Have you ever driven a big city bus? I have. It was donated to my church when I was a newly minted pastor. The front windows were busted out completely but it ran pretty good. Who needs front windows anyway? Rick Long, my fellow-cohort-pastor-friend and I were determined to use this big bus to pick up people who needed brought to our tiny church every Sunday morning. Heck, we could pack more people on this huge white bus than were actually going to our church at the time. All we knew was that we had a bus! With or without a front windshield we had a giant bus!
Driving it to the church one day at 60 miles per hour I discovered the value of having a windshield. An angry wasp flew into my flapping-in-the-wind shirt and stung me on my back 6x’s. My soon-to-be-wife (yes, I was a pastor and she was my girlfriend…hubba, hubba) gave me some Benadryl which reacted with the wasp poison and got this preacher, well, kind of high. All I remember was that the room was spinning.
I fell asleep only to wake up a few hours later feeling all better. With a clear head a stark reality hit me pretty hard..I was an idiot. Why? Because I had a giant bus that I couldn’t use. Rick and I didn’t have enough money in the church budget to replace the rather large windshield so we ended up giving the bus away to someone who had a brain and some cold hard cash.
You too have a bus that you may or may not be able to use. That bus is your youth ministry. It may be running just fine but if your front windshield is cracked, shattered or gone you could be a danger to yourself and others. What is that windshield? It is your ability to see what’s ahead and drive to your destination. It is your ability to look ahead down the road called “time” and arrive, by God’s grace, to your ultimate youth ministry destination unimpeded by dust in your eyes and wasps in your shirt.
Can you see where you are headed? Do you have an ultimate youth ministry destination you are driving toward? Or are you flapping in the wind?
Get a windshield. Make the investment to install it. This windshield won’t cost you money but it will take an investment of prayer, creativity and strategy. And once you set it in place and seal it in don’t turn to the right or to the left until you get where God is calling the bus of your youth ministry to go.
