“Saturate me with the oil of Thy Spirit, that I may be aflame. Make me Thy fuel O flame of God.” – Jim Elliot

So I kept seeing this redhead in the choir but I was sure that I was imagining that she was smiling at me. As I learned later the redhead’s name was Lisa and she actually was smiling at me and had been watching me for some time. She says that of all the young men in that auditorium, I was the most serious and passionate about the singing and preaching and this intrigued her. Each day when she came back to her dorm her roommates would ask her if she met a guy yet and once again she would explain that she was not there to meet guys but to get prepared for ministry. Finally they wore her down and one day she told them, “well there is this one guy I would like to meet but I don’t know his name.” They squealed with delight and made her promise to point this young man out the next time she saw him. So later that day I come walking into the cafeteria and Lisa pokes her roommate and says, “there he is…” her roommate Karen looks up and says quite loudly, “Matt Bullen!!!??? That’s the guy you want to meet, Hey Matt!! Come over here! So now Lisa is bright red and crawling under the table. It turns out that her roommate is my dear friend Karen from my church. I came up with Karen through Sunday school since we were 4 years old. She is like a sister to me. Lisa is petrified and of course I have no idea what is going on and at the moment. I don’t even recognize Lisa as the girl from the choir. Karen just introduces me to all of the girls at the table and I move on never giving it another thought. But for a week or so after Karen keeps telling me that her roommate likes me and she wants me to meet her. I keep telling Karen that I can only imagine what kind of girl she is trying to match me up with and I want no part of it.

Finally one day we are having a big lunch on the grass in the middle of campus and Karen comes and starts dragging me by the hand to meet her roommate. I reluctantly give in and she walks me up to Lisa and my eyes bug out because its the redhead from the choir! I feel like telling Karen, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the pretty redhead?” 🙂 Anyway, we talk a little but this girl Lisa is painfully shy and so I’m not sure if she is really enjoying this or if Karen coerced her as well. The next day however we got a chance to talk for a long time and tell each other our conversion and following ministry stories. She had been saved out of a horrible situation at the age of 13 had moved in with her pastor and his wife and kids and had lived with her youth pastor’s family some as well and been thoroughly discipled by them. She had been a radical witness in her high school too and had won and discipled many teenagers in her school. We had a very similar passion, vision, and mission in life and I left that visit that night knowing she was the one.

I had a little problem though. I had a girlfriend back home that my whole church thought I was going to marry. I had been chasing this girl on and off since I was in the 7th grade and everyone knew we were going to get married after she graduated high school. (Of course because we were strict Fundamental Baptists, so chasing her meant trying to sit by her in church). Now I had met the girl of my dreams and I was in a pickle. I explained my situation to Lisa and we reluctantly agreed that we should just be friends but neither one of us were very happy about it. We started meeting with some other friends every day to pray and seek God for His power to win souls. I was sharing with Lisa all of the things I was reading about the Holy Spirit and revival and she was getting more and more fired up. She and the girls in her dorm started having all night prayer meetings asking God to revive our college and to give us souls. The more time we spent together the more I knew we were both falling hard for each other and I kept trying to figure out how to get out of the fix I was in. It seems comical now but at the time it was a serious dilemma. When I went back home for Christmas, my girl back home informed me that she had met another guy and that she thought we ought to “date around” while I was away at college. No young man was ever more happy to be dumped!!

During this time another dilemma had been rising up in me. I had loved and soaked up all of the study and the prayer and the seeking God my first semester at Bible college but one thing was eating at me. I had just spent two years in high school winning souls every day, teaching every day, preaching every week, and various other ministry adventures and though I had needed the time with God and the season of searching for His power I was now ready to get involved in some sort of ministry and get back in the action. I had noticed a sign at Baptist Temple where I attended that read Teens Unlimited Youth Ministry. I felt drawn to that sign and I started praying that God would let me get back to winning the lost somehow and that he would let me be a part of that ministry. To my amazement, within a couple of weeks I was invited to be an assistant youth pastor in that ministry and they were also looking for a young woman from the college to work under the youth pastor’s wife and minister to the teen girls. I immediately told them about this awesome young woman named Lisa that I knew who would love to have that position. So shortly thereafter Lisa and I were off and running working in Teens Unlimited and going to Bible college and more miracles were about to begin… Aflame For God – Teens Unlimited