Finish The Race

It's hard to believe that one month from Saturday I will be on my way to the airport to fly home. I only hope that the words I've placed on here in the first 3 months have given you some idea as to how enjoyable, challenging and life changing this trip has been and now I can see the finish line.

Last Friday night we had the priviledge of putting on, what we called, an "All Night Sports Craze" for high schoolers in the area. This is a night where the goal is to bring as many youth together, stay up all night, play sports and present them with some kind of message. This year was a great success. We had 188 high schoolers show up for this night, which was the most youth that showed up in the history of this annual event. We broke the youth up into 10 teams, played big group games and team games throughout the night. I will take a minute to brag and say that my team was the overall winner of the Sports Craze so if nothing else I have bragging rights over the other 2 members of my team! Most, if not all, of the students that showed up were from the high school that we held the event at. They recently went through the tragedy of losing a fellow student so it left a lot of students asking questions. During the night we had 3 speakers, which I was fortunate enough to be one, and we felt as if it was set up to share the gospel and share about eternity.

The first speaker set it up. He asked the students about choices and things that are important that help you succeed in life and ended by saying that there were people here that wanted to share something that would help you in a certain part of life. I was the 2nd speaker, speaking at 2:30am, and I shared what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians about athlete's running the race and more specifically about Paul training and persuing the imperishable prize in his Christian life. At the end I was able to give a simple gospel presentation to these 188 students. The 3rd speaker went more in depth about the gospel and about the eternal life in heaven a person can receive if they accept the free gift of salvation.

As I go back to the beginning of this post, I am reminded of what I spoke about last Friday night. It reminds me that even though I only have a month left, that I need to run it as hard as I ran the first three months. We have a lot of great things planned like a weekend retreat to Cody, New Hampshire this weekend, bonfires and hikes the following two weekends after that and anything else we can think of that can impact this tiny town for Christ. Finish strong, finish well and finish together. That's the goal in mind when I look at this final month.