Back from Northern Ireland and it was an amazing experience! It's been incredibly hard getting back into the groove of things--it's been like slow-mo at work this whole week. Hopefully Monday will be better...
Anyway, we saw one teen commit his life to Christ, which was awesome! We were having all kinds of issues with leadership and then finally one night, our assistant leader for the trip completely quit. She left the same night we had an evening church service. We had one of the groups from the drop in center (an evening hang out place where kids could come and play pool, buy snacks, chill with their friends, get on the computer, etc) come to the service and this teen boy sat behind me. His name is David and he was always super nice and not so rough around the edges. Anyway, he came up to me after the service and insisted I go with him downstairs while everyone else was hanging out in the community hall having tea.
Reluctantly, I followed him downstairs, preparing myself for anything. We sat down in the foyer of the building and he told me- with a sparkle in his eye and a giant grin on his face- that he had prayed for Christ to come into his heart and said he wanted to be a Christian.
I was over the top excited for him! I had been talking with him all week and he seemed like he had a belief in Christ, but he told me he had never made the commitment to follow Him.
After that I took him around to each of my teammates and introduced him as our new "brother" in Christ. It was amazing.
Beyond that, each night was filled with conversations with kids who were entrenched in the Troubles and tensions over in Northern Ireland. Though kids might call themselves "Catholic" or "Protestant" it's more of a political affiliation than anything else. Sort of like "who do you support?" when it comes to football (soccer). They might say they belong to a religion, but there's nothing really there. They drink (underaged in most cases), smoke, do drugs, have orgies and sex, break the law; basically anything that makes them "cool" in their friends' eyes. Many don't have hopes for the future and their only ambition is to shoot a Catholic in the kneecaps. (Most of the kids we worked with were "Protestant" or "Loyalists."--Loyalists don't want to see the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland rejoined and generally view Catholics the way Whites used to view Blacks in the South back in the day).
It was terribly sad and hard to comprehend why the kids harbored such hatred in their hearts for people just like them. Why they could possibly follow a fallacious statement such as "all Catholics are murderers" basing their facts on previous incidents.
I'm going to continue to pray for Ireland, the teens in Ballymoney and the youth workers staying there. The country needs its youth to be healed or healing will never come to the country itself.