Our God is Great!

Every closing day I get to talk about the Teen Service Team program that I am helping to direct in front of about 1500 people. After I review the program I usually pull 2 campers from TST to give testimony about what God has done in their lives.

The testimony today was incredible.

The girl who talked, I knew. I knew her because she hated camp and she wanted nothing to do with God. She wanted to leave, and after many painful conversations, she left last Sunday. Her mom and dad were heartbroken, not only because she was leaving camp, a place she had traditionally loved, but because she was seemingly turning her back on the God they loved.

She was gone less than 24hrs when we received a phone call from her mom. The camper wanted to come back! The camper was talking and praising God for the change in her. She said she knew that God was calling her to come back.

Today in her testimony, she gave more details. She said that while she was on the prayer walk, God's Spirit totally grabbed onto her heart and she couldn't understand how people could look at the world and not see God in it. She said it was then that she gave her life to Christ. She started crying and than said some random catch phrase that made her whole team laugh and the moment was lost.

Her mom came crying up to me later and gave me a big bear hug. She said words couldn't express the joy in her heart at the work of our great God.

have you ever seen?

Have you ever seen 60 horses running down the road - unbridled- unhindered by people's property lines?
I have. So has Jay.
Last night, around 7 pm, there began to be frantic calls in the radios for anyone available to come out to 9 mile between 95th and 80th Avenues to help wrangle horses. Jay and I responded. We had been ready to head home for the night, but this sounded like way more fun.
We broke a few rules and took a golf cart to make it most of the way there (it was about a mile from our office). We took the next 1/2 mile by foot only to come across the most unlikely band of warriors. Some were on foot, some were in cars, we even had one on their motorcycle.
The majority of them were quickly corralled into a church yard. The last 12 were a little tricky. Some took off another couple miles down the road. Others headed off the newly sprouted corn fields only to be followed by burly site men in pick-up trucks (property owner apologies would be issued later).
A plan was hatched. Horses are herd animals. We should just run them down 9 mile to the pasture. So with our cars, our arms, our motorcycle and with our little bit of luck we managed to get them back onto camp property. It was quite a sight to see them run by the cars that were trying to go the opposite way down the road.
But camp property wasn't good enough- we needed them to be in a fenced in pasture or we were going to be doing this again in a few minutes. So through chest high grasses we waded and continued our herding techniques (my particular favorite was the swinging of the lead rope over my head).
Finally, the horses were returned safely behind the gates of their pasture. I was covered in bites and sweat and we still had to hike back to our golf-cart that we left on the side of the road.
I still had one more adventure ahead of me. Something in the grasses attacked me. I was covered in bites and I began to have a major allergic reaction. My eye (which had been bit) began to swell. I began to sneeze uncontrollably and my eyes watered like I was crying. When I went into the infirmary to get some medicine their initial response was "what happened to you?!" They pumped me full of benadryl and I was sound asleep within the hour.

Radios and winking dads

I have recently encountered the strange phenomena of the winking dad. I encounter several hundred dads a week as a work at the luggage pavillion on opening and closing days. 75% of those dads will wink at me. I don't really see it as them being flirty - really it is more like a twitch that they began in adolescence as a way to pick up girls, but now it is the instant reaction that happens to their face when they see a female.

Here is a picture that I feel sums up what Jay and I are doing this summer.

Our radios. They are a permanant attatchment to our hips (or I guess in Jay's case, a permanent attatchment to his new utility belt. . . I don't know, it is a host thing). Jay is known by his job. Everybody needs the host, all of the time. The radios sleep next to our bed and they like to wake up and talk (especially to Jay) very late at night or very early in the morning. For me, everybody on my staff knows my name and likes to call it - a lot. I rarely get to make it from the food line to my table with my food still hot because I am the giver of the answers to all of the questions, all of the time.

Here is a gift to my Lincoln friends:

Yes folks, that is Scottie Broxterman all decked out for our army themed evening event, and it is not just him. Check out some of my other staff:

I miss you all and love you dearly.