July 20, 2026 - Good Morning! It’s Monday, July 20.
The church I worked at yesterday is sending their youth to camp today - on a bus. That news brought back some memories. I can’t begin to count the number of miles I’ve logged over the years on church buses. Mission trips, choir tours, youth camps - it’s probably greater than the distance from the earth to the moon! Many of the early trips, before the “turn of the century”, were on old-school, school buses. The kind with hard bench seats and air conditioning that consisted of sliding down the windows.
Later on we travelled on charter buses, and though they were a lot more expensive, they weren’t that much more comfortable - especially if the bus was jammed full of kids. Kids. Lying in the aisles. Kids. Shouting out “Are we there yet?”. Kids. Wall to wall... KIDS! The excitement of looking forward to those trips was at least equaled by the joy of seeing all those little darlings get back in their parent’s cars at the end of the week.
But, seriously, there are so many wonderful memories from those bus trips. Memories of hosting Vacation Bible Schools in city parks. Memories of being on The Today Show in New York City! Memories of teenagers touching the lives of inner city children and singing to the inmates of a women’s prison. Memories of standing alongside my youth group at Ground Zero a couple of years after 911, and of riding our bus through New Orleans the summer after Hurricane Katrina. I could fill a dozen devotionals with memories like these.
I’ve been in the work long enough that many of the teenagers on those buses have teenagers of their own now, or even teenage grandchildren! Sometimes I imagine them standing in a church parking lot waving goodbye to a bus load of kids. And I imagine, in those moments, that memories like mine flood back to them, and that they recall a time in their youth when God touched them, taught them, used them, blessed them.
Ecclesiastes 12:1 - “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth.”
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
