I can’t think of anything better to read as we kick off a new school year in Young Life.
My Commitment by Bill Goans
(Former YL staff and now pastor in my hometown of Greensboro, NC)
As long as high school kids mill around at ball games looking for love in all the wrong places…
As long as they desperately seek an identity based on the opinions of friends and reputation…
As long as kids limp through the stands broken by family strife, enslaved by drugs, alcohol, and sex…
I want to be found- not in the adult section where it is respectable and controlled…
but right in the middle…where passions, vulgar and profane, blurt out obscenity…
Where raucous and reckless facades hide wounded hearts filled with torment and fear…
Where the price tags have been changed and darkness confuses…
Right in the middle where God has positioned me to shine forth His grace, His Hope, His love and His truth.
As long as there is an enemy who can convince his victims that tomorrow doesn’t matter, that harm will not find them, that chains are like jewelry and cool is free…
As long as his lies leave character, soul, and life in ruins- when thrill goes ill and fun turns fatal…
As long as terminal is only a passage word to an eternity of one’s own choosing…
As long as God has rendered him a defeated foe using the weakest of us to shine a light that pierces the darkest places, that brings rescue to the lost…
As long as the darkness is blasted away by the light of the world- that Light that lives within all who know, follow, and love Him…
As long as there is such darkness…
I’ll man my post right in the middle of all that chaos, holding my position until he calls another play, and I steal home.
As long as we stand in such an important place, we must not forget what it means to be salt and light in this tasteless and dark generation.
In Jesus,
Bill
