The Confessions Sessions

There is a real tangible benefit of confessing sin to others. When sin is hidden, it has a greater hold on a person. When it is exposed or as some say, brought into the light, its grip is loosened. This was a defining moment in the life of the ship ministry. They realized God was about building a group of people - a community - rather than just restoring a ship. The leaders believed public confession would draw everyone into a greater unity as people became vulnerable with each other in exposing their sin. A microphone was set up at the front of the meeting room for people to confess their sins.

As people overcame their initial embarrassment, a line began to form as one after another, people began to confess. There were about 350 crew at this time, so it took several sessions just for the confessions. Out of the many, the one that I remember specifically (besides my own) was by one of the engineers. He had been a nuclear engineer in the U.S. Navy. He confessed to some pretty serious depression because of some things going on in his family and the way his life had turned out. As I recall, he had also been suicidal. But that confession began a huge change in his life. He later became our Math teacher and in years to come, a pastor.

As people were confessing at the microphone, I began to get the feeling. My heart started to beat harder and harder until my whole body was thumping. I got hot. My mind was racing. It was conviction and the realization that I was supposed to get up and confess. I tried to push it down but I just knew that I knew I supposed to do it. It was the Holy Spirit.

There is also something called the fear of man, which is when people care more about what people think than what God wants them to do. I had a lot of the fear of man but I finally overcame it, stood up and got in the line. When it was my turn, I confessed that I had been doing some bad stuff with some girls and I was sorry to all the mothers. I’m not sure why I only said sorry to the mothers and not to the fathers or even the girls themselves. That’s just what came to into my head but that confession helped to send my life in a drastically different direction.

Understand, when I say I was naïve and innocent, certain hormones had not kicked in for me yet. Most of what I did was just an academic following along with what other guys were doing. There was a certain line I had still not crossed but it had come fairly close.

I also started to listen to teachings by other YWAM leaders on tape - yes, cassette tapes in those days. One message was about the multiple fruits of pride. I sought to examine my life to root it out. To this day, points from that teaching still come into my head. One was that it is pride to expect and demand that others go through what you went through. This is especially true of older siblings. They usually want their younger siblings to get or not get what they did or did not get.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more