Jesus Christ arrested my heart when I was a teenager.
Both my hands were up in the air in glad surrender!
I know deep inside I was being transformed by God’s love and grace and that life is never going to be about me anymore!
Yet this won’t be possible if not for the people who loved me enough to reach out to me, to mentor me, and empower me to live for Jesus and for the generations to come.
And I will be forever grateful to a handful of people who believed in me and in the potential that lies within the teen-agers during our time. I want to honor my parents and the youth pastors during my teen years Ptr. Dennis Sy, Rico Ricafort and Joseph Bonifacio and all our other leaders. They have both directly and indirectly inspired, challenged, equipped and empowered me and a lot of teens to live for God. I love my spiritual family and I thank God for people who, out of love for God won’t neglect the youth but would value and invest in the next generation.
Now, I am an active campus missionary with LifeBox. (www.lifebox.ph)
I have a fervent love for the students and I am passionate about helping teens discover their purpose and lifetime mission. I believe with all my heart that the “teen years” of a person’s life is a crucial phase where they need to make a resolution not to waste their lives but instead live for a Cause that’s bigger than themselves. They have to remember their Creator in the days of their youth!
We often quote the wise saying of our nation’s hero Jose Rizal that the youth is the hope of our future but the question is how much do we actually believe this?
The word of God tells us of an account where a generation neglected the other generation that resulted into an epic trouble!
Joshua 2-7,10-12 says:
7 The people served the LORD throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the LORD had done for Israel…
10 After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. 11 Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals. 12 They forsook the LORD, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They aroused the LORD’s anger 13 because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths.
Joshua and the elders were men of God. They knew who God was, they experienced the love, the power and the faithfulness of God in their generation but sadly, this account tells us that they failed to bring up the next generation in the true knowledge of God.
Throughout world history, we can observe that the local churches that die are the ones who fail to reach, mentor, and empower the next generation. When teens are neglected and the kids in our local churches are treated as mere side issues, ten to fifteen years from now, our churches could most probably be obsolete! I believe God warns us over and over again that we are never to neglect the next generation.
As His people, we have to make deliberate efforts to come together and reach out to each other so we could experience the love, power and the blessing of God as we co-labor in God’s harvest field that is so ripe and ready!
I believe that as the Christian leaders of today (The Now Generation) tap into the energy and the creativity, idealism and energy of today’s youth (The Next Generation) and as today’s youth humbles themselves and allow themselves to receive the rich wisdom and necessary guidance of those who are ahead of them, there will be a powerful national transformation that this nation has yet to see.
His story has only began. We’re living for this cause!
And this is just my part of History! Let’s collaborate! Let’s make history!