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Something Changed
By Joel Herbert
Little did I realize that all my life God was preparing me for moments when I have no words to speak. Moments when the words of a song seem to come down straight from Heaven, out though my mouth, and into the ears and hearts of those who listen.
After a year of training at a Texas institution called the Honor Academy’s School of Worship, I had the opportunity to be a part of something called “Teen Mania Ministries.” It’s a group that tours America and Canada holding weekend conferences for teens and young adults called Acquire the Fire. The team travels to over 30 cities annually, presenting the gospel to upwards of 120,000 kids every year. In my second year travelling with them, I was offered the main worship leader position--an incredible honor and something I still can't believe I've been able to do
I met so many people as I criss-crossed the continent. There are multiplied thousands of people whose stories could be told. I have personally watched them—young people all over the country--break, as they understand the overwhelming love of the Lord for them for the very first time. Stony hearts are softened, broken hearts healed, lies uncovered and truth restored. It’s an amazing sight to see. A miracle, really. But I want to share one story I’ll always remember.
Lessons from Nashville
It happened in Nashville with a guy I'll call Bryan. I was actually interviewing him as a potential intern at the Honor Academy. His answers stood out to me because they were so honest, forthright, and sometimes just plain bizarre. I'd never met someone with a history like his. Later that day, before I was to lead worship for the final session of the conference, he tracked me down and told me his story in its entirety.
He had been raised by his mom and grandpa, and remembers as a kid watching his grandfather continually abuse his mom and siblings physically. He hated his grandpa. He left home as soon as he could by joining the military out of high school and was sent to Iraq.
He told me that he had been trying to block one very terrible memory of Iraq from his mind. It was of a poor Iraqi kid who approached the border of the American lines with what appeared to be explosives strapped to his body. After repeated attempts to negotiate failed, Bryan's staff sergeant ordered him to shoot the boy. Bryan delayed as long as he dared, but ultimately he obeyed the order and pulled the trigger.
When they checked the boy's body, they discovered that he was rigged with nothing but sandbags that looked like C-4’s so he could approach the American lines, pretending to be a suicide bomber. I listened in stunned amazement as he told me the story.
Bryan was able to come home soon after that nightmare of an experience. He started dating a girl, and life seemed to be getting back to normal. But when she heard he had killed an Iraqi boy, she left him, somehow blaming him for the boy's death.
Not long after that he entered another relationship, only to have this girlfriend get pregnant with twins. Tragically, she wasn't sure the babies were his and left one morning in a spur-of-the-moment decision and had an abortion without his knowledge. When blood test results came back, they confirmed that the babies were indeed his. It crushed him and his girlfriend so much that she left…swallowed up in guilt and self-condemnation.
I didn't know what to say to Bryan. I couldn't understand it. I couldn't put his emotions in a nice theological box and hand it back to him. I was simply floored. It was so obvious to me that this 19 year old (yes, only 19) had a personal vendetta with Satan. I had no idea why, but it seemed to me that Satan had done a pretty mop-up job of making sure this kid would be destroyed. And yet here he was, in front of me.
I told him everything I could tell him. I told him I didn't know why all these things had happened to him, but that if he would give them to the Lord and let Him heal his heart, He would feel well again in time. I told him that somehow, someday, it would all make sense. Perhaps just the fact that he had gone through what he had would be redemptive for someone else. I prayed with him and hugged him goodbye. His youth group was leaving early, so he had to go.
Something in Me Broke
I went to my standby room to pray with my band before the next session started. At first I didn't say anything, but then it dawned on me. Many of the kids in that arena were also dealing with monstrous issues in their lives. Maybe none of them were quite as big as Bryan's, but they were giants to them, nonetheless. Cutting, perhaps, or pornography; kids whose parents told them yesterday that they were getting a divorce; 13 year-old girls sleeping with their boyfriends and suffering from guilt; sophomores and juniors wondering about their sexual orientation and what it would be like to make out with someone of the same sex; kids who lived in the heart of the Bible belt, in a city where mega churches flourish and religion is plentiful, but whose churches and youth groups had done little to assuage their pain—or to answer the deep questions that had caused them to run to these behaviors in the first place.
And it floored me.
I told my band Bryan's story, and something in me broke. All weekend the worship had been good, but that night something changed. I walked onto the stage a different man.
Bryan was gone. He never got to see the impact that his story had on 3,000 kids that night. But I did. On stage I didn't say a word about Bryan or his conversation with me, but the band knew that that evening was special because of a divine appointment God had set up between a tough, burly, scared 19 year-old and myself. We went a completely different direction in worship that night than we had planned. The last song we led was a song called "How He Loves". It's a song that states in a very unique way that God loves us. God. Loves. Us. And I saw over 3,000 kids “get it” that night. At one point I looked over the floor section and I honestly don't know if there was a single person not kneeling on the ground. God's presence was so thick there, so ready to heal, so ready to mend, so mighty to save!
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