Rejoicing in "chance" encounters, part II

So, disregarding the danger of inflicting you all with too much information, I'm just going to sit down and with slightly incoherent, joyful verbosity share how a random encounter with a bus led to a Bible study. Seriously. :)

I was running to school, already 10 minutes later than I wanted to be, inwardly berating myself because I'd forgotten two pieces of information that I was supposed to prepare for one of my students, when I noticed that a brightly-colored bus seemed to be attempting to turn around in the church parking lot. Because of the time, I simply smiled, said good morning to the bus drivers, entered the church, and started setting up for class, thinking, "Good grief! I hope they are really turning around and leaving! This class is going to be hard enough to teach without distractions and no time to finish preparing..."

My thoughts really turned sour when Sensei came running into the classroom and said, "It's a Christian bookstore in the bus! Come see!"

Yes, I confess, my thinking was something like, "God?! Why?!...don't you know there's enough going on, and things I still need to pull together...?"

But I grabbed my books, wrote my outline on the board, made tea, threw the class CD in the machine, and headed outside to check out this bus that seemed to dwarf the church's parking lot. (As a side note, I really had planned the lesson for class the day before...do any other teachers have the problem of always trying to pull more things together before their lessons?)

The bus was cheery, with children's books, Bibles, CDs, DVDs, and other articles with Christian messages. As my students came into class, we all began wandering in and out of the bus, looking at books, necklaces, etc., and chatting.

When we finally did come back into the classroom to start our lesson, we began by looking at what the students bought, and one lady pulled out some forks with an engraving of the 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish on the handles.

"What does this mean?" she asked.

Then commenced a "field trip" to the sanctuary, where a tapestry depicting the 5 loaves and 2 fish was hung, and I told the story of the feeding of the five thousand.

...45 minutes later, we were still talking about the feeding of the five thousand--complete with Bibles out on the table and a short mini-lesson of the contents of the Bible. When we were all discussing what message Jesus was sending by doing the miracle, one student (not a Christian) matter-of-factly stated, "He was showing that He was God." Right...what she said. :) And then we were led into an after-discussion involving faith and life questions, and how we come to have faith.

One of the reasons why I had been so worried about preparing for the class this morning was because the class members involved two people who had been in the class for awhile, two new people, and one person who is moving and was saying goodbye today. Talk about transitions! I had thought for awhile about the class today because the emotions and transitions make learning and relating difficult. I was going to try my best to make class challenging, but cheery, and useful.

But as I sit now, and think back on it, my eyes want to have tears of joy in them, when I think about the gift God gave us during class. His plans are so much better than mine... My student who is leaving is entering a new phase of life with the message, "Jesus is our Provider. There is nothing He can't do." The two new students are entering with questions and new thoughts about God, faith, and questions we can think about together. The rest of us (myself included) were reminded that light discussion does not ease the questions in our hearts.

There are people who insist that the Bible should be kept out of the English classroom, even at the church. But today it was my non-Christian students who kept pulling me back to the passage, hungry for meaning and insight into a world that sheds truth on our existence.

I think we encouraged the drivers of the colored gospel bus when we told them our students' reactions. :) And I am encouraged, as I think of the hunger God places in people to know Him. What do I do? Nothing. :) Make plans that inevitably end up changing, because they are so small compared to God's big plans. :) God truly does seek for individuals...longs to call them by His name for them...and rejoices to hold them in His embrace. So He comes to us daily, every minute, in the "normal" and the "random"...

Yay for colored gospel buses, Jesus. You always have such good, random ideas. :)