Only ONE

Tonight we had a major skate event at church for our youth group. At one point, I tried to count the number of students in the crowd; I lost count around 200. Another person said that they tried to count later in the evening and they got to 300, but people were still coming in! How exciting it was to have that many teenagers at one church event! We all looked around marveling at what God was able to do!

After the skate demo by the professional team, they gave an altar call for students to accept Christ as their Savior. My prayer team was ready to go...we had trained about 5-7 adults to pray with the students and we all had response cards ready to go to get their information and send them gifts later in the week. The time had come for us to minister to these hundreds of students! And then, just ONE teen came forward. I have to be honest, at first I was disappointed. Why weren't more kids coming forward? We had prayed so hard and worked so diligently to hold this event. But then God reminded me that he came for the ONE. If it was just for that ONE person, Jesus still would have died. Then I realized that if it was just for ONE person to get saved tonight, all of our work was worth it. ONE! ONE! ONE!

In a world where we worry about quanity instead of quality, ONE does not seem like a very important number. But if it was just you, ONE person, Jesus would have died for just YOU! How humbling is that thought? How much more are we supposed to extend ourselves for ONE of our loved ones or friends? How important is just ONE act of kindness towards another person? I have to tell you, this is a challenge for me! What is the value of ONE person?

At the end of the movie "Schindler's List," there is a scene where Oscar Schindler, a man who has managed to save over 1,000 jews by posing as a Nazi and buying them to work in his factory, breaks down as he realizes that he could have bought more. He looks at his car and wonders how many more lives he could have saved with the value of this posession. He looks at his gold ring and realizes it could have bought him ONE more person. "ONE," he says over and over, "ONE more person." It makes me wonder how many more people I could be praying into the Kingdom. It makes me wonder how many more students I could be reaching at school with just a few more minutes of my time. It makes we wonder how many more people I could bless with just ONE more smile or word of encouragement. ONE. What a challenge to all of us never to doubt the power of ONE!