Week # 3

The summer is flying. I cannot believe that next week I am speaking and I only have two weeks left here. This past week I was in a cabin, and I was not too excited about it. However, this is not my first summer and I have learned if I go in with a crummy attitude then my week will follow likewise (okay so that is not just at camp). So I prayed and started reading Philippians over and over again, and I came across a passage in the first chapter where Paul is talking about people preaching with the wrong motives and how to him it doesn't matter because Jesus is being preached. Anyways with that in mind I decided it was time to stop judging some of the others for their motives and rejoice that God is using even them to preach the good news. This week was awesome. Energy was found in God, and I discovered that actually spending time with God on my breaks helped. This past week was awesome and the best was Thursday night when a few of the girls asked to accept Jesus. Neither my co-counselor nor myself asked them, they came to us. It was so sweet. This next week I am speaking in the chapels so I would greatly appreciate your prayers.

An indescribable God

Ok, I babysat (if you could call it that) tonight and wow the kids were a nightmare. I got pretty mad at a bunch of middle schoolers. Anyways after listening to Indescribable by Chris Tomlin a couple of times I started thinking about how amazing God is, then how much beyond my imagination He is. And it sort of donned on me that God loves me a pretty much insignificant speck of life (in comparison to the universe) and hears my prayers and forgives. Then of course I start to realize that this kid who is being a pain in the you-know-what is loved just as much by God, and that from time to time I can be that irksome. Slowly but surely I started to see this annoying child in a whole different way. Instead of seeing this kid as a jerk, I saw him as a child, probably hurting a lot, in desperate need of a loving Savior. Then the unthinkable happens... I actually pray for him, not a forced insincere thats what I'm supposed to do prayer, but an actual legit prayer.

There were also these to girls, sisters, who went to my school a couple years back. Gave me loads of grief then and were again a pain-in-the-you-know-where tonight. After what happened with the previous kid I started to see the same thing in this girl. She appeared to be a girl caught up in the pressure of being popular, used to putting people down to build herself up (obviously I may still struggle a little with judging), but slowly I started to note that she too was probably hurting and struggling with allowing God to be her everything. I'm not sure if this is God working inside me or what, but there is definitely something. If that carries over to school and maybe just maybe a few others start experiencing the same things, then maybe just maybe school will be different. To quote a cheesy musical, "this may be the start of something new..."

Ok I think I am starting to get it

Back in September God called me back to my parents church (I have to start calling it MY church) and I had no idea why. Well thanks to a few people God chose to speak through I think I might understand now. I went with my old church to the rescue mission to serve for a little more than an hour. It was an awesome reminder of what serving God is like (since it has been more than two years since the last time I went). However as I was fighting traffic to get to choir relatively close to on time I started thinking why doesn't my church have as many opportunities to serve as this church. Ok first of all incredibly stupid thing to think because isn't that like judging my church. If a person cannot another person then surely a person cannot judge a church. I asked one of my friends (also in my prayer group there) what her take on it was. She reminded me that our church is still recovering after losing our senior pastor and they are in the process of rebuilding. Well that is true, but I thought about it a little more and realized that long before we started having all these issues with pastors and such when our church was large and had a strong foundation there was still little in the means of outreach, it seemed (and seems) like the church has been focusing a lot on making itself bigger and better. Now don't take any of this wrong and think that I hate my church because I assure you I do not. However after thinking it through and listening, it started to click.... I have a heart for missions and outreach (even if I forget it from time to time) and I am not satisfied with my church or rather their opinion of it. What is the best way to change something? The answer is simple, get involved. That is exactly what I intend to do. After choir is finished at the end of December I will take the membership class and officially become a member of that church. Then I will find some way of getting involved in the outreach department or the missions department, whichever.