Today is a strange day. I feel strange, and I'm not sure why. Stress, I guess. Even though serving in church is a joy and a privelege, it is stressful sometimes. I actually have two sunday school lessons to prepare, since I'm covering Todd's 8am discipleship class and teaching my normal 10:45 class. I'm confident that God will show me what He wants me to teach.

And since we're on the subject of God's direction in teaching, let me go ahead and tell you about last week. It's a great example of the benefits of obedience, even though many times my life seems to be about the perils of disobedience. We saw the movie End of the Spear on Saturday night. It was INCREDIBLE. That's all I'll say. If you've seen it, then you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, then rent it or better yet buy it, because I can almost guarantee that if you love Jesus, then you'll love this movie. But let me catch myself before I give the plot away.

Anyway, we saw the movie and it blew us away. I already had made plans to make my lesson on another topic, but God had other things in mind. I had been having a feeling that day that God wanted me to talk about something besides what I had planned on talking about. Sure enough, I read that day's corresponding proverb and verses were jumping off of the page at me. Different verses than usual. In general, I think that verses that stand out are ones that have a personal application to where we're at at the time. But these verses had to deal with the poor. So God gave me this whole lesson about the two sides of poverty: material and spiritual. It went over great with the kids, and another adult that serves there every week told me that the kids opened up more than she had ever seen them do before. So glory to God for His great lesson! I was so humbled to be used in such a way. And it was yet another confirmation that this is what God has called me to do. I so look forward to being a youth pastor. I'm just waiting on God to pull it all together. I know He has to knock off a lot of rough edges and prepare me for what He has in store for me. Waiting has been a character-building exercise, to say the least.