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.

A stroll in the woods

Jay and I have our days off together on Wednesday. Usually we spend it with other people, but yesterday we thought it was time that we spent the day just with each other, so we decided to go for a hike along the Manistee River Trail in Manistee National Forest. Jay camped out there on his own a couple of years ago, and I backpacked the majority of the trail in 2002.

After a couple of false starts, we were on our way. We set a path and stopped for some trail food on the way to the trail head. Jay remembered the part of the trail that we were going to hike as being about a 10 mile round trip - easily done in a day because we were packing light.

It didn't go exactly as we had planned.

Our trip was scheduled to go to the dam and back, but to the dam actually ended up being more like 6 or 7 miles than the 5 we had anticipated. Also, it was really hot and muggy and we did not pack enough water for the conditions, so once we hit the dam we had to go another 1.3 miles to get to a clean water source. Once we had replenished the H2O, we had to turn around and rehike the entire thing to get back to the car. We lost the path for a portion of the way back, which was fine for Jay since he was wearing his heavy duty hiking boots, but I was in my Chacos (c'mon - it was only supposed to be 10 miles on a well worn path right?).

After 6 hours of hiking, with only 15 min. of breaking, we made it back to the car - quite possibly one of the best sites I have ever seen. We scarfed down the box lunches we had brought while the Jetta sufficiently handled the worlds bumpiest road on the way back to the highway. After sitting for the 45 min. drive back to camp, standing proved to be quite difficult, but after treating ourselves to ice cream and an early bed time I think it is safe to say we will survive.

These are the faces that we thought would sum up our trip well, and here is a shot of our feet after the hike - these small body parts held up pretty well for the distance we put them through

Where's Toto?

I realize that in Nebraska big storms are the norm. Here in Northern Michigan - not so much. This past Sunday, June 8, Springhill was ravaged by storm front unlike any the camp has seen since it was created in 1969. In one half of camp over 200 trees are down. Our luggage pavillion was flattened and structures were damaged. Kids come in three days.

God was merciful and He saved us from any truly crippling damages. Obviously he has spared camp for a reason and we are all so grateful and so excited to see the work He does here this summer.

Please keep us in your prayers. Crews are putting 12-14 hour days in order to get the camp ready by Sunday, and tons of volunteers have come up for the week to help out.

I am wiped. . .

I have been here for over 3 weeks now, which, on a sad note, means I have missed over 3 weeks of my little Addison's very new life. On a happy note, it means I have been able to spend 3 weeks serving God at this place that God has used so much to impact my own life.

Jay got here two weeks ago, which has made being here a lot easier. All of my staff arrived today, which means that I am in over-drive - planning training, learning names, still staffing, rarely sitting down, and not getting any breaks.

Along with my staff came two dear friends, Scottie B. and Josh Hosak. They are a connection to Nebraska and they came with hugs and personal greetings from other friends who aren't doing anything quite as cool as working at a camp this summer.

On another note, Jay and I are trying to find plane tickets to come back to the states for Christmas Break. They, unfortunately, are ridiculously expensive and we are ridiculously broke. If you all could be praying for that situation that would wonderful.

Miss you all.

At the "Hill"

I've been here at Spring Hill since Monday. We trained earlier this week, and for the past three days we've been 'moving our offices' (that is code for carrying furniture and hundreds of boxes of paper up and down stairs in order to find a new spot for them. This is so that we can use what was once a storage closet as our office space). Needless to say, my lifting muscles are sore.

Jay is on his way here. He just called to tell me he is leaving, and that his heart is breaking. I know the feeling - my heart broke last week leaving Lincoln and it really hasn't recovered. I've had fun this week trying life out on my own. It seems strange not to have Jay go with me when I make spontaneous decisions, and it seems strange to be spontaneous on my own. I've gone out almost every night this week, hanging out with all of the single people that the camp ministry life seems to attract.

A positive of being here, is that I am back in some beautiful country. I just walked around this morning taking pictures. A downside is that it is still very cold here in Michigan and right now we are experiencing a very sweet, Nebraska-strength north wind.