God's ways are NOT our ways!

This weekend I took 15 highschool students from our youth ministry back to Muskoka Woods for a retreat called Blizzard. We met up with close to 500 other highschool students and leaders for an awesome weekend of connecting and challenge. The speaker this weekend was a man named Collin McKartney. There's so much that God taught me and reminded me through his messages but it'll take too long to explain on here so I won't even begin to try. But I really believed that God met a lot of our students in an amazing way this weekend. There was one girl in our group who God has been drawing to himself for the past 3-4 months now in particular. She is such a sweet girl who was really trying to figure out who God was. Friday night I had a really good talk to with her and then Saturday night she had sooo many questions after the evening session. So during the closing worship session we went into a back room of the gym and she just fired question after question at me for over an hour. We then had to leave because everyone had left and they were locking up the gym. At the end of our talk she knew she wanted to be a Christian but she wasn't sure if she could cause was too afraid to make the committment.
The next day we packed up all of our stuff and were waiting for us bus that was supposed to show up at 1:00. Two and half hours later it still wasn't there and we were still waiting. At 3:30 I arranged for parents to come pick us up since the bus was clearly not coming for us. At first I was really annoyed by the inconvenience of all the hassle of finding an alternative ride home. However at 4:00 when I was finally done making phone calls and arrangements I went into the lounge and Rodger (another leader asked me to come and join his conversation with this girl). Apparently they had been talking for the past 3hours and when I joined them this girl was wanting us to pray with her to make a committment to Christ. It was so awesome because if we hadn't been stranded for those extra hours Rodger wouldn't have had the time to sit with her for 3 hours and answer her questions and help her work through her fears.
It was also really cool how GOd knows exactly what we need in order to draw us to ourselves. Apparently yesteday the chorus to a Kelly Clarkson song kept running through her mind and she really felt that it was a message from GOd to her that this was a step of faith she needed to take. The lyrics that challeged her say this:

I gotta take a risk
Take a chance
Make a change
And breakaway
Out of the darkness and into the sun
But I won't forget the place I come from
I gotta take a risk
Take a chance
Make a change
And breakaway, breakaway, breakaway

It is so cool how God can take a secular artist and use her words to draw a teenage girl into a relationship with Him. This girl was scared of the committment but she knew it was a step she needed to take. During the weekend the speaker kept talking about how we need to breakaway from fear and bondage of this world and she knew the only way to do that was by putting her faith in God....So cool. Our devotions that we read through Saturday morning were from Luke 15.It talks about how God is searching and waiting for those who are lost to come back to him and find him. Saturday night I knew this is what was happening with this girl. God, the good shepherd, was calling her name and Sunday afternoon at 5:10pm she prayed a prayer of forgiveness and surrender to God. The last verse of Luke 15 says "But we have to celebrate and be glad, because this [sister] of yours was dead and is alive again; [she] was lost and is found". God can even use a Kelly Clarkson song and being stranded at Muskoka Woods to draw His children back to Himself. How Great is Awesome is our God.