In the seventh grade I joined the football team.  Don’t laugh.  I played wide receiver and free safety – the two positions least needed on a seventh grade football team me thinks.  Anyway, I rode the bench all season.  Never saw a minute of game play.  Until.

One day at practice the coach put me in the game.  On the first play of our scrimmage the ball was passed to me – far and high.  I leapt, arms out and up, looking the ball in to my grasp and – SMACK! – two burly guys spun me in the air and down to the ground on my left shoulder.  It broke clean in two.  That was my last day on the football field.

I flashed back to this landmark moment/emotional scar in my life earlier today at Colorado Christian University.

I’ve been speaking and playing on behalf of Compassion International for a while now but riding their college speaker guy bench hoping that their college chapel team would put me in the game.  There are more people at college chapels than at my shows – let’s be honest.  And it’s much harder to get on a chaplain’s schedule, to be green-lighted to speak about God and Compassion when you’re unknown, than it is to book a show in a local church.  And the number of kids that can be saved from such a large crowd is greater as well.  Then there’s also the damage or good one could do to Compassion’s relationship with a college – the effects of a bad experience can ripple on and on for years, making it difficult for Compassion to get on that campus for a long long time.

But this morning Kelley Erickson, the booking person for Compassion’s college chapel division, put me in the game.  The play was this: Sing three songs the crowd can sing along to and then talk about Compassion International and ask “poor college kids” to part with $32 every month to save a child they’ve never met living in impoverished conditions they can’t fathom in a land too far away to visit.

I sang my songs.  I talked about the “Good News”.  I explained what Compassion does and asked 500 college students to sacrifice to save lives.  And they did.

Loads of students raised their hands asking for a sponsorship packet.  Throngs of them stood in lines, some knowing they’d be late to class for doing so, to fill out paper work, fill in their credit card numbers and write checks.  The chapel team from Compassion brought 125 packets with them, expecting to have many left over.  We ran out.  So names of the still interested were added to a makeshift list and will get a packet in the mail soon.

The students of CCU surprised us all – I’m ashamed to say – rising to the occasion and giving up caffeine, cable, clothes, music and more to save lives.  Thank you.

And now Kelley wants to book me at college chapels across the country in 2008. 

That’s where you come in.  If you’d like to share Compassion International with your college FOR FREE, have your chaplain contact Kelley Erickson asap.  E-mail her at and I’ll be on my way.  All a college needs to provide us is a hotel room (Hampton Inn or the like, nothing fancy) and a meal.  I can also do open forums, speak to religion or music classes, take out the trash and just about anything else while I’m on campus.  Ideally, speaking in a chapel service and then playing a full concert that night would happen more often than not but the concert is a bonus, not a neccessity.  If I get to talk about Compassion you get me, doing whatever you want, FOR FREE.