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miracles


the theme of our semester is discipleship: becoming compelling disciples of Jesus. in order to lead others into this kind of discipleship we need to be followers first. first followers...compelling disciples...major goals for the next several months.


last friday i did a short case study for our leaders on peter as a first follower who became a compelling disciple (did you know people lined up the sick next to where he walked to try to get them healed...crazy...acts 5:5). one of the things that stood out to me (again) with peter/the disciples in acts is all the miracles that are going on. sometimes i think we get bummed out because we don't see these kinds of miracles going on today, but i also wonder if we don't know how to accurately label miracles either. 


with that in mind, i've been feeling a lot of weirdness at UMASS Boston recently. weird conversations with other groups, one-on-ones that fell through at the last minute, even a crazy preacher who yelled at people for six straight hours last week. weird spiritual stuff.


and yet, i continue to feel strongly that this is an important campus in the city and an important campus for us to invest in, especially if we say we want to care about the neighborhoods of boston (lots of kids from these neighborhoods go to umass...for example in our core group right now we have two kids from dorchester, one from eastie, and one from cambridge...all local kids). furthermore, last week i had great meetings with two students that affirmed how good it is for us to be at UMB.


so, late monday when i checked my email and discovered a paperwork miscommunication that threatened to dissolve our organization on campus at UMASS I freaked out, but i also saw pretty clearly that, indeed, there is some spiritual stuff going on here. i am always hesitant to play the "spiritual warfare" card, but sometimes it is undeniable. 


we needed to prove in less than 24 hours that we had an accurate number of people connected to our group. at umass this involves an incredibly un-user friendly website that very few students use. before getting in to bed for an unrestful night of sleep I prayed, "the only way this happens tomorrow God is if you come through in a big way." it seems dumb because all we were asking people to do was get on their computers and press a button. and yet, i cannot understate what a difficult task this can be given the culture and nature of the school and the software.


most of tuesday was spent furiously writing emails, texting, making phone calls, praying, brainstorming names, facebooking, and worrying.  at 3, two hours before the deadline, we were still several names short.


somehow by 20 after 5 we were one over! people i hadn't been able to get in contact with for weeks suddenly were returning messages and following through. tim remembered a nursing student, tony, that we had forgotten about and tony came through with several people and is now one of my hero's. i was checking my email at one point and a confused student happened to be on g-chat and i was able to walk him through the registration process.  


in the end it all worked out. somehow. on the one hand it's such a simple thing, but given the context this was nothing short of a miracle. 


thanks to all of you who prayed for us throughout the day. miracles happen more often then we think, i think. maybe we just lack the courage to call them what they are.