Middle School students connect with God

What a great night!

We'd been planning to do an evening of extended prayer and worship with our middle school students for some time. For the past few years, we've been incorporating experiential prayer exercises into our worship times. Not every student connects with God through singing, so a long set of worship songs leaves some of the students in the dust, and that's not good. A few weeks ago Kim D led a group of students through the process of creating prayer stations, and we used a couple of their ideas. That was cool!

Tonight was exactly what we were praying and hoping for.

You can see pictures here. Thanks Randy.

Some of the highlights for me included:

• seeing high school girls leading middle school girls through the communion station
• 6th grade guys lighting a candle while asking God to bring the light of Christ into the lives of their friends
• students writing prayers of confession, then burning the papers to symbolize God's purifying power making them clean
• students holding a rock that represented their burdens, then laying the rock on the altar, releasing the burden to God's care

There is a picture in the collection of me praying with a smile on my face. God spoke to me tonight about who He is, who I am, and answered a question that I've been asking for a long time. I found myself crying, with a huge smile on my face.

Oh yeah, I played guitar tonight, too. Woohoo! God is good!