Best Field Trip Ever!

“Listen, Shepherd…Rally your power…Revive us…Restore us, Lord…make your face shine on us…” Psalm 80:1-19.

I served as a chaperone on a field trip years ago that gave children who had never gone to the beach a day to discover that experience. The children came from families who used every penny just to feed their families. It was a very humbling day to see the splendor on their faces for one day, knowing that I had the privilege of going a few times a year growing up. One story that I still recount was when we were getting on the bus to go home, and I asked one little girl about her experience. She looked at me perplexed and said, ‘Mrs. Emmons, it was a great, but I know this beach was bigger when we got here than what it is now.’ You see, she knew nothing of the ebb and flow of the tides. She had not been exposed to that knowledge in her life. But in witnessing something new and powerful, she would never forget it because she experienced it. I’m sure many times after that day she looked for opportunities to experience that same event again. I wonder what impact that day had on her and it might have influenced her future.

There was another chaperone on a field trip back in the 1940’s. Dr. Edwin Orr, lecturer at Wheaton College, took a bus of students to John Wesley’s home. John Wesley was an English Anglican cleric and theologian who, with his brother Charles and fellow cleric George Whitefield, founded Methodism. Walking from room to room the students discovered evidence of the fervor of Wesley’s life. Wesley’s heart was on fire for spreading the message of Christ. The most notable marks of his life during that field trip were the two worn out patches on the carpet beside his bed. Orr explained that those worn impressions were the prayer marks of the time he spent on his knees asking for God to show His power to a disbelieving world. As the chaperone was taking a final headcount on the bus he noticed one student was missing. He retraced his steps and found him kneeling in the same spot that Wesley had knelt a century before. Respectfully, he gave the student a moment to finish his prayer and heard the young man say, ‘Do it again, Lord! Do it again!’ The two returned to the bus and the young student would never be the same and neither would we. That student was Billy Graham and God definitely DID IT AGAIN!

We can never be sure how God wants to use each of us. Graham was just a little boy from a dairy farm in Charlotte, NC. He had an open heart and spirit when God called him to set the world on fire. Every day is a field trip for all of us, if we will open our minds to the possibilities of what God can do through us to a watching world. God has been using ordinary people throughout time to do His extraordinary work. If we are fervent in our prayers, available in our lives and hungry in our walk God will certainly do it again!