Day 44 of IMPACT | June 16, 2015
Leading Discovery in a parish is a completely different experience than leading Discovery on campus. For one, it is definitely a large humbling experience to lead Discovery to older parishioners. It is also an inspiring experience, to be able to demonstrate how much God is working in the young Church (and for that I am truly thankful).
Everyone who knows me knows that I am a huge planner and always have a certain idea of how a certain lesson should run (especially Lesson 4, which we did today, and Lesson 5, the huge-ultimate-crazy-Jesus-is-amazing-be-the-centre-of-my-life lesson, which we're doing next week). Although that kind of mentality and planning works very well on campus, especially since on campus there tends to be more participants that are quieter and more reserved, it doesn't quite work as well in parishes (well, at least in my parish). On campus, sometimes discussion needs to be expanded in a certain way so that it fits within the hour time frame: however, in my parish, the opposite is true - discussion has to be cut short in order to fit the time frame (especially since many parishioners are running to other places or heading to bed early after).
Going in with expectations with Lesson 4 is something I naturally did tonight - after all, Lesson 4 of Discovery talks about Jesus being our Saviour and it's an incredibly important lesson to build up to Lesson 5 next week. Obviously, like every week, discussion was not going the way I wanted to go: there were tangents, people who didn't understand the questions, people who jumped ahead of where the discussion was going, and some who felt like they couldn't talk. It was every small group leader's nightmare!
However, it is in our trials that God creates good. While I was frantically trying to steer conversation back towards the topic (especially the Bridge, c'mon!), legitimately good conversations were taking place and the Holy Spirit was truly working. Obviously, God had other plans for Lesson 4 tonight. After the lesson, some of the parishioners walked up to me afterwards to remark about what a great lesson it was and how much they enjoyed the conversation: the same lesson that I saw as not going as great as I hoped.
The words of one of the CCO staff, when he was talking to me about mission back in February, always ring through for me: I need to plan, yes, but I need to plan to an extent that there is still room for the Spirit to move and work. I think I'm guilty of doing this so often - planning so much that I know what I'm doing, but I don't know what the Spirit's doing, or if the Spirit has a chance to do anything at all.
If He works anything like today all the time, He even turns the bad, the uncomfortable, the sad experiences and makes something good out of it. Ultimately, even if I feel like my words are not reaching people, they probably aren't - it's the Spirit that moves and changes hearts, after all.
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