I came into that Senior year really renewed by a summer camp I had attended with my local church youth group. I started out the year viewing my school as a mission field, and since this was my last year, I had nothing to lose.
My friend, Josh, and I were given leadership of the Christian campus ministry at Olathe Northwest, then called Club 121, from the youthfront days. On the very first day of school, Josh and I went early to the prayer room at our church sometime around 5 AM, then bought a bunch of cans of startbucks coffee shots and handed them out to strangers at school as a kind of evangelistic effort. After meeting people, we split up and headed to our first hour of classes. On my way to class, I turned a corner in the hallway to see that a classmate of mine had fallen down a huge flight of stairs and she was unconscious! A group of teachers gathered around her and called for the nurse and said she was unresponsive. As I passed by I prayed silently for her and once I recognized who she was I prayed for her by name and instantly she woke up. At the same time, my chemistry teacher from the previous year, who was one of the teachers tending to the girl, gave me the keys to his classroom and told me to go tell them what had happened and that he would be late. So, I went to his classroom, told them Jesus healed a girl that had fallen down the stairs and that Mr. So-and-So would be late! I heard the report from the school nurse that the student who fell was miraculously okay. No injuries of any kind! That was day one.
Day 3, I found out that I was scheduled to train a classroom of new students on some of the technology at the school. I had an hour every day with them for a week as my students. A few days later we had covered all of the material and I had one day mostly open to do whatever we wanted. The night before I felt strongly impressed by the Lord to share the gospel point blank with the room. So that morning I spoke to the teacher whose classroom I was using for this training and told him my plan. He agreed to stand outside the door and make sure I was undisturbed during my "presentation." I did it, while trembling, and invited every one of them to the dodgeball tournament at my church, and some of them came, but I didn't see any major fruit like an outward decision to follow Christ. But, I was obedient, and it caused a little stir. That was week 2.
A few weeks later, I got a call from my friend early in the morning and he had been strongly impressed by the Lord to share the gospel. The difficult part was that he wanted to share it from the top of a lunch table. I went along with it and we showed up to lunch and he was as nervous as I've ever seen him! He showed me his notes that he had with his Bible and he told me "If I get taken down by the teachers, can you try and finish it for me?" We counted to ten, and up he went. He shared for a good 5 minutes, but then as assistant principal came and asked him to come to the office, but he hadn't finished... As he stepped down, and people clapped, he looked at me and set his Bible with his notes down on the table. I then picked up his notes, stood on my chair and gave a brief (30 second) wrap up of his message as he was escorted to the office. I invited anyone to come to our table with questions or to come to our Bible study... but that was it and no one came.
We did a few other outreaches, invited tons of people to church, shared in front of a few more classrooms, continued to meet every week for Bible study without about 6 other students, but it didn't turn out quite like I expected it to in my mind. I even carried an 8-foot cross into the school on Good Friday, I made it 100 feet before being asked to leave. I thought through our zeal for evangelism that hard hearts would be made soft, and that lots of people would respond to our many outreaches, but we neglected prayer and missed most of the big picture.
My passion for high schools never left, however. I learned a lot from that year! And now I'm fully pursuing my assignment from the Lord to contend for breakthrough until that breakthrough comes. I've learned about the importance of prayer that precedes the move of God, and the big picture of what the Lord is doing on the earth in preparation for the return of Jesus. God has spoken many promises over the Olathe schools to area pastors, youth pastors, teachers and students, and I believe those promises are still to come and that every morning we wake up to pray at our schools is preparing the way for this mighty move of God.
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