Go Beyond

Starting this week, more than four-hundred Kingsland students and sponsors will go beyond our campus to serve around the globe. For years, our student ministry has mobilized, equipped, and made it possible for our students to engage with a world in need. If there is one thing our children and students understand, it is that God is using them to make His name famous.

This past week we sent a gift of $20,000, raised largely by our kids in Vacation Bible School, to our partners in the Miskito Coast. These funds will be used to add a new and fully equipped classroom to Instituto Vida Abundante, a school started by Alex and Laura Waits of Reach Out Honduras. This school educates Miskito kids who otherwise would not have an opportunity to go to school.

On Wednesday, I will return to Jordan with a team of high school graduates to serve Syrian refugees and displaced Iraqi Christians. The humanitarian crisis created by the civil war in Syria and the encroachment of ISIS in northern Iraq continues to dominate world news. Our students will have a front row seat to history as they personally care for those who have suffered unimaginable losses.

Other Kingsland teams will engage with at-risk kids in Houston’s inner city wards, with people in need in several locations around the country, and with hurting women and children in Nicaragua. For the next two weeks, our students will experience God at work in and through their lives in dramatic ways.

We live in a troubled world — a world where continued acts of violence, terror, and war rip families apart and destroy human lives. These despicable acts are driven by worldviews that have no regard for the sanctity of human life. These world views stand in stark contrast to the biblical worldview that compels us to move in the direction of the suffering to be the hands and feet of Jesus.

As I continue to travel the world to demonstrate and to speak about the hope that is found only in Jesus, I hear a recurring theme. In the words of a Syrian Muslim refugee who witnessed the abuse and murder of loved ones, “You bring us love and you treat us with dignity even though we are not Christians. You have shown us the beauty and love of Jesus without conditions.”

Please pray for the four-hundred plus students and adults who will demonstrate the beauty and love of Jesus to a hurting world. Pray that the entrance of God’s Word will bring light and illuminate hearts suffering under ominous darkness. We go forth longing for the day when the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the seas.