Early morning encounters

It is two in the morning. Our faces are covered with black face paint and the music is blaring as we roll into the church parking lot on this early Friday morning. Dread washes over me as eight fifteen-year olds pour from the cars. It is amongst an insane sleepover that I have brought these friends to pray at the church. They have spent the past six hours dancing, screaming, running through the grocery store, eating at Taco Bell, wrestling, and singing. The mere thought of asking them to sit still for ten minutes, let alone the hour I have scheduled here, makes me nauseous. They quiet as we enter the sanctuary of the empty church building. We are participating in the 24 Hour Prayer Vigil that happens overnight from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday here at Heart of the Rockies. Most of them have never been in a church before and we gather in a circle and I read to them from the Gospel of Mark an account of Christ's death. I ask them if they would spread out in the sanctuary for twenty minutes and be silent and alone. And when they were done they could meet me at the back of the sanctuary.

So for those twenty minutes I sit at the back of the room and wait for them to gather. And those twenty minutes pass and I wait . . . and I wait . . . and I wait. Before I know it, almost an hour has passed and the sanctuary remains silent. Part of me panics, fearing that these girls have run off, or are hiding or are off swimming in the baptistery. So I begin to walk around in search of them. One is seated only a small distance off in the center of a labyrinth with her head bowed and there is another girl who walks silently around her. And there is another who is kneeling at a table covered with broken tile pieces at the back of the sanctuary writing about the brokenness in her life. And there is a group of three who are huddled together, with their arms around one another, near the front. I hear them whispering quietly in prayer. And another is tucked quietly away in the darkness of a corner with her head buried in her arms. And the littlest one, she is kneeling at the front of the church, at the foot of the cross. And I can hear her weeping.

Time passes and the girls gather at the back. We sit in a circle and pass around lit candle and the girls share the movement of the Christ. They speak of a thankfulness of a place to pray and friends to pray with. They share this brokenness and the knowledge, the experience of a God who loves them within it. They talk of knowing the presence of Christ.

They didn't go to bed that night. My roommates said that when they got up for work at seven the next morning the girls were starting a movie. We went and raided the boys' sleepover on our way home from the church. We went to get ice cream at three in the morning. But when I drove them home the next day and asked for a highlight they said over and over again, "Our time at the church, praying at the church, being together in prayer, friends that I can pray with, going to the church."

I worry a lot about being cool amongst these junior high friends that I have built relationships with through Young Life. We create dazzling programs for them and attempt to wow them with our weekly activities. Yet time and time again, God shows me that these friends are longing for nothing more than an authentic counter with the living God; which they found that night in silence on the church floor.

It reminds me of the authentic encounter that Jesus shared with the Samaritan woman at the well in John Chapter 4. This woman encounters a Christ that when leaving she can't help but tell everyone she knows about him. "Come and see a man who . . ." And her entire village comes to know Jesus because of her brief, yet real conversation with him at the well.

These authentic encounters, my time with those girls at the church at two in the morning, I can't wait to tell others about them. Because as I have these experiences, I realize that the world, even junior high students, aren't looking for cool. They are looking for real and authentic encounters with the loving God.