This guest post is written by Christopher Kitchings, a volunteer Young Life leader and student at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
Campaigners went pretty well tonight. Actually, it went REALLY well. There were a ton of kids and everybody had fun. I shared my testimony with some thirty plus high school kids, and they were really receptive to it. The night couldn’t have gone better…unless you were Jayshon.
Jayshon is a junior in high school and two weeks ago, his six-year old brother passed away. He was getting along, although having a hard time, until tonight when he got a call from his mother. The call came towards the end of campaigners telling him that his grandmother swerved to avoid a drunk driver and ended up rolling her car.
Everybody was at Sonic when we found out. He was standing off to the side when I approached him, not having a single clue what the following conversation would look like or if there was even going to be a conversation at all. After a few moments of silence, I asked if he wanted to talk.
We ended up walking laps around the Sonic parking lot as he shared with me what was on his heart. In my mind, I just knew there was something I could say to help him out but I just didn’t know what it was. Every bit of me screamed for me to say something, anything to make him feel better, but words never came.
Instead I was reminded of Jesus as he was on his way to heal Jairus’ daughter and was stopped by a lady who, after being healed, just wanted somebody to listen to her. (Mark 5) I was reminded that scripture doesn’t say Jesus gave advice or words of wisdom or things like that as the woman told her
story. It simply says that she told Jesus her story.
As we ended our walk, Jayshon looked at me and simply said “Thanks man.” Before tonight, I never thought about just listening…just listening to one of my guys’ tell me whatever was on his heart.
Tonight Jesus showed up in my silence and showed me that sometimes, silence can even do more good than words.
