look what He did!

I taught Sunday School today for the first time in six months...

Wow, the girls have changed! I'm so excited to see so many of the younger girls really stepping out in their relationships with Christ in the 6th and 7th grade! I bet they have no idea how abnormal and how amazing it is... and how much of an encouragement. I can't tell you how many times Jillian and Erin and I prayed for them and for motivation for ourselves - a year ago, they were a hard lot of girls, the class had cliques, and people kept leaving because nasty things would be said between groups (I think this is the reason people steer clear of working with Junior High groups... there's a LOT of drama and it's really hard!).

Anyway, over this past year I've been praying Colossians 1:9-10 for them and I shared that with them today. It's been so great to come back over this break and see them living for God. Over the summer, FLOW brought an end to a lot of the disunity between the girls (they ended up hanging out a lot because all of them were in the same group) and perhaps instigated some growth. The majority of them seem to be "walking in a manner worthy of the Lord" and it's refreshing to see. I know I wasn't even close to that maturity in Junior High... I didn't get the relationship aspect of Christianity.

The lesson itself wasn't great. I'm not the most wonderful of teachers but I also didn't feel like I got to say what I was trying to say. The high school class joined ours because both their teachers were out and though there weren't many of them, they disrupted the class by ignoring whoever was speaking or playing with phones or cameras. I'm hoping that the younger girls provided a good example to the older ones and were able to influence them positively. Though I don't know them very well, I know that I'll be praying for growth in these seemingly quite hard hearted young ladies. If what's happened in the past year is any indication, God can do some really big, amazing things.