Strep Throat as a Good Thing
February 17th, 2012It was a cold day in Montreat, North Carolina and it had just begun to snow. Two days before I was on a sunny beach in Charleston. Two days before I didn’t have Strep Throat. It exploded in my tonsils a day after preaching at Second Presbyterian and the Monday morning that I was supposed to set off to meet a half-dozen students in Montreat for the winter college conference. Even with a blood test and throat culture, the doctor wrote it off as just a virus, so I given some weak pain medication and told to ride it out. I now shuffled quickly through the blowing gusts and snow like an anxious zombie to the conference center to check in. I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t for the fact that I was leading a discussion group, daily gatherings of 30 students designed to help process the speakers’ messages. Apart from that managing that responsibility, however, I was basically useless.
Fortunately, I had the joy of seeing our Charleston students step in to pick up the slack. They grocery shopped and made a warm lunch to feed a 100 hungry students from the other South Carolina campuses. They organized carpools to make sure students could always find rides back to mountaintop cabin where we stayed. And can you believe this? They attended every single speaker and workshop available to them, using every opportunity to learn more as well as speak the truth of the Gospel into the lives of other students at the conference.
This demonstration of leadership continued into the next week during the first day of classes when we launched our back-to-class outreach campaign. Eight students spent much of a rainy day handing out 800 spiritually provocative fliers and working a coffee table giving away over 100 cups of good, free coffee. Students used those interactions to invite their peers to the Journey large group gathering and to have any conversations people were willing to have about faith and Christianity.
Even now, as the second semester is beginning, our student leadership in the Journey is talking about training up new leaders for next year. Please pray that our discernment would be Spirit-led and that as we prepare to say goodbye to our seniors, God would raise new leaders in their stead to be mature ambassadors for Jesus Christ.
