“You were right, Pastor”, Eber said to me as I looked at him in shock. “What happened to you?” I asked.Here I was standing before a young man who was just starting his 20’s and already was lacking an eye, displayed a huge scar across his face and was using crutches. “I lost my eye in a saloon fight over a girl. These guys ganged up on me, and one broke a bottle and hit me in the face with it. After I recovered from that I got drunk, had a car accident and broke my leg.”
What a contrast to the young man I had known before. When we started the church in
I presented the gospel to him and he accepted it readily, but it didn’t last long, like the seed that fell in a rocky place. He told me that in the future he wanted to marry a good Christian girl that had long hair and wore long skirts. Soon after we finished fixing up our little church hall he left town with a modeling agency. He showed up a year later with a scantly dressed pregnant girl and said, “Pastor, I want you to meet my wife”.
They hung around for a little while and he got a job in a local supermarket painting promotional signs. During that time I tried to minister to the both he and his wife, but soon they disappeared again. Now three years later he appears all disfigured and destroyed.
Sadly he says. “Pastor, you told me to follow Jesus and not the world, for the world robs you of the truly good things. Well, I didn’t follow your advice, and the world robbed me of everything”. I felt like crying. How sad it was to see him in that situation. Yet the worst part of this story is that though he wants to be freed from the life he is living, he is trapped and can’t let go. Like the monkey with the hand in the jar who won’t let go to get free.
Not different from Eber, I have seen many kids follow the same path with similar results. On the other hand, what gives me great joy is that I have also seen others take the hard and narrow way that leads to everlasting life. Many of those are active in the Lord’s work today in the
