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| A Bus Full of Miracles |
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A very tired, but super-blessed, me is finally heading home. For the past month, I've been traveling with a bus full of miracles. Oh, you might just look at these 60 Native American/First Nations young people from 35 different tribes and not see anything that miraculous. Until you hear their stories. The young man who buried 14 friends and loved ones and got lost in a haze of drugs and suicide thinking. The young woman raped by a trusted loved one and sexually abused by others. The young woman who felt reduced to nothing by a father who called her a worthless mistake, who was crushed by her mother's suicide - and whose father offered her a rope to "go and do what your mother did." But it's a bus full of those very kinds of young people who I saw God use to do what virtually no one has been able to do - bring hundreds of Native young people to choose Jesus Christ. When they poured out their stories on ten reservations this past month, virtually everyone listened. Young people who, for the most part, listen to no one. But they weren't hopeless stories. They were Hope Stories! Because of a Savior named Jesus. Who has done what He promised He would do for broken people - (I will) "bind up the brokenhearted...comfort all those who mourn...provide for those who grieve...bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor" (Isaiah 61:1-3 ). So, the "worthless" girl, who was told by a hateful father that "you need a man to take care of you," now proclaims "he was right. I do need a man to take care of me. And I found one. His name is Jesus Christ, and He loved me enough to die for me." It is her pain that gives her the credentials - or "crud-entials," as I call them, to be an unarguable proof of the power of a living Jesus. But that's not unique to devastated but rescued Native young people. It's the experience of any broken person who brings the whole stinking mess of their life - all the sinning they've done, all the sinning done against them - to the feet of Jesus. Because He knows grief and pain and the price of sin on a level no human has ever known. He is, the Bible says, "a man of sorrows...familiar with suffering...pierced...crushed for our iniquities" (Isaiah 53:3 , 5). And it "by His wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5 ). It is Jesus - and Jesus alone - who can make the worst things that ever happened to you a door to hope for countless broken people. I've seen it with my own eyes.
2011 On Eagles' Wings reports: Reservation #1 |
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