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God Uses Us Despite Our Limitations

Tony Campolo tells of how he was a counselor at a junior high camp. He said he had never met meaner kids in his life. They focused on an unfortunate kid named Billy who had cerebral palsy. His brain was unable to exercise proper control over his body or speech. The kids called him "spastic." Billy would walk across the grounds of the camp in his disjointed manner, and the others would line up behind him, imitating his every movement. One day Billy asked one of the boys, "Which way is the craft shop?" The other boy twisted grotesquely, pointed a dozen different ways and said, "That way!" How could he be so cruel?

The meanness reached its lowest point when Billy's cabin had been assigned the morning devotions for those 150 kids. The boys voted for Billy to be the speaker. They knew he couldn't do it. They just wanted to get him up there so that they could mock him and laugh. Little Billy got up out of his seat and limped his way to the platform. You could hear the titters of mocking laughter. But that didn't stop the little guy. He took his place behind the rostrum and started to speak. It took him almost ten tortured minutes to say, "Je-sus loves meee! Je-Je-Je-sus loves meee! And I love Je-Je-Jesus." When he finished there was dead silence. I looked, and there were boys trembling and crying all over the place. A revival broke out in that camp and kids turned their lives over to Jesus. A host of boys committed their lives to Christian service.

Campolo wishes he had kept count of how many ministers he has met as he travels across the US who have told him how they gave their lives to Jesus because of the witness of a "spastic" kid named Billy. “If God could use him with all of his limitations, what makes you think that God can't use you to touch the lives other people? If God can transform the lives of people through the likes of little Billy, don't you dare tell me He can't do great things through you.”

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