2014 Senior Retreat

This post was written by Senior Evie Fordham, an intern in the Department of School Advancement.

Each September, the Wake Christian senior class participates in a senior retreat, where they get to play games, listen to a message, and eat pizza at Midway Baptist Church. This year’s retreat was bittersweet, as the Class of 2015 honored Madison Pearce, who had passed away only a couple of weeks earlier. Midway’s Pastor Grant Staubs was able to incorporate the gospel while addressing the tragedy during his sessions with the seniors.

“God uses unbelievable circumstances,” he began, “He used the death of His Son on the cross to redeem us all.” Going along with the theme of God’s working through trials, he chose as one of his texts Mark 6, where God gives abundant sustenance to the crowd and, Staubs emphasized, does not even waste the leftovers.

Cuing off of the story in Mark 6, Pastor Staubs told the students, “My encouragement to you guys is to realize that God is not wasting things in your life … My fear for good kids like you guys is this: that you know a lot about God, but you don’t truly know Him … A lot of people are going to spend an eternity in Hell because they knew a lot about God, but they never fully placed their faith and trust in God. God’s going to allow a lot of circumstances and a lot of things to happen in your life because He wants you to look up to Him.”

He also gave the seniors some practical advice. “I think it’s important that when difficult times come, we’re honest and real with the Lord,” he said.

“People will say … ‘You’ll get over it.’ If anyone says that to you … That’s ridiculous. You don’t get over something like you guys have experienced … You learn to deal with it day by day by God’s grace.”

Pastor Staubs closed with a very honest exhortation, saying, “2015 Wake Christian Seniors, you have experienced great loss. The Bible is true when it speaks of the shortness of life and you have felt the impact of life being a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away … My prayer for you is that your loss is not wasted, but that you live your life to the fullest. Not live your life to the fullest in some crazy way, but that you’ll live life to the fullest realizing that you have an opportunity to glorify and live for God in this life because that’s going to last forever … I believe the God of the universe wants nothing to be wasted and he does not want you to waste your life.”