The Mini Bus Of Despair

I tried to block out the noise, but without success.

They were all around me in the mini bus.

Teenagers.

They were being rude, deliberately offensive and consistently unresponsive to my requests for some more reasonable behaviour towards each other.

And we were still over half an hour away from home.

As I descended deeper in silent depths of discouragement and despair, I was reminded of a challenging mission I set myself recently. That whenever I have somebody before me in need, to ask myself who else is going to help this person, and who is else there praying for this person.

I realised that this Wednesday evening trip to Laserquest was the practical side of things, and that as we were now on the way home, the most significant and revolutionary thing I could do was pray quietly for everyone on the bus and the various situations they faced on a daily basis.

So I prayed.

Time passed.

No change to the noise level and crude conversation topics.

We arrived back into Andover.

I felt different.

The noise, bad language and bad behaviour hadn't changed as a result of my prayers. But I had changed.

My prayers actually had done me more good on this occasion, reminding me of the need to forget myself and why it is that I use hours of my free time on a weekly basis to work with young people.

I realised it's a privilege to work with the young people I see each week, no matter what bad press gets given to teenagers in the press.

I understood how prayer can actually tune me out of my selfish frequency, and get me onto God's wavelength, enabling me to see the issues before me from His perspective rather than my own.

And who knows what longer term impacts my prayers might have on the lives of those young people. Certainly not me.

But God does.