08/27/2006
The Kansas
Souvenir
To my faithful readers.
This summer, I did not go on exciting excursions to Asia or Europe . I didn’t
go to New Orleans
to get up to my eyeballs in plaster. I
didn’t travel the world at all. Instead,
I found a place in tiny Edgerton ,
KS
You see, I spent the summer hanging out with Jr. High
girls at Youthfront West. Girls who are just starting to
ask questions about life and wonder why they are here and where they are
going. Girls who became my shadow for a
week while they were at camp. Girls who
may possibly remember me for the rest of their life. Girls that I got to share Jesus with for a
week solid and who hopefully got to know Him better through me.
I spent 10 weeks with a different group of girls each
week. One night toward the end of camp I
sat back in the chapel and realized that if I had all the girls I had in all my
cabins this summer in the chapel at one time, they would fill more than all of
one side of it. That was an incredible
feeling, knowing that I had influenced over 150 girls this summer. Hopefully it was a good influence ;).
Camp was a full week.
Every day I got up at 7:00 and woke the girls up and made them clean. My day didn’t slow down until I put the girls
to bed around 11 and I collapsed into my bed and started over the next
morning. We weren’t allowed to use our
cell phones, but there really wasn’t time anyway. I was so exhausted all the time, but I managed
to keep going and usually not let the girls know. Week 8 my team even won the spirit stick 4
out of 5 days…and if you’ve talked to me lately you know that my voice isn’t
the same. I hope it will eventually get
back to normal, but it’s been switching between raspy and gone since Week 3. It
wasn’t me that kept going because I know that I don’t have that much energy in
me. It was all God working in me. Week 3 I was really sick and had no voice the
whole week. I got an ear infection on
Thursday night, and ended up going to the doctor on Friday morning, leaving my
girls. I did my Bible studies with the
girls with no voice. Yet I will look
back on that week as one of my favorite weeks of the summer. I know that God worked through my weakness
that week. 2 Corinthians 2:9-10
proclaims that “[God’s] power is made perfect in weakness” and I claimed that
promise all summer long.
I also grew to appreciate my parents over the summer,
especially on those weeks where girls didn’t respect me or talked back to me or
didn’t know how to clean their rooms. I
hated that I poured so much of myself onto these girls and they didn’t
appreciate it at all and just threw it back in my face. I remembered the days where my mom would tell
me to do something and I wouldn’t do it or would talk back to her. I bet she felt the same way. No wonder she yelled at me. It was exhausting being completely selfless
all the time. But definitely satisfying
knowing that was where God wanted me.
I went to Kansas
to share Jesus with Jr. High girls. I
definitely did that and it was absolutely amazing. However, I encountered another ministry as
well: caring for staff. I made some
lifelong friends on the staff this summer.
We were all living together for 11 weeks solid and we went from strangers
to family during that time. We ate
together, laughed together, and cried together.
We shared God’s love with each other by praying with each other both for
cabin situations and personal lives and by being shoulders to cry on or
cracking a joke when someone needed cheering up. We ministered to each other by cooking for
each other, lending our stuff to one another, and sometimes throwing each other
in the pool/lake (hey, it’s jr. high camp and we acted like it). These were the people that got me through the
hard times and made the summer easier to bear.
They also made the fun times more fun.
And sometimes situations were so hard that you just had to laugh at
them, and they would laugh with me. And
sometimes we restored things back to the way they ought to be ;).
While it definitely wasn’t Paris , this summer was incredible and I have
so many memories that I will keep close in my heart. And while some of my other excursions have
been about what I’ve seen and did, this summer wasn’t about me; it was about
the girls. And it brought me back to the
simpler things in life: how to show God’s love to other people. And that’s what it’s all about. It’s hard being back in class. In fact, it’s awful to spend my time learning
to advance myself. When I know that
there is so much work to be done. Not
that I can’t show God’s love in the class room and in Carbondale , but it’s hard in the midst of
everything else to make that my primary focus.
But I know that He works through the willing. And I pray that I would be His vessel this
semester and that He will work through me both in class and in the BCM and
everywhere else I find myself.
Thanks for taking the time to read another edition of the
Souvenir.
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