An Unexpected Opportunity

Last time I posted, I shared about my attempt at launching a soccer chapel at Truman and the difficulties that I had with that... In the meantime however, God has been working on something else without me knowing.  A few weeks ago, we planned a pastor's prayer event.  Our goal was to connect with youth pastors and pastors from local churches to pray for our community and specifically the needs of teens.  In a lot of ways the church is not very unified in our area, and we wanted to try to help this by bringing pastors from different denominations together for prayer.  We did not have a great turn out for the event, but one of the guys who showed up was Scott, the local FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes) director.  For over a year, we have been somewhat connected with Scott and FCA through a football chapel that they are doing at Truman.  Scott asked us if we knew the basketball coach at Truman, and he told us that the coach had him come out to speak at an event a while back.  He said that the coach seemed very positive about building character and leadership in his team members.  Through Scott, the door opened for us to connect with the coach about doing a weekly chapel program with his team.  He was very positive about us doing it and strongly encouraged the team to take part.  The first week, we had the whole varsity and junior varsity teams out for our chapel where we had pizza, a student from the Bible club shared his testimony, and Josh from our staff team shared the Gospel with the students.  Even though it has not been a manditory meeting, we have been getting just about all the guys from both teams coming out the past three weeks, which is usually around 23 guys.  It has been fun connecting with them, and we are slowly learning names and getting to know the guys.  Please pray for us as we encourage them as a team and as young men, and that God will work in their hearts and reveal Himself to them through His Spirit.  Also, pray that Scott, Josh, and I will be able to get together with them some outside of chapel time to get to know them at a deeper level.  It can be difficult to get to know them deeper when there are so many of them at the meetings... but that's a good problem to have!

Here are a couple pictures from a basketball game Josh and I went to.