Soup Kitchen

I can't elaborate very much, it's getting really late.....early.....but the worship service our missions group did today at the soup kitchen was awesome!!!! I don't know if it was God's Spirit leading my praise or if all the energy I put forth today was all my own. Either way, I tried to keep it to where I there was nobody around me. I emptied the room, destroyed the buidling, threw the earth and all the stars into a never ending abyss and let God fill the void.

Now that I think of it, this is the first time I've participated in leading a worship service. To give you a good idea of what we were working with I'll explain to you the setting. And I'm going to be real honest, I'm not going to try and cover it up with candy drop sweet talk and what have you.

The city we live in is so ethnically diverse. Everyone from around the world comes to Ft. Hood to in obedience to the Presidents orders. Not on there own, but we are forced to live together and invade surrounding neighborhoods. This causes too many problems to mention. One of the major problems that I'll touch on is the same problem every major U.S. city faces at one point in time or another. If I'm not mistaken, it's called the inner city flee or something like that. Basically it's where a vast amount of immigrants (in this case, soldiers) come and overwhelm the elites in the inner city, causing them, along with their businesses to flee leaving the immigrants in poverty. Downtown Killeen looks like a section from the Third Ward in Houston. Of course it's much nicer, but they're facing the same condition...and that condition is poverty. So this soup kitchen is owned by brothers and sisters in Christ and they do the soup kitchen thing. But what's really cool about them is that they don't just hand out food and while people are on their way out say "Jesus loves you." No. They put on a full blown church service in this 20X10' space.

So, apparently...one day, Kelsey was acting weird and decided to do the Napoleon Dynamite wave-your-hands-like-a-bird deal and the owner of the soup kitchen saw her doing this and screamed, "YES, YOU NEED TO DO THAT!!! I WANT YOU TO DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT NEXT TIME YOU GUYS COME!" (I wasn't there, it's just what I've heard). So our missions group decided we should lead a worship service in the tightly compact dining area. So we got there and practiced in a room that was seriously no bigger than a middle-of-nowhere gas station restroom. It had enough space to fit a table and a couple of chairs, and a counter. So we went over the songs and the whole time, I was worried that our group would all make this whole thing about how good or bad we sound. So I told them all to make these songs your prayers to God. I know they here that every time they do corporate worship, but I seriously wanted to remind them of the importance of making your songs a prayer rather than a show. I find that when you sincerely sing to God, you sing with more enthusiasm. I know the level of enthusiasm is a major factor in leading worship. Ever since I saw Aaron in SFA at Student Life, I knew that it's absolutely necessary to show with your whole body, how much in love you are with God when leading worship. And the only way I know how to be enthusiastic about God is to actually be in His presence. Well, that's not the only way. But you get the point. So, basically, in a nutshell, everything went AMAZING!!!! We had people responding with smiles, clapping, standing up and dancing. There was this man beating the table SO HARD to the beat of "Into Marvelous Light I'm Running." Even though I had no intentions whatsoever to get a response from these people, it was great to see them. I'm in love with this talent God has given me to lead people to Christ through song, enthusiasm, and passion.