But We Want To Come

On Wednesday night, our smaller church shares a fellowship meal with each other and with the kids of our neighborhood. Nothing fancy, here's how you'd know - I cook. But it gives the kids a good meal, their parents a break, and leads in to our missions organizations for boys and girls. We've been doing it for years.

Last night we had black-eyed peas and rice, along with cornbread and some other dishes brought in by our folks. I had to cut and run to worship practice so I didn't get to hear how the kids fared. Did get to taste the peas later, and you could tell Bunny supervises all my cooking because they were good.

In prayer group they told me that we had over 30 children here last night. To put that in perspective for you, only 4 or 5 of those are from families of kids whose parents or grandparents go here. The vast majority are kids from the neighborhood. They outnumbered the adults by plenty too. It was awesome.

God must really love us, to trust us with telling those kids about Jesus.

This coming Wednesday night is the night before Thanksgiving, and we have learned over the years that turnout from adults is low and so since many of our volunteers are gone, we don't meet that night.

But last night, when our RA leader Joe Stoy told the kids that, they said, "why?" Joe explained and they looked at him and said "But we WANT to come here." He told them that if they were here, he'd be here too.

I am so thankful for the people God has placed here at New Hope. This is often a tough place that demands a lot of our volunteers. Lost people, kids or not, have a disturbing tendency to act, well, lost.

But love wins, friends. Love wins.

And as long as we have people like Joe loving lost kids like that, we're going to see God smile on a place called New Hope