While on my Montana and Idaho tour last week I had the opportunity to share some of my observations with a couple different teams at Family Time.  As you go back and read the blogs over on the youthmark.com site (click on blogs), you can read the great success stories we have in students sharing their faith, however, sometimes this came after a painful learning process (or trap) we often fall in.

Numbers vs. Souls.

Here’s what I mean… when you look at a picture like the one below, what do you see?

Besides the beautiful scenery and some of the obvious other things we can point out, we see a good number of teens, correct?  On these trips, or even, any given Sunday at church, this is what we see… numbers.  We see a gathering of folk.  We talk about “how many people” we had in church, at youth group, or in Bible Study.

There is and was nothing wrong with our teams being excited about the 4, 15, 35, 67 or 9 people they had at the park or the school.  God honored our prayers by bringing people to these local fields.  However, the trap happens when we simply see numbers and not souls.

You see, in this crowd we needed to see the following:

Can you see them?  These are the individuals that make up those “numbers.”  We need to see each of these faces as souls we want to introduce to Jesus or encourage in Christ ( if already saved).

We can get caught in counting heads rather than seeing the faces.  These faces sometimes tell and sometimes try desperately to hide their stories.  What happens in these mission towns is often similar to what is happening in our own towns.

When you go to work tomorrow, the park on Wednesday or Church on Sunday, will you see the soul of another, or will you just see a number?

Grace,
Brian