“God knows even what your parents don’t know,” I said.

Josue looked at me with incredulously. “He even sees me when I steal?”

“Yup,” I said. “Everything.” That was a new concept to Josue.

We were in the middle of youth week of prayer. The kids had first heard about this type of event in a Sabbath School mission story almost a year before. From that point on, they’d talked about doing a youth week of prayer. They kept asking me, and we tried several times to find a date when everyone would be free. Even during vacations, many students still have school. We finally decided to do it during Easter vacation. Then, about a month before Easter, the district pastor told us there would be an evangelistic program during that time. I wasn’t about to let go of our dream, so I gathered the youth, and we all agreed to hold our week of prayer in the mornings so it wouldn’t conflict with the evening evangelistic series.

I struggled about what to do for these meetings. The age spread in our youth group is pretty wide—8 to 18. Bony offered me a week-of-prayer program, but it had been written for adults.

I had been reading a book about a Presbyterian lady who worked with youth in the 1920s. With inspiration from her story and with the Holy Spirit’s guidance, I worked out a program in which the youth would do skits about miracles Jesus performed, and then we would have a discussion about how each applied to our lives.

We started Monday morning. The skits were only two or three minutes long, but the kids were very good actors. The discussions that followed offered great opportunity to teach values and illustrate how to have a relationship with Jesus. I don’t remember which skit led to the discussion of the fact that God knows everything we do and think. The topic may not even have had anything to do with the story, but I tend to do quite a bit of ad-libbing. Where the Spirit leads, I go. That day, I know Josue and possibly several other youth gained a new understanding of who God is and how to become His child. I explained to them how to ask Jesus to make them His children and how to ask forgiveness. Then I invited each of them pray to God themselves for these things. I was determined each day to invite the kids to choose God.

We had some good discussions and covered lots of topics. Since it was a week of prayer, we also did a lot of praying. We made it a point first to give thanks to God for the things He had done during the past week and then to name the different subjects we were going to pray about. We prayed for the people coming to the evangelistic program each evening. Three or four youth prayed each day. From the youngest to the oldest, everybody had a turn. They felt safe praying in our friendly group, and we usually had prayers going up in several languages. They saw God working and answering their prayers. They saw Him miraculously stop the rain at the evangelistic program and witnessed Him touching the hearts of the people.

It was a week of extreme fatigue because we were getting to bed between 11 p.m. or midnight each night, and then we were back at the church at 8:30 a.m. for the week of prayer. But God poured out a great blessing on those who attended. Minds were opened and hearts were changed for eternity.

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