About 75 people gathered at Blacknall to hear from our ministry partners during an annual celebration dinner.
Blacknall members, attenders, and friends gathered this past Sunday to celebrate the work of ministry partners in Durham and around the world. With about 20 stories shared throughout the evening, it became clear that God was at work in the communities our partners serve.
Representatives from organizations spanning homeless shelters, campus ministries, healthcare clinics, international student programs, and overseas missions each shared stories of what God has been doing through their work. Themes of transformation and rebirth threaded through nearly every testimony: students finding faith, organizations offering Christlike service to those in need, and refugees rebuilding shattered lives. Stories came from different corners of Durham and the world, but they kept returning to the same truth: God shows up in hard places.
That place might even be a grocery store aisle.
Josh McCoy, a campus minister for Every Nation at North Carolina Central University, shared the story of a student named Genesis, whom he met during his first year on campus. She had given her life to Christ as a freshman but became less engaged after a painful breakup sent her into a spiral of alcohol, drugs, and destructive habits. One afternoon, standing in a store about to buy supplies for a night of drinking, something stopped her cold.
“She said she felt the Lord say to her, clear as day, ‘You’re done with this,’” Josh recalled. Genesis left the store, went home, and poured out every bottle of alcohol she had. She soon returned to her community, began discipling younger women, and graduated this spring. She’s about to start a career as a teacher in Durham.
Smaller, intimate stories were shared, too. Gregor Levy, Director of Breakfast Ministry at St. Joseph's Episcopal Church (across the street from Blacknall), talked about how each morning, he gets to see a gradual transformation in people who come for warm food, coffee, and fellowship with St. Joe’s staff and volunteers.
In recent months, he’s met with people who’ve found respite in a simple meal that helps them deal with physical pain or reconcile with possessions that have been stolen. But small acts have stuck with Gregor the most: A few months ago, one person left breakfast and stopped to thank volunteers because the meal at St. Joe’s was how they started every day. It’s the kind of thing that Gregor said helps him experience Christ’s love first-hand.
“I am the one being converted,” he said, “every morning, ever more into the mystery of Christ and of God.
The evening's most sweeping testimony arrived from the Middle East, sent by Hunter Lambeth, who supports Young Life ministries in the Middle East and Africa. The story came on behalf of a young Iraqi refugee named Adel, who was briefly kidnapped at 11, later imprisoned at 17 for participating in protests, and was eventually displaced to Turkey. Through these moments of turmoil, Adel asked himself, “why is my life like this?”
Disillusioned by his circumstances and a God he felt never listened, Adel struggled to understand his suffering as a Muslim. But through Young Life’s newest ministry in Turkey, he turned to Christ. It didn’t come without cost: His family rejected him and he lost his job, a chance to study at a university, and at times, felt profoundly alone. But through a church and the Young Life community, he grew in his understanding of the Bible and Jesus. He kept praying and asking others to pray for him, knowing that “I would not dwell on [difficult days] because my heart kept telling me, ‘God is with you always.’” He now has a job, is studying again, and feels God working in this life.
“Today, whenever I pray, I often do not know how to thank Jesus enough,” Adel wrote in his testimony. “Sometimes I reach a point where I simply cry before God because of all the good things he has done in my life.”