Last night our family had a show at the Auburn, Maine Advent Christian Church.  This was our third time there, and it is one of my favorite churches we minister at.  Pastor Laura Leigh is an amazing woman of God.  This church is in a rather rough neighborhood characterized by poverty, fatherlessness, alchoholism and drugs.  She works tirelessly reaching out to her neighbors with the love of Jesus.  Most of her congregation is children, she says, whose parents send them to church unsupervised.  Gradually, she has won the trust of the adults, and God is using her to really impact the area.

As I started my opening routine, "the Hallelujah Chorus", their sound system shut down.  After a few minutes of people working on it, it was determined it would be out of commission for the night.  We brought our little CD player with us, which we had to have miked to be heard throughout the sanctuary, but it sufficed.  Unfortunately, their system wouldn't even give us back our opening CD, so that threw off how I wanted to start the night.  After a routine or two, we settled in, and the technical difficulties were over. (After the show, they literally had to disassemble the system to get our CD back!)

I built our message around the passage in Hebrews that says, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."  I ended with an invitation, which is not always a part of what we do, and three people responded to accept the unseen, but very real, gift of grace offered by Jesus when He died on the cross that first Good Friday.  Interestingly, the three who responded were a child, a teen and an adult.  It's a blessing to be part of what God is doing in the lives of the beautiful people of that neighborhood.