Day 6 (Thursday): You Reign Forever

Day 6 (Thursday): You Reign Forever

It’s not often that I see kids get excited about routines—school, church, you name it. But today I saw a foil to that. We pulled up to Wesleyan Christian Academy yesterday shortly before 9:00a, with most of the choir feeling groggy, tired, and wanting to go back to sleep. Being a Christian school, chapel attendance is mandatory for middle and high school students. As they walked in, I couldn’t tell much of a difference from their faces and ours. But in spite of our exhaustion we knew that we would have to bring our best to the table. After all, if we don’t give God our all, why should we give him anything?

So we brought it. As soon as we were introduced to the school by their student chaplain, we began one of the most intense sessions of worship we’ve experienced so far on tour. Song by song, I watched the kids in the audience get more and more into their praise until, finally, more than half of them in the chapel had swarmed onto and in front of the stage. 

“You reign forever and ever and ever!” they chanted with us. And they didn’t sing timidly either—they were so passionate in their worship and just so enthralled with the words that for 2mins after the band brought the song to a resolve, the kids were still singing those words over and over again. That moment was easily one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever witnessed. The beauty of the moment only increased when the school chaplain told us that in his 21 years of working at Wesleyan nothing like that had ever occurred. 

The excitement continued as Sam Cho, one of our insanely talented guitarists and a Wesleyan alumnus, was able to share his testimony with the rest of the students in the building. (I can’t do Sam’s story justice, so I’d encourage our student readers to get to know Sam and his awesome story themselves—his sense of humor is contagious, and he is easily one of the most talented people I believe I’ve ever met.)

After another chapel service for Wesleyan’s high schoolers at ~11:00a, we were treated to lunch in the cafeteria, which gave us the opportunity to sit with the students we’d just sung to, getting to know more about their own school while also sharing our experiences at Wheaton.

The blessings didn’t end there, though. Sam Cho’s parents were kind enough to invite us all to their beauty shop and then into their home, bringing a day full of concerts to a relaxing end in their backyard. I popped open a bottle of Mandarin Jarritos soda, flipped open a book, and just laid in the grass with the blue sky above me. Everything was quiet. It felt amazing.

We’ve still got a few more days of touring left and spirits are still high—even in the midst of the stressful times it’s still very obvious what God is doing with and through us on this trip.

—Connor