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Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's April 23, 2006 Youth Sunday worship service. Faith Bethel Youth Sunday – April 23, 2006 By: Jordan Sherrod Well I’m guessing that you guys were probably looking forward to not having a Sherrod preaching to you today, but I guess you just can’t escape. Okay…so we have heard it a million times: faith is “believing in something you can’t feel, taste, smell, hear, or see.” I don’t know about you, but faith really just isn’t that simple for me. I really do struggle to understand the full meaning of HAVING FAITH in God. I am going to tell you a story about my faith journey and how I came to have a new relationship with God out of a really rough patch in my life that I thought would be the end of me. As some of you may know, I had pretty much the worst time of my life when I was uprooted from my hometown of Arlington, Massachusetts…from my friends, my school, my security, and the only place that felt like home and was moved down here to Kingston. I can remember sitting around the kitchen table one night when we were still living in Massachusetts and my parents brought up the topic of moving. The excitement at the prospect of moving continued as our family toured what seemed like the entire country in our red mini van. Dad interviewed for many jobs, but we finally came to a small town in East Tennessee called Kingston and more importantly a little white church called Bethel. We then made the life-changing joint family decision to move there. Little did I know that with a personality such as mine, moving was just about the last thing that I needed. I can remember the exact moment that I got that crucial reality check: It was when I walked into my very first class at Cherokee Middle School and I realized that I had never before felt more alienated, more alone, and less like a hot shot than when being stared at by those 30 kids who looked to me like they would care less if they never saw my face again. My parents, siblings, and a few very close friends can vouch for me when I say that I had a lapse in faith at this point in my life. Not only was I angry with God for making me move at all, but I was also pretty perturbed that he had let think that moving was going to be a piece of cake. It was, as I said before, the ultimate reality check for me. My life was turned upside down and it seemed as though the hard times would ever end. And yet I can remember just being so frustrated because I knew that NO, I WASN’T THE MOST UNLUCKY PERSON OUT THERE, although it seemed to me at this time of self-pity that I was. It would be terrible for me not to mention the few things that I believe God sent directly to me in order to keep me sane through the fall of 2001: First of all, there were Nancy and Vic King who let Mom, Caleb, Hannah, Eden, and me stay with them for a couple of months while our house was being emptied of its old inhabitants. Without their kindness, we could have possibly been in a hotel room for that time, and WOW that would have been like the straw that broke the camel’s back! I can remember looking forward to coming “home” to their house and just sighing in relief that I had a “home” to come to. Second of all, there was Bethel. Here at Bethel I really felt welcomed like I didn’t feel at all when I was at school. I will be forever grateful for the little acts of kindness that this church did for us. Although they probably didn’t seem like much to you at the time, they meant so so so much to our family. And most importantly there was my family. I don’t know how my mom did it, but she managed to get all 4 of us kids settled into our new schools/activities/etc. and she also managed to do all that junk that comes with moving. Now that might not seem like a lot, but you have to keep in mind that we are all pretty much at the ends of our ropes at this point. It takes a real special lady to be able to keep all of us from killing each other. And there was my dad. Yeah…just talk to him about trying to get our old house packed up while the movers who were supposed to be doing it were watching the disaster of 911 on our T.V. What a time he had with those movers who incidentally ended up like trying to run away with half of our stuff once they finally got it to our house a few days late…..What a crazy time. ******At this point, I must thank Dick Evans for being the pizza deliveryman at precisely the right moment that we needed a lawyer. And finally there were my siblings: Caleb, Hannah, and Eden. With all of our personalities combined, we somehow made it through those times of confusion, sadness, and hopelessness. Oh how I wish I could have just had faith in God. I mean it is terrible to say that I didn’t, but I really just can’t truthfully say that I did. It was probably my stubborn nature that kept me from just sitting back and letting God help me, but the only thing that I could focus on at that point in my life was the fact that I felt alone, scared, and angry. I look back and it would have just been a million times easier if I had just had faith in God. When I prayed it was more like a last plea for help. What was God going to do for me? He had already let me get myself into this mess! You might say that I have learned first hand to just believe in the power of God…. Now don’t get me wrong, there was no specific turning point for my sadness to turn into happiness, but as the cliché goes: Time does heal everything. I have come to believe that God did have a pretty good plan in mind for me when he sent my family and me to Kingston. There are so many things that I would have missed out on if I had followed through with my original plan after my first day of school which was to buy a ticket and fly back to live in my best friend’s attic. I never would have met all the people or had all the experiences that are so important to me now. I never would have gotten into band, I never would have started playing tennis, and most of all, I wouldn’t be who I am today. Moving was the thing in my life that really made me believe in God. I mean I believed before, but it really has been the drawn out miracle that such a wonderful life can blossom out of so much original uncertainty that made me really believe. So whether our Dear Lord shows his might with fiery chariots or the marvel of a once lost soul coming through the roughest part of his or her life to become the person that he or she was meant to be, God really does deserve for us to have all the faith we can muster in him. Amen.
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