You Were Hammers

Today's story is from Lori Murwin. Lori is the Director of Mobilization for NMSI.

Sa-wat-dee-Kah! For those of you that don't speak Thai, hello! In November and December, I had the privilege of traveling with a great team to Thailand, Philippines and Cambodia. One of the main reasons for this trip was to facilitate youth ministry leadership training. The US has 90% of the world's youth ministry resources but only 4% of the world's youth. If you understand the weight of this statistic, consider one more reality. Over 90% of all Christians accept Christ before the age of 18. So is there any question as to why it is critical to raise up leaders - pastors, teachers and ordinary people - to reach out to their local youth?

In Thailand, our team facilitated two separate trainings. My group went into the Lisu village to work with students at the local Bible College. The students were very shy and it was difficult to know if they were grasping the material because they were not used to answering questions out loud in a classroom setting. It wasn't until the last day that we got to see the impact of this training.

After we had distributed the certificates for all the participants, one of the students stood up and went to the front of the classroom. He said he wanted to thank us for coming and share something on his heart. He then began to explain that he thought of us (the trainers) as hammers. At first, we felt horrible because we thought he was expressing how difficult the training was for him and the other students.

He then said, “You all just kept hammering and hammering on us. We (the students) are stones. As you continued to hammer, you began to break us open. It was then the crystals and jewels inside of us were discovered." Wow! We were all speechless.