If you’ve read many of my other posts, you’ve read about two senior guys who’ve wiggled their way into my heart, mostly by asking me to make them cookies and by coming to my classroom last year to complain about chemistry. This story isn’t about them… it’s about their friend.

This friend, I never had in class, he took chemistry at a different school, and wasn’t interested at all in taking AP. He kind of noticed his two buds were hanging around me a lot… he also noticed when they did, they usually got food. I think he likes food, and so, we began to interact.

A little joking here, a little teasing there… a no bake or two thrown into the mix. I distinctly remember him even asking one time, “Can I come too? Even though I didn’t have you as a teacher?” I laughed when he asked that telling him, “Of course! I am an equal opportunist when it comes to loving students.” But it shows even in his rough and tough exterior, there’s still some insecurity in there.

In a conversation with a friend of mine who works among Muslims in North Africa, she recently told me, “I find it takes about ten hours of doing life with someone before you get maybe one hour of deep, spiritual conversation opportunities.”

If you add up all the time I’ve spent with this particular senior guy, it might reach ten hours…. or it might not be even close. And yet just a couple days ago, he came up to me, “Hey Miss Galloway… can we talk?”

I instantly knew what he wanted to talk about because of conversations I’d been having with some other students I’m close with. This would be no light and fluffy conversation.

He didn’t follow up when he had originally indicated, but yesterday as I sat down at the beginning of my third period prep hour to get some work done, he walked in. “Are you busy right now?”

Grading in a pile, copies to be made, prep work abounding, “Nope.” The work will get itself done later.

I sat at my desk as he sat on a desk in the middle of the room. I saw his face working. I saw him struggling to work out what question he wanted to ask.

“We’ve got time.” I encouraged him as he mumbled, “Why is this so hard.” He finally decided his opening question and so it began.

As we talked through how to navigate difficult friendship struggles he asked deep and tough question after deep and tough question. This is a guy wrestling with real hard life. He got to one of the harder questions and I was stumped. I didn’t know what to say, so I mulled as the conversation moved on.

We ended with me reading two different chapters of scripture to him, the only advice I knew wouldn’t be fallible in answering his hard question (well, actually we ended making fun of the soccer players on the other team from the game the day before, but that was the light fluffy closer).

The bell ending third period rang and we went to chapel- where the first thing read was one of the very passages we had just talked about.

This week has been “SEW.” Spiritual Emphasis Week. We have an incredible speaker sharing each night, a worship team from Nairobi leading us in songs in English, Swahili, Zulu, and other Bantu languages I don’t know the names of. The Lord is on the move. He is here. He is working in the hearts and minds of students. I have no idea who else is wrestling like this guy of mine. How many other students are wondering in their hearts… how many other students need an hour processing with an adult?

When the speaker talks about the goodness of God based on GOD’s definition of good, which students are pondering the hard things that have happened in their lives, trying to match that up with the word ‘good’?

When the speaker talks about the need to lay aside our own grievances to accept the lavish invitation of the king, who is holding onto the ways they feel they’ve been so wronged in this life, refusing to accept the love of Jesus?

When the speaker talks about the provision of Jesus in being given to fulfill each of our needs, when he talks about us looking for God in the pleasures of this world, which students are thinking of their own sins, their own needs, their own desires and how they have sought to fulfill them in their own ways?

I don’t know. And so I pray. I pray for this student, in whose heart God is clearly on the move… I pray for the students who are tough and stoic. I pray for those who are crying, or sleeping through the messages, and I pray the Holy Spirit would be moving in them all. We have two more messages in two more days.

Would you pray with me?