God So Loves the Children
page 1 of 3by Roxanne Grego
More from Urbana 93
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I was a child of ten years old when my comfortable world was suddenly shattered. I remember clearly the day when my mother got out of the car. I was sitting in the back. She got out, shut the door and waved, and my father said, "We'll pick you up at two." And she never came back. And my father searched for her and a couple months later found out where she was and discovered that she had left us for another man.
Two years later, my father remarried, and it was a disaster from the beginning. They constantly fought like cats and dogs all the time, and there was a constant threat of divorce, and my father beat my mother. And I would go to my room often and just cry and cry. And sometimes I would say, "God, why don't you do something about this? Can't you do anything? Don't you care?" I often contemplated suicide.
Every summer I visited my brother and sister and brother-in-law in Toronto which is just three and a half hours away from where I was living. And every summer it was the same thing. They were into drinking and doing drugs and smoking and swearing a lot. I remember sometimes I would sit there with a pillow over my mouth so that I wouldn't have to smell the marijuana in the air.
But when I was fifteen I went to visit them as usual for my summer vacation. And this time it was different. This time there was no smoking. There was no alcohol. There was no swearing. There was no marijuana in the air. Instead, they talked all the time about Jesus; how Jesus loved them and how much Jesus had had done for them. And after two days of that, my brother-in-law sat down and shared a Bible study with us, and asked, "Do you want to ask Jesus into your lives so he can do the same for you?" And my brother and I said, "Well, yes," as though there were no other question. That day, we gave our hearts to Jesus. I have never been the same since.
And later, in the evening when I went to bed, I knelt by my bedside, and I just cried. And I cried and I cried and I cried. But this time they weren't tears of bitterness and frustration and tears of anger and of pain like I had cried so many times before. They were tears of joy because a burden had been lifted from me and I felt peace. I said to God, "you have done so much for me. I love you so much, and I will do anything for you, and I will go anywhere."
Two years later when I was seventeen, I was off on a short-term mission trip to Israel. And my team and I worked on fixing up an orphanage that was really run down, high grass that we had to burn down, and painting, and making sidewalks and making a driveway. And I decided that I needed to go to Bible College - after all, here I was in Israel, and I didn't know where half the places were.
After my first year at Ontario Bible College in Toronto, I wanted to go on another short term project, and I went to Mexico City with Spearhead, a short-term program with the Latin America Mission. With Spearhead, you are placed with a partner, in a home, a Mexican home. You work with a Mexican church. You learned a little bit of Spanish, a little bit about the culture. I worked in the Latin Church, and I was immersed by the culture, by the people, by the language. I loved it - I knew this was for me.
One of the people who came to speak with us was a missionary with the Latin America Mission, and he developed a dynamic program with working with children in evangelism and discipleship. And he said, "If there's anybody here that would like to come and see what this is all about I invite you to my home for a weekend." So, several of us took him up on it. And we went and spent a weekend with him, and he trained us and then he put us to work. We went out to the streets and gathered in a bunch of kids - about a hundred in all. We did an evangelistic program. At the end we gave an invitation, and all those children - about a hundred of them - raised their hands. I was so touched by how readily they responded to the gospel, and I thought, this is what I want to do the rest of my life.
Is there a need to work with kids? Is there a need out there? You saw the video. There's an incredible need, an incredible need.
This talk has been broken into three pages. Go to page: 1 2 3
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