The Hope of the Nations

If there was a place I thought the National Youth Worker’s Convention lacked this year, it’d be in their Big Room worship sessions. They decided to, rather than expose us to different worship leaders from across the country, to have a consistent worship team for the entire event. That is, except for one evening, then they resorted to have a children’s choir lead us in worship. It was more than your average children’s choir though. These children were from Kenya and had been flown to engage us in an amazing worship experience with the Lord.
One of the things I’ve always looked forward to about heaven is the “every tribe, every tongue” verse. Though these children were leading us in our own language, their own language was prominent in their speaking and singing. You could see the zeal they felt towards the Lord. They were eager to share their favorite verses with the 3000 of us youth workers. We could only desire the same amount of zeal in our own children and youth and even ourselves. At the evenings end they skipped down the long aisle, through the arena, slapping high fives to all of us youth leaders who had crowded the aisle to get a better glimpse and even a touch of these blessed children who were so madly in love with Jesus.
I felt a great amount of emotion as they had led us through several songs. As they sang Mighty to Save (“Shine your light and let the whole world see”) I, possibly for the first time, could physically see and touch the importance of missions. And I’m not necessarily referring to our mission work towards them. That is, of course, important. But what they contributed to spiritually for me that night was unbelievable.
As they sang “God of this City, (“You’re the God of this city, You’re the King of these people, You’re the Lord of this nation, You are”), I felt a great deal of encouragement as I allowed these children, who had grown up in poverty and poorer circumstances, to sing over us. It’s amazing how often we, One Nation Under God, can forget about the fact that we are “under” anyone. To hear these children sing this over us was to hear, “He’s still in charge here, He’s still King.” It was encouraging and wonderful to know that though thousands and thousands of miles and cultural differences separate us, we have and worship the same King, and that, in and of itself, is all that matters. Christ is the common denominator... always.
I knew standing there that evening that I had received a little glimpse of heaven. I’m almost guaranteed to never be standing in the same state, not to mention the same room, with the same group of children this side of Heaven. I look forward to worshiping again with them someday, and I can only hope to have the same amount of zeal and passion that they had that evening.