Will the school be any different?

Hello all, we are once again blessed to have a parent sharing from their own experience and story. Margee and Dan Curran have had their four children, Ebey, David, Hannah, and Hope, graduate from College Park High School. Margee shares about a life changing experience:

When my oldest daughter Ebey was about to start her senior year at College Park High School I was sitting in a large meeting in Colorado with about 5,000 other missionaries. Someone was talking about High School ministry….  As the guy spoke, God began to get MY ATTENTION!!  A question popped into my head, “ Will College Park be any different because my 4 kids have gone there?”    (and hopefully have been a fragrant aroma of God’s presence at CP) At that point, my answer to that question was NO!! 

As  I was sitting in the meeting, Jesus began to give me an idea: What if our 2 high-schoolers invited their friends over once a month for dinner, games  and a short bible study?  Kind of like Young Life.  I asked Ebey (the senior) and David (sophomore) what they thought. Ebey was excited and David was not.  Since one of my kids was willing to try it, Daniel and I decided to “go for it.”  We picked a date, made little invitations for Ebey to pass out and tried to figure out what this would look like…  That first Sunday about 25 kids came.  It was fun, wild, noisy, disorganized and spastic, BUT the CP kids who came liked it and wanted to come back again, and more importantly, David liked it and wanted to invite his friends the next month.  He had been worried that it was going to be weird and needed to see one first before he invited friends.  We began to call it Dinner with Jesus.  I always made a simple dinner (lasagna, salad, bread, dessert) I put my kids in charge of the game and then we would read a story from the gospels about an interaction Jesus had with someone- (like Jesus and Zaccheus in Luke 19)   The kids would break up in small groups and go answer questions about the text that we would discuss as a large group.  In Isaiah 55: 11,  it talks about God’s word not returning empty without accomplishing what He desires.  I figured that as long as we “gave out” His word, it would accomplish things of eternal value. 

We hosted these monthly meetings for about 5 years and then our 2 youngest kids,   Hope and Hannah decided to form a club at College Park called Lunch with Jesus which replaced out monthly dinners.  Lunch with Jesus is in it’s  4^th year and is continuing even after Hope graduated in June.

Margee Curran / margcurran@aol.com

Thank you for sharing Margee! What an incredible experience, and what a blessing it is to see how you and your family responded. Please contact the Curran family for more information on their ministry and how to get involved!