interlínc : Maximizing Music and Media in Youth Ministry

“Keeping Me Alive” is one of the new songs from our new CD. Actually I had an experience recently with this song. Our manager, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer right after Christmas. It was a big blow to his family and people of our camp. He’s not only our manager but a close friend, mentor and a great man of God. He received a diagnosis just after Christmas, he went in thinking that he had an upset stomach and walked out with a diagnosis for pancreatic cancer which is typically the worst cancer you can get because you don’t have symptoms for a long time. Fortunately he went in for an upset stomach and that’s when they found it. So his prognosis was really good and they wanted to get him into surgery right away but he had complications that they didn’t expect so a 7 day stay in the ICU turned in to a 21 day stay. There were times when it looked like he wasn’t gonna make it due to certain complications. I had a chance to visit with him and see him while he was in the ICU and he was really weak, really out of it. And when I walked in, he must of been surrounded by people who were in worse condition than he was. There must have been 4 or 5 other people in the ICU there and Ihad heard that he had seen some really hard things that week, people that had not made it through there. After talking to him for a short time he was telling me how traumatic it was and that when he was most scared and felt most out of control, he just gave it up to God and he imagined these pillars of scripture around him. And he was just speaking scripture out loud and just talking to God and he said that, “While I was in the ICU and while it was so chaotic, I could just feel God right here with me”. And he said that it reminded him of this song, “Keeping Me Alive”.

Josh Havens from The Afters talks about what he recently is discovering about God.

Hey guys this is Josh from The Afters. What I’m discovering about God, I’ve seen through my brother over the last year. My brother has been addicted to meth for about 15 years and has been through alot of hard times. It started off slowly, he was into soft drugs and then gradually got into some harder things. He used to be a very successful person. He had a job where he was making over 100,000 dollars a year. He had it all. He had the nice sports car, the sweet house, he had all the different toys he wanted. He had the jet ski that we used to take out and because of drugs, he lost all of it. Not only that, but he lost the most important things to him and that were his kids. Child Protection Services ended up taking his kids away because of it. But my mom has been a great support to him and she always told him “You know what, it’s never too late. God loves you and his arms are always open for you”. And he would always reject it and it was never, I guess, the right time for him, but eventually he hit rock bottom through losing his kids and he completely turned his life around. He went into rehab. He is now clean and he has actually asked the Lord into his life and he is on fire. It’s been amazing to see. It’s been so exciting for me to see because he is a completely new person unlike anything I’ve ever known and to just see the excitement that he has for Christ and every time I see him he is asking how he can pray for me. And it’s really taught me that there is nobody who’s a lost cause, and there’s no one without hope. That even the people that we think are so far gone that they might never come back around, can because I couldn’t have imagined anyone being in a worse position and now he’s a completely changed person and just living for Christ. So if you know anybody like that, who you feel is hopeless and so far away from God, just encourage them and pray for them because no one is ever too far gone.