Seventh Graders Share Stories of God’s Faithfulness
One by one, seventh-grade students stepped out of their seats and walked toward the front of chapel. Some carried papers they’d written testimonies on, others carried these stories in their mind, the kind that they knew by heart. The stories were different. A family enduring heartbreaking loss, and another whose parents wrestled with an unexpected change in direction. Moments when circumstances made little sense at the time, are now stories passed from parents and grandparents to their children who shared them in chapel this week and all of them carried the same discovery: God was there.
That was the lesson Mrs. Tara Carlson wanted her seventh-grade students, and ultimately the entire Hillcrest community, to see during a recent chapel focused on the faithfulness of God. “The Bible is filled with stories and stories of God’s faithfulness,” Carlson told the students at chapel, and at the close of the testimony time she challenged them to do something more than simply study those stories. She asked them to look for evidence of that same faithful God in their own lives.
“How have you seen God faithful?” Carlson asked. “What’s a standing stone moment in your life thus far that you can point back to and say, ‘Hey, God did that. God used this hard thing for good. God brought about this direction change in my family, and now it’s impacted us’?” It turned a classroom assignment into something much bigger in the chapel presentation. Students were learning that the God they encounter on the pages of Scripture is not merely the God who was, He is the God who is.
Throughout Scripture, God repeatedly tells His people to remember. Israel stacked stones beside the Jordan River so future generations would ask what happened there. Feasts, songs, stories, genealogies, and memorials reminded God's people that their history was not random, that God had actually acted in time and space. God had provided, protected, rescued, and remained faithful. Carlson invited her students to begin identifying those same kinds of markers in their own families.
“Maybe it’s not something just directly for you,” she said. “Maybe it’s a standing stone moment just in the history of your family that you have heard from your grandparents, from your parents.” That’s when the students telling their stories came to life. One student shared about a tragedy that happened during a family trip. Why would God allow them to lose their first child? The student's story did not offer an easy answer, but instead, it pointed toward faithfulness in the middle of suffering.
God provided people who surrounded the family, comforted them, brought meals, and helped carry them through their grief. Years later, the parents have been able to come alongside other families experiencing similar pain. “God used this hard time in good ways,” the student explained, and that distinction matters in that student’s testimony and is an encouragement for classmates. Faithfulness does not mean every story is easy; it means God remains God inside the difficult parts of the story.
Another student summarized the lesson simply: “This shows me how faithful God is and how the Lord never changes. The Lord is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” That is the bridge God invites students to learn to cross. The God who worked through Abraham, Moses, Ruth, David, Esther, Peter, and Paul is the same God students can trust in Fergus Falls today.
Another seventh grader connected an experience in his family with Jesus' words in John 13:7: “You do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.” For a seventh grader, that is a profound lesson. Students will have chapters of life they cannot understand while they are living them. Sometimes understanding comes months later, and sometimes it resolves in years, and still other times it is redeemed in eternity through the redemption found in Jesus Christ. Yet students can learn to look backward and recognize moments when God redirected, provided, protected, strengthened, or used something difficult to accomplish something they could not yet see. Those become their standing stones.
Carlson's final challenge was not simply to notice God's faithfulness; it was to remember it and proclaim it. “From here forward,” she told the students, “proclaim the mighty deeds of God. Remind yourself and others of how He's been faithful, and find ways to remember.” Students probably will not build stone monuments in their yards, but they might write the story down. They might ask a grandparent about a time God provided or remember a prayer God answered differently than expected. They might tell a younger sibling how God carried their family through something difficult or tell their own children the story they heard in seventh grade. That is how faith becomes more than information; it becomes inheritance. A forever faith is strengthened when young people realize Christianity is not merely a collection of events that happened thousands of years ago, but that the biblical story continues to shape the way they interpret their lives today.