Ripple Effect

When Sean Nine said he wanted to come back and find God, he meant it.

I met Sean during his junior year. I was at the park with some of my boys playing football. We met up with some kids from Huntington High who also wanted to play. Sean covered me (which wasn’t too difficult). He was memorable because he hadn’t cut his hair in a couple of years at the time. He looked like chubby Jesus.

A year later I was surprised to see him walk in our church. As it turned our Sean attended our church as a second and third grader. He had decided that it was time for him to find God, and he decided the best place for him to start was where he began. He was baptized and started attending regularly. With only two months to go in his senior year I found myself wishing that he could have come back to our group sooner. I would think, “If I had Sean in the youth group for all four years, he could have had quite the impact.”

I hate it when I try to limit God.

Pretty soon after Sean arrived he invited his friend Nick. Nick became a very significant member of our youth group. Soon after that several members of Nick’s family started coming. Rachel, Nick’s cousin, has a ministry to children and some of the international students at Marshall University. She brings many people to church with her. Nick also brought his friend Cory. Since then Cory has been baptized, and he has brought Alex, Vinny and even Ryan occasionally (not to mention the fact that Cory became a great leader in our group). Cory’s girlfriend, Whitney, started to come and brought her sister Katie and Anna (a foreign exchange student from Germany).

Let’s recap. All of a sudden Sean comes back to find God. Now we have close to twenty people who occasionally or regularly come to our church. That is quite a ripple effect from a guy who came back with only two months left in his senior year.

This week Sean is in Afghanistan trying to bring the light of Christ to a war torn and desperate land. For some reason God put Afghanistan on Sean’s heart soon after he accepted Christ. He’s not the kind of guy you would look at and say, ‘wow, now that guy is an evangelist.” But there is something special about that kid. He’s going to do big things for the kingdom.