Dear Church Family,

I’m so glad to be back with my church family after spending some downtime away. I’m refreshed and ready to start a new semester and year of ministry. I’m also excited about our Preschool Ministry building expansion. Thank you for giving towards this worthy project, and I would love for those of you who have not given to pray about how you might be part of this effort. I can just imagine the faces of those precious little ones when they see it for the first time!

Many years ago, I came to the understanding that our spiritual gifts are not for us, but rather to bless and encourage the Body of Christ. Well, when those who have the gift of evangelism use their gift, it really encourages me to share my faith as well. The following is a great story from my friend Ed, who is a true evangelist:

Soon after I began taking my book to the juvenile center where I regularly attend on Sunday afternoons, I met a seventeen-year-old boy named Alex. During conversations, he bragged about driving twenty-one cars (as I remember) off high-end dealership lots, but the judge had only charged him with the two thefts. It seemed obvious the adrenaline rush he had experienced was a major motive for these adventures.

When I tried to address spiritual topics, he blew them off as irrelevant to his life. However, he agreed to read my book. So, I gave him a copy and left. 

About two weeks later, I returned to the pod where he lived and overheard a conversation he was having with another “church” volunteer (Wyatt). He was telling him how the book had completely changed his perspective on life. As a result, Wyatt began to mentor him on a weekly basis. Through this process, he became a strong believer in God and a follower of Jesus.

From that time, he spiritually grew “leaps and bounds” and became a role model for other youths and even staff members. I sensed he might be an evangelist in the making. However, sadly, I learned while authoring this book that he was back in adult jail (now at age nineteen), again for car theft – but that Wyatt was in communication with him at his new incarceration site.

I didn’t hear any more about him for about six to seven months, but felt certain God wasn’t going to give up on him, as He hadn’t with me, and I fully expected to learn in eternity that God’s plan for his life eventually prevailed. 

However, recently, after I had sent my draft book for editing, Wyatt came to me at the juvenile center with an amazing update on Alex:

During the time I hadn’t heard about Alex, Wyatt had been conducting bible studies over the phone with him. Also, during this time, Alex began a bible study with about twenty men in his cell block. When the warden became aware of the impact this was making in the lives of the men, she came to him and said she would love for him to start doing the same thing in the jail’s other five cell blocks. So, Alex began weekly bible studies in all the jail’s cell blocks. While this was going on, Wyatt supplied about two hundred Bibles for Alex to use in both men’s and women’s Bible studies. This continued to progress to where Alex began hosting “church” on Sunday mornings in the jail chapel with fifty-sixty people at two services. Then Alex requested Wyatt send him an inflatable pool, which Wyatt gladly did. Using this pool, he baptized more than one hundred eighty people. 

The justice system has scheduled Alex to get out of jail soon, and he requested some of my first books that he can put in the jail library before he leaves. As a result of the huge spiritual impacts, the jail administration has told Alex he can come back in a Chaplain role after his six-month parole period.

Please contemplate with me God’s interventions that made all this possible. Here we have a seventeen-year-old youth with minimal, if any, spiritual background, who a judge sent to a juvenile center for car theft. When he arrived at the center, a servant of God gave him a book about God’s plan for humanity. As a result, God used the book to make Himself known and to forever change his life. After about a year of mentoring by another faithful servant of God, he reaped an exceptionally large harvest for God’s kingdom – and now, at age nineteen, with most of his life ahead of him, who knows what the magnitude of his eventual contribution to God’s kingdom will be. How can I explain this amazing story apart from God’s unfathomably majestic orchestrations?

Press On!

Mark