One winter morning sitting in my office jamming to worship music while working on a number of things, a women came into my office asking if we would be willing to bring our teens to her nursing home to lead their residence in worship and then to spend the evening playing bingo with them. Sounding like a great ministry opportunity for our teens, i eagerly accepted the invitation.
February 21st, we left Northeastern heading for the Nursing Home which was about 4 miles away. Not having been their before we drove to the destination looking for a large building with a good size parking lot. We found nothing. So, we continued to drive up and down the road of the street of the address looking for it. Finally we found the street address on a tiny sign that was half coved with snow. We pulled into the drive way of what was a small house. Convinced this was the wrong place, i parked the church van and went to the front door of the house and knocked and was greeted by a women who had just as a surprised look on her face as i had on. After a short awkward conversation we both realized the same thing. Neither of us was prepared for what happened next.
I went back to the caravan of vehicles and unloaded our group of close to 30 people along with musical instruments and supplies, and we all entered this house which had 1 worker and 5 residence.
As we jammed ourselves into the living room which had just enough chairs for their residence i began to have flashbacks of spelunking. While the teens were getting "comfortable" i had yet another awkward conversation with the worker informing her of our plans for the evening. When i finished she changed my plans by letting my know non of that is going to work, due to the fact that the residence need to be in bed in 15 minutes.
We passed out the songs that we were planning to sing for the evening and our worship leader began to lead the 5 of them in some familiar hymns, while the residence began to fall into different stages of unconsciousness. To kind of redeem myself and put a spiritual emphasis on the evening i opened up a time of testimonies to allow our youth leaders and students a time to share what Christ has done in their lives. Once testimony time was over the teens were very ready to begin playing bingo... which gave me the privilege of shattering their desires by saying "it's time to go". It was interesting listening to some of the comments from the confused and uninformed teens. My favorite quote was, "Oh, we must be going to the nursing home now."
We packed up and headed back to the church. Instead of being back at 8:30 p.m. like i had told their parents, it was then almost 7:30, which gave me plenty of time to answer the student’s questions.
As, i look back at the evening i realize the valuable lessons i think the Lord was trying to teach me: Even simple events need a lot of preparation and always have a plan B.
