A number of weeks ago there was a leadership event for all the volunteers at our Church, and I served in the kids program. It was a Thursday evening, and not many kids came to the program. I ended up hanging out with a kid I didn’t know before… he likes soccer and I am from Brazil, we played for a while, talked for a bit and at some point of the program we prayed for each other. That was basically it. I serve at Voltage (for kids on Year 5 and 6 at school), and he is on Year 4, and that is the reason why I didn’t know him before.

A few weeks later I saw him at Church with his family and stopped to say hi. It turned out his mum already knew me as “the soccer player”, and she said that he talked about me for ages since that evening when we met.

I have to say I was very surprised that his mum heard about me, and that he talked about me for a while, since we hung out for only one evening, a couple of hours… it made me think about the impact we can have in a child’s life if we stop for just some moments and show interest in their lives.

If you stop to do the maths, if a child comes to church every week, he or she will spend about 110 hours at church in a whole year. That is 1.25% of the year, and it is almost 7 times less than the time this child will spend eating (about 8.5% of the year) and almost the same time this child will spend in the toilet (about 1.5% of the year)…

One of the things that God is teaching me this year is the art of being available so He can use me to make a difference in a child’s life. When I am serving in the kids program, if there is at least one child in the room, there I am, talking to them. The last thing you will see me doing during the kids program is hanging out with other leaders or doing something by myself.

We don’t have much time, but we can make the most out of the time we have. If we let God use us during those couple of hours that we have every weekend, we can be powerful instruments in His hands to make a huge difference in the lives of the children that come to our kids program. It is a simple choice that can change their lives forever!

Cadu