It Started With One Man and a Worship Song

My youth group and church has gone through a lot over the years. We have had youth pastors come and go and different couples work to try and be advisors of our youth group. However, I'm not going to give you all of that background information quite yet. I'm going to start off with the beginning of a new journey we started.

It was my sophomore year of high school when we hired our new youth pastor Ryan. I personally was very skeptical of him because I had seen numerous other people attempt to come in and help the youth grow their faith and build a solid spiritual foundation. Most of those attempts did not end well at all. However, my parents told me they thought I would really like him and that he was different so I was suppose to give him a chance.

At first he seemed like all of the others. He would tell us the same exact bible stories that we all heard every year. At this point most of us could practically recite them word for word. We did not want to just hear those stories anymore, we wanted more than that. We all were looking for something deeper. We didn't want to just hear about the Jesus in these stories, we wanted to know him and have a personal relationship with him the only problem was, we had no idea how to do that. Thankfully, Ryan knew how.

He started with worship. He used one song in particular. None of us had heard it before, to be honest none of us really knew how to worship or what it meant. It was not something we were taught or did growing up. But Ryan knew all about it and was ready to show and teach us. So he played the song "With Everything" by Hillsong for us. He didn't tell us anything about the song. He just told us to sit there silently and listen, and we did. We sat still and quiet through the whole song and when it was over he asked what we thought. We all said we liked it and that it was a good song. Then he asked how long we thought the song was. We all answered 2 maybe 3 minutes. Much to our dismay the song was 10 minutes long. We had no idea. And that was it, we were all sold. We found a way to get close to Jesus, and it was through music.

This song was the start of everything. It was how we knew Ryan was different from all the other youth pastors we've had and how we knew he was going to change our lives and our relationship with Jesus. This song was the beginning of the journey for all of us. Below is the song. I hope you listen to it and fall in love with it the way we all did. It holds a lot of meaning to me and the rest of my youth group. Who knows, maybe this song will introduce you to worship and give you a deeper more personal relationship with Jesus.