This week has been great so far. As I previously mentioned Jamie talked about the “bad news” on Monday, remembering what we were without Christ. Tuesday night he talked about the “good news”, what our life is with Christ in it. Also on Tuesday, Julio gave a great morning chapel talk about showing Christ to others by loving them. He told us about one of his life long friends, Oscar, who he’s been praying would accept Jesus for years, and how he just recently accepted Christ as his savior. This happened because of prayer and the love that Julio and others showed Oscar. What a great story that gives you goose bumps and shows how through loving people, showing them Christ in our everyday lives, praying for them, and talking to them about Christ, people can come to know Christ as their savior.
Wednesday was a great day all around. We woke up late, breakfast until 9:45, we had a prayer walk, I ate nine sloppy Joes for lunch, my team won the basketball tournament, Kwinn (my wife, the missionary) brought down the house with a humorous and insightful talk at evening service, we had a luau, Kristen Moorer won the limbo bending in ways no one thought was possible, and the boys had some great games of buck-buck before bed time.
A little more about prayer walk, every year we try to do a contemplative exercise with the campers which requires them to be stretched and participate in a task very much out of the ordinary. We started by watching a Rob Bell video about silence in the tabernacle. From there the whole camp was quiet and we went out in groups to different stations. We went to a station where we picked up a rock and thought of it as our sin then threw it in the water and watched it disappear. The next station we considered the ways we need to be filled and took a piece of bread to eat and saw how Christ can fill us up. Then we went to a station with a broken mirror so we could see that we are broken and need Christ. Here we were also given seeds to ponder the life they give. The last station we all came back together and we had two sheets to paint on. The first was where we wrote who God is; the second is where we wrote who we are because of who God is. Reading these sheets is truly amazing to see how deep these campers really are. This is the fourth year we’ve done an exercise like this and every year the campers FAR exceed expectations. They are respectful of each other and responsive to the way the spirit moves.
Kwinn’s talk Wednesday night was right in line with the theme and who we are in Christ. She talked about how God is what gives her the ability to minister to the people she works with and how we are all missionaries because if we have been saved by Christ we are called to love others and show them Christ in our every day life. She also, was very transparent about how we all struggle with thing but that God doesn’t leave us, he’s always there for us.
We’ve been trying to incorporate campers in the night games. Monday night we recruited 10 campers for the skit to start Mission impossible. Tuesday we had 10 more join the skit for “pirates of Lake Agape” and they also were pirates for the game chasing the other campers. The last two days we’ve played super sized soccer (with the enormous ball), tug-a-war across the lake and had volleyball and basketball tournaments. So again things are going great. Please continue to prayer for the spirit to move.
-Steve Tucker
