The following article is adapted from a Christmas newsletter sent out by Jeremy Luistro, who graduated this year from John Brebeuf Regional Secondary in Abbotsford and is now volunteering with NET Ministries in Ireland.
As I spend my Christmas in Ireland – flights home to Canada were a bit too pricey – I am very blessed as many families are taking me in as one of their own.
I have settled into Ireland and been assigned a mission with two other International NET Missionaries, forming a team of our own working in the northwest corner of Ireland in Co. Donegal, based in a village of a 1,000 people in Newtown-Cunningham but doing work around the Letterkenny area as well. To sum it up, we will be doing all sorts of ministry from the quiet rural village countryside to the busy city streets.
We have been busy working as a mini-road team of sorts with other NET teams in the country, alongside NET staff hosting retreats in various places. There are so many beautiful stories to share, but I’ll keep it to three.
We hosted two confirmation retreats in the heart of Dublin at an all-boys school and an all-girls school, respectively. The energy that these children have was overwhelming at first, but it worked in our favour as they became invested in the activities we had for them and were very open to conversations about the faith.
At the boys school I injured my knee doing a slapstick comedy sketch, leaving me unable to walk. After the retreats I was prayed over by my team. I had doubts about being physically healed, but the third time they prayed over my injured knee I could feel something grinding in it. When I stood up, I was able to walk with that knee. God is so good!
At the end of every retreat hosted by NET, we hand out anonymous feedback forms so youth can tell us what they like, what they don’t like, and what they learned from the retreat. After two exhausting days of retreat these responses filled us with so much joy. I’d like to share some of them, from students aged 11 to 12:
“Jesus could be talked to as a friend.”
“I should ask help from the Holy Spirit from Jesus whenever I am scared.”
“I didn’t know that Jesus loves me personally, I always dismissed that but when we went to the church I really felt loved.”
Here’s one more highlight from the past couple of months of ministry.
One struggle that many youth have in rural Irish villages is boredom. Because these villages are quite small, there is often not much entertainment other than the local soccer field, which many avoid when the weather starts getting cold. What happens is many youth turn to loitering outside of stores – drinking, vaping, and other things that aren’t so great for them.
When some of these youth started loitering outside of our NET offices, our supervisors insisted they be invited into the office.
At first it was quite awkward. The youth weren’t interested, and we didn’t really know how to approach them. So we just made them tea and biscuits and tried to have some conversation. Offering one-word answers, they were unengaged and very closed up.
Then I had the idea of bringing out some musical instruments and playing live music for them. It worked! At the end of the afternoon we all were having a good time taking turns on the guitar singing Christmas and pop songs, with some of the youth teaching us Irish folk songs.
To be honest, I hadn’t wanted to do anything involving these young people at all. They were the kids I wouldn’t want to hang out with in high school because of their party lifestyle. They wouldn’t be interested in Jesus anyway, I told myself. They only care about vapes and alcohol.
By focusing on these negatives I was judging these kids before even giving them a chance. But they were the people God wanted us to actually reach out to the most! We weren’t called to just evangelize the good, the holy, the people who have everything figured out. We are called to reach out and love the difficult, those with bad habits, those who are in the wrong crowd.
It has been such a humbling experience for me as these youth remind me a lot about myself in high school, when I just needed someone to recognize my goodness and to meet me where I was at without asking anything in return.
I’m so blessed to be able to be the light of Christ to these youth and hopefully eventually encourage them to reach out to Jesus who loves them so much.
This is one of the ministries we will be continuing in 2023. We will continue to invite the youth of this village into our offices and build relationships with them. Many of them are actually starting to become comfortable with us and they’ve started asking questions about the many religious icons in our offices.
So please pray for the youth of Balleybofey as many of them come from difficult backgrounds and have unfortunately developed unhealthy habits with vaping and drinking. God is so good and loves them so much!
Because of your support, you make these moments possible. You enable me to serve the youth of Ireland and show them the love of God. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much, lives are being changed, Christ is being encountered! And you make my small part in God’s grand story possible.
Jeremy Luistro and Bella Grant of Prince Edward Island are the two Canadians serving with NET Ireland. To contact or support them visit netministries.ie.
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