The Boys of LHS Part III

Last night I was sitting around a table with some friends and I shared a little about my faith journey. I told them that I caught my first glimpse of Jesus Christ at a Christian camp in 1993. I told them that I was basically blind-sided by Jesus that week. I signed up to for the girls, and the horseback riding, and the girls, and the rappelling, and the girls. Jesus wouldn't have broken into the top 1,000. In fact, I remember sitting by one of my high school friends Lauren Lowe the first night at dinner. Someone stood up to pray for the food. "Oh man," I said, "you mean this is a Christian camp?" Of course I knew it was a Christian camp, but Christians were anything but cool in my book, so I was playing dumb. For Lauren and any other girls that might be listening.

That's the thing about the Jesus I met that week. He is totally cool with the kids trying to be totally cool. Totally cool with the kids trying to be totally unchristian. In fact, for me, that was what great Young Life was all about - being totally cool with the worst kids in the school.

The boys of LHS who climbed aboard the bus with us in 1998 were not the worst kids in the school, but like me, they were definitely trying to be. Sagging pants, wife-beater shirts, foul tattoos, fouler language. They were a mess. I remember talking with a parent of some other kid who was going on the trip from some other high school. He is now mayor of Lubbock. A very honorable guy. Also a very conservative guy with a very Baptist hair cut. I was telling him how excited I was to be taking the kids we were taking from Lubbock High. "Some good kids then, huh?" he said, shaking his head as if he understood why I was so fired up. Obviously he had missed my point. "No, not very good kids at all," I said.

God wants to call the worst kids in the school, and those who want to be the worst kids in the school. If you don't get that you don't get Jesus. But no worries, there's hope for you too, because Jesus has also come to call the people who don't get Jesus.

It's pretty incredible, but a lot of the LHS boys who climbed aboard that greyhound that night had never been outside the Lubbock city limits. They had never had an opportunity to go on a real vacation. Never been outside their confined world. I kept telling people that. "The moment the bus john rolls past the Lubbock line these guys will be further from home than they have ever been."

I was proud. What I did not know, however, was that in a metaphorical, but much more profound sense, I was about to travel farther from my own home than I had ever been also.