WEEK 2: Camp Praise; Sweet Home, OR

After our long week at Gilead, we arrived at Camp Praise, exhausted and not at all feeling ready for our next group of kids to arrive. We were pleasantly surprised when we pulled into the camp though to find that it was a very homely and simple camp..in a beautiful way. The staff was small, the grounds were small, the games were fun, but simple, and it was beautiful. There is such a beauty to simplicity.
My cabin of jr highers soon arrived, and our 2nd week of camp began..
The week was good. Really good. Like I said, the camp was simple, but it was focused on God. It was focused on loving the Lord and loving these jr highers we were with. We started out our mornings together in a staff meeting focusing our eyes on Jesus and praying together. We went out during the day as 1 team, with a unity and love that only Christ can bring- and we went out and let Jesus love these kids through us. My cabin of girls, for the most part, was a really sweet cabin. I got to have one-on-one time with all of them and find out about their lives, their struggles, and their walks with God. I got to laugh with them, and cry with them. And most exciting of all, I got to sit with one of my little girls, Zoey, as she prayed to tell the Lord that she needed forgiveness and that she believed in him, and that she wanted to see him and hear him and be with him..and that she loved him so much! It was a simple and beautiful prayer.

Darron, the speaker at the camp this week, was blunt, fiery, and real. He said things like they were, and I appreciated that. The whole week he talked about what it meant to be "A person after God's own Heart." He used the life of David as an example because David is the person that God calls a man after his own heart. I learned so much from Darron this week. God really used what Darron was talking about, the way Darron loved the kids, the way Darron talkes about his wife and marriage, and the way Darron lived his life to teach and encourage me. It was really neat hearing Darron talk about his wife, Candy, and hearing him say that she is hot, that she is his best friend, that he is a better person because of her, and that he loves the Lord more because of her. He went on and on about her, about how great it was being married to her, and then he got all choked up because he missed her so much (after only 3 days!). Although this may seem like not a big deal, to me it was. To me it was a huge testimony and example of what a marriage should look like. I have never seen a guy talk so highly and respectfully about his wife and their marriage. It gave me hope.

Darron's talk about being a person after God's own heart really challenged me and made me think. He had 8 main points:

A person after God's own heart:
1. may be unnoticed by most but will always be noticed by the one who matters most
2. cares more about God's honor than his own life
3. maintains a proper perspective of lives problems- has God's peace, power, and presence
4. will always find faithful friends
5.will always honor the perfectly placed authorities in his life
6. will always extend to others what God has extended to them- mercy, forgiveness
7. will always faithfully fight, resist, and run from temptation
8. is always willing, ready, and able to boast about God's bigness and our littleness- the goodness and faithfulness of God

God taught me so much through these different points about what it means to be a person after God's heart. He challenged me to look at my friends and decide if they were pulling me towards Christ, or away. He challenged me to be quick to boast about God and his faithfulness in my life. He challenged me to long to be noticed by God, instead of people. He challenged me to care more about God's honor, than what people think of me.

At the beginning of this week I talked with God and asked him to help me have a heart that was present. I realized how long I have lived just trying to get through the day, just dragging through waiting for the next day, waiting for my next breathe of fresh air. I don't fully invest my heart and mind into every moment...and I need to. I was not making the most of every moment, and I need to and want to, to honor God. So that was my prayer as I went into this week to have a heart that was fully there and that loved my girls and invested in my girls- and I felt like God granted me that...and it was wonderful! It was draining, and hard at times..but it was good. And I am so thankful!

God has been so faithful to me. Faithful in bringing me encouragement. Faithful in giving me strength when I have none. Faithful in giving me words when I have none. He has been faithful in working in and through this mess of a person that I am, and using me to bring honor to Him.

Week 1: Mt. Gilead, Sebastapol, CA

We started out our summer adventure by getting up at 4AM and driving straight through from Cannon Beach, OR, to Sebastapol, CA - A 12 hour drive to our first camp, Mt. Gilead. The week at Gilead was, to say the least, an exhausting and stretching week. It was a tough week. Several different factors played into why the week was so exhausting and tough. For one, Gilead is a very loud and enthusiastic camp. It is like a pep rally from high school...THAT NEVER STOPS! You are constantly screaming, yelling, making up cheers, and participating in competitions- and it never ends. It is so high energy, and being a counselor, it was my job to help get the kids all loud and screaming and cheering. This was so draining for me because I'm not an enthusiastic person. I felt pushed into a position of being someone I wasn't. I felt out of place. Along with this I felt very imprisoned. I couldn't seem to laugh, joke around, be silly, to just let loose and be real. It left me frustrated with myself, yet not knowing how to let go and be real. I realized this is the way I feel most places I go. It follows me almost everywhere I go. I have a hard time letting down my guard and letting myself be real. I just close off. I don't like it..but I don't know how to change, I don't know how to not do that. But I feel like it is selling myself short and not honoring God, because I am not being who he created me to be..it's like I'm hiding who he has made me- but doing it unintentionally.
Both of these things were factors into why it was such a tough week, but the hardest, most discouraging part for me was that every day, I felt like I tried so hard to love my girls, to talk to them, to get to know them, and in morning and evening cabin discussions to really dive in deep and talk about the Lord with them- and I felt like we got no where. Right when we would start getting into a good conversation about the Lord, about their struggles, about death, etc. something would happen, some distraction that would tear all my girls attention away, the moment would be lost..never to be seen again.
I left the camp feeling like a failure. Feeling like I failed my girls..and worst of all, feeling like I failed God. I so badly wanted to represent him well. I so badly wanted my girls to see Jesus in me. I wanted them to see and feel his love, to see who he is through me and desire to know him. But I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I still failed. Now don't get me wrong, there were lots of fun things about the camp- I got reunited with an old friend from high school who randomly was working at the camp as well (she was a huge encouragement to me!) ,we had a great time in the mud pit wrestling around, great fun playing ultimate clue, tons of fun getting crazily dressed up by my girls and doing a fashion show ending with a belly flop off the diving board into the pool...but what do those things matter..if I failed to represent God? .....what do they matter? They don't. I want to love God. I wanted my girls to know and love God..yet I failed to represent Him well. I found myself praying that I wouldn't be the only "Jesus" they ever meet. That God would bring someone into their lives who would better represent him to these girls.