Posted by Rebecca Leland
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He couldn’t concentrate, ran around non-stop, and refused to stop coming back to talk to me at the end
of class. “I want to learn about God,” Jordan (name changed) would say, each time I gave a Gospel invitation and he came back. Each week this happened, I explained the Gospel and asked him questions… Jordan answered them all perfectly.
Each week, the script was the same: “Have you ever believed in Jesus before to take away your sins?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
“OK…why not?”
I never want to pressure a child, but this usually indicates a breakdown of understanding somewhere.
And this was where the script varied. “Because I want to live for a hundred years like a superhero in my comic book!” “Because I like dinosaurs.” “Because I want to do it at home (but he never did when asked the following week).
Faced with such answers, how would you respond? I did my best: I prayed, listened, re-explained the Gospel-centric Bible verses… but each time, he had the same (yet highly varied) responses.
Finally, my cO-teacher told him, “Jordan, we want to talk with you about dinosaurs all day long! But this time in the schedule is an important time. If you don’t want to have your sins forgiven, then talk to us at other times. But if you want your sins forgiven, then come back and we’ll talk at this time in the Bible Club.”
Jordan stopped coming back to talk to us. He showed me comic books at other moments when I saw him, but that was it.
One week, Jordan accompanied five other children to talk with me right after the Bible lesson. All the other four could not seem to sit still. I did my best to corral their energy into talking about God, I showed them object lessons that tied into the Gospel message, but they seemed more interested in running around than in listening. One by one, I sadly sent them back to the main class. Finally, I was faced with Jordan. Frazzled from the last 20 minutes of trying to calm four hyperactive children, I faced him with, I’m certain, a rather wild look on my face. “Hi, Jordan, why did you want to talk with me?” I asked.
He looked me squarely in the eye, all hyperactivity gone. “I want to believe in Jesus to take away my sins. But first I need to use the bathroom.
”I have two rules: 1) never keep a child from using the restroom unless you want an accident on your hands, and 2) never delay a child from accepting Jesus as his Savior. In this case, I decided to trust that if Jordan was serious this time, he’d remember. “Go, use the restroom, come right back,” I encouraged. He was back within three minutes.“He died and came alive again to forgive me, I want him to do that for me. I’ll go stand in the corner and do it.”
“Uh…OK…go stand in the corner…I guess.”
He came back, smiling confidently. “I believed in Him—He forgave my sins. Of course, Jordan would do things in his own way, at his own time. But in the end, it was really God’s timing. There was no way he’d been ready before this moment—but while Jordan continued coming to club, bringing dinosaur and superhero books, and learning about God as well, Jordan never came back to talk to me at the end of Bible lesson again. He didn’t need to: all his sins were forgiven.
