in the fall.
• The growth of the emerging leader category of the summer interns has led us to a more developed leadership process for the school year.  Pray for the final planning of this, for leadership camp in two weeks, for a CCDA youth contingent leaving for Tennessee in Aug.
• New life!  It births hope and vision for the future.  Some want to finish their education.  We need a new GED teacher, with our dear Simona leaving next week.
• As volunteer opportunities birth new vision, young adults realize they need work.  Pray for Manny, our jobs developer, who is working hard to get a few young men jobs, and who is also trying to get our new micro-business (Mi Nana’s Tamales) open by September
• Young moms get so much help here!  Pray for the young dads who still need a fully developed mentoring program just for them.  
• Headstart has a waiting list for the next year that is in place with no room for more kids.  One thing that happens during kids club is about 10-15 new preschoolers surface, as someone really falls in love with them, and begins to talk to their moms about our great pre-school, with no real spots open for these; maybe just one.  Pray for these preschoolers and the right one or two that will get in.
• And so it is with our other programs … I Can Do It, Jeremiah Project, Partners in Learning … new kids, old kids, needy kids, desperate kids, all wanting and needing help with their lives.  More kids surface, and more realities surface that can be met in our existing programs, but some needs will be met.  Pray for the convergence and the selections.
• And lastly, pray for the small group leaders that bonded with their kids and will make commitments to Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday night ministries starting in the fall.
• Please don’t forget to pray for our finances.  Summer is really expensive and this summer particularly.  And we aren’t done yet!