One of the great joys of being the Middle School Youth Pastor is that I get invited to the students' birthday parties. I get to meet their friends, talk to their parents, and spend some time hanging out and having fun. The moment I always wait for at the party (besides the cake, mmmmmmm) is the opening of the presents. It tells you a lot about a student to see what gifts they receive and how they react when they receive those gifts. You can see their heart and the type of person they are to their friends based on what their friends bring them. I expect to see clothes, video games, Legos, and other items of that sort. What I didn’t expect to see at a recent birthday party was Jolly Ranchers, lots and lots of Jolly Ranchers.
Steven Cummings is going into the 7th grade and has been a huge part of Fusion (the middle school youth group). He invited me over to bring some games to play and to meet his friends with the hope of some of them coming to youth group. I arrived as he was opening his gifts and, as with most people, he was holding court and loving life as he was opening each present. I observed as Steven opened his first gift; it was Jolly Ranchers. He was pumped! Then he moved on to the next gift; two more bags of Jolly Ranchers. Awkward. That is the same gift from two people. That is not what most 12 year olds want to see. To my surprise, he was even more pumped! Then he opened another, then another, and another; all of them containing Jolly Ranchers. He was thanking everybody who brought him Jolly Ranchers and he was so excited to have received them. I didn’t get an exact count but I would guess he got somewhere near 15 bags of Jolly Ranchers. It appeared we had a bit of a Jolly Rancher nut on our hands. I was clueless to what actually was happening.
As Steven finished up opening his presents, his dad John, asked the whole group a question, “Do you know why Steven asked for all these Jolly Ranchers?” No one knew; they all assumed that he just really loved hard candy. Wrong. John explained that Steven had specifically asked for Jolly Ranchers for his birthday presents so he could donate them to the Brazil mission trip. Josh Thorp, a leader in Fusion who was heading to Brazil, had told the students what the candy would mean to the kids in the slums of Brazil and how rare it was for them to get candy. This had touched Steven’s heart. Rather than doing what you would expect an average 12 year old to do, he decided to use his birthday as an opportunity to show love to kids he would never meet and to show Christ to the kids at his birthday party.
Steven took the king’s bounty of Jolly Ranchers to Josh at youth group that night. Josh, naturally, was touched by Steven’s desire to share his birthday gifts with kids in Brazil. In a culture where we constantly want more stuff and our birthdays are our opportunity to be materialistic guilt-free, it was heart-warming and inspiring to see a student who decided that even though it was his birthday, the gifts belonged to the kids in Brazil.
--Pastor Patrick
First Baptist website: www.fbcsalem.org
to respond to this email: fbc@fbcsalem.org
