Tuesday afternoon’s chapel featured David Skidmore, a youth minister at North Boulevard Church of Christ in Murfreesboro.
Skidmore kicked off his message by recalling a recent experience in a movie theater that left most of the customers dissatisfied with their purchases at the concession stand. After the customers had already paid, they found out that the soft drink machines were out of every drink except Powerade.
He laughed at the experience, and explained that his family has adopted the incident as an inside joke. They will often quote the manager of the theater by passionately yelling, “Look lady, we still have Powerade!”
“That’s just become a metaphor in our lives for if everything else is bad,” Skidmore said.
“Powerade’s not going to work,” he said, explaining that nobody wants to go to the movie theater to drink a sports beverage.
“College is where I spiritually began to struggle,” Skidmore said. He explained that he made a lot of unwise decisions during those four years, and he sees some students doing the same. “I just know there’s hope, because I’m standing up here,” he said.
After Skidmore’s college roommate watched him make poor decisions, one day, he told Skidmore, “If you’re the best example of what can happen when the spirit of God gets ahold of a person, I think I’m doing pretty good without him.”
Hearing that hurt Skidmore that day, but it still brought him grief to repeat it to the audience. “That day, I said, ‘Okay, everything is going to change,'” he said. “I realized what it was like to stand at a counter and to have paid for something, and expected the world to deliver it, and the world can’t deliver it,” he said, referencing his frustrating experience at the theater.
He said that God, on the other hand, blesses people with what they need in order to take hold of their lives.
He continued his message by showing comical pictures of familiar brands of food next to their knock-off counterparts. He explained that the comparison was so funny because the false brands fall so short of imitating the original brands.
Skidmore related this to faith and spirituality, tying his message together by saying, “The goal is that you look so much like [Jesus] that other people can’t tell the difference.”