My favorite Weird Al song of all time is “Another One Rides the Bus” (this of course is a parody of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”). I will often sing that to myself when we are stranded on the side of the road with our bus! But, that has nothing to do with this story…
My 2nd favorite Weird Al song of all time is “Albuquerque”. This song is probably rated somewhere between PG and PG-13 rated so please preview it if you plan to play it for your Sunday School class next week. This song is all about Weird Al’s fictional journey to Albuquerque, New Mexico and the hijinks that proceed to happen. When my kids found out that I had signed up for the Albuquerque trip way back in April, they were excited and made references to the song! A few weeks prior to the trip, we got an email letting us know that the trip had been canceled. I figured I would sign up for the next trip and I looked ahead at the calendar. The next available trip was to Colorado on July 10-14th. When I went to sign up for it, I found that the trip had already been filled up.
That was a bummer.
A few months later our church got a call from a small church in Columbus, IL to help run their Vacation Bible School during the same dates as the Colorado Crusade.
As I stated in my last post, this trip was a blessing for me. I got to experience a ministry road trip with my family and got to watch them serve and put others above themselves. One thing we stressed to the kids that went on the trip was that “We are here for them!” which is something we say when we huddle up before the first game of our prison visits. We say that to remind ourselves that we are there for the inmates and to tell them about the Gospel. I reminded the kids that the trip would be fun but ultimately, we were there to serve the church and the kids that we would be ministering to.
The week was a blast and I had fun seeing my family and my church’s youth group serve during the VBS. I came home tired but refreshed from the with my family and my church family on that trip.
I will never claim to totally understand God’s sovereignty and will, but it was interesting how God shut the door for me to participate in a prison trip but ultimately used those dates for something else. He is great!
Last week was hot here in the Midwest. When we arrived at Taylorville Saturday morning, they immediately let us know that the 2nd half of the day was canceled. This is always a bummer but was probably a blessing in disguise as it was going to be very hot and was likely to be an issue for the inmates, the staff, or us!
We lost the first game when the prison team rallied back and beat us with a walk off single in the last inning. In between games 2nd year missionary athlete, Chris Onken, shared his testimony. God worked in his life from being just a kid who grew up in church to ultimately understanding that God wanted more than just going to church. He wanted a full-time relationship with him. I shared the Gospel in between games and preached from John 6. In this passage, the people who had just experienced the miracle of the feeding of the 5000, had just caught up with Jesus and wanted another meal. We see Jesus explain that they needed Him for more than food; they needed Him to save them for their sins.
After our preaching time, we played another game and won in a landslide victory! After the game we huddled up and prayed with the men one more time. We stayed for lunch with the men and enjoyed some prison biscuits and gravy and pancakes! They were good and it was fun to hang out with the men for a little longer.
Overall on the day, we had 7 men indicate that they wanted to follow Jesus and we handed out 173 Gospels of John.
Tomorrow we are visiting Danville Correctional Center. We have been there several times and it is always a blast to enjoy the day and fellowship with the men there.
Keep us in prayer as we are planning to play four games and share the Gospel twice. Kurt Hand and Jeremy Haab will be sharing their testimonies and Drew Aberle will be sharing the Gospel.
Thank you for all of the continued prayer support this year!
