Controlled chaos

I once heard the art of water color painting described as controlled chaos. One starts at the top of the page with a healthy weight of water and paint on the brush, then gradually shapes it down the page in ways that make the picture take form. More or less.

Last week I witnessed another kind of controlled chaos as one of the leaders of a Youth Evangelism Conference held in Nashville, Tennessee. As part of the event, participants were invited to witness to their faith in servant evangelism ministries, showing God's love in practical ways. They converged on the downtown area with coffee and cocoa, bottled water, blankets, food, gravitating especially to those areas where there were homeless folks or others in need. They stood outside hospital parking lots with refreshments, and were sometimes asked to pray for family members of those visiting the hospital. They did service projects at a local HIV/Aids clinic, the Rescue Mission and a homeless shelter. When you have a couple hundred teenagers involved in something like this, it looks like controlled chaos, without much emphasis on the controlled part. But the stories the kids told when they returned made it clear that God used this effort on a cold afternoon to touch many lives in small and practical ways -- especially those young people.