Camp Sermon Given in 2010

Good Morning!

I am going to start with some scripture today… 1 Corinthians 3:1-15.

This section of scripture is titled “On Divisions in the Church”.

I found this fitting for our church today. It has been a year, an interesting one at that. We have been through a lot together, as family and friends. I have watched the people that I love the most be hurt, angry, resentful, broken, and strong. Growing up in this church I have seen a lot without ever really realizing it.  I saw a picture last week of my first summer out at camp where our praise team had come in to do worship here, and our pews were full. I almost cried. Then I started thinking and remembering the feelings on my own heart that year while here in this church. I remember not wanting to be here. I couldn’t feel the Spirit. My heart ached for something that was missing. And then my church family fell apart and things changed drastically. And I can honestly tell you that the first Sunday that things were different, the Spirit was back. Yes, we were all hurting, and confused, and angry. But the bad feelings that I had had before were gone. I have wanted to be here every single Sunday since then. I have kept pretty quiet this last year and have watched as things started to come back together. I feel closer to each of you than I ever have before. My sermon today is titled “This Could be Our Day”. I come to you today with a challenge from my heart. Before I challenge you I want you to hear the song that sort of inspired this message.

~Insert Song Here~

I consider this song the Camp Horizon song. Because this is how I feel best describes my job as a counselor. And I am going to share with my first hand experience with this:

As a counselor at Horizon I have learned a lot about Youth Ministry and about myself. My first summer as a counselor I met a young lady named Jane. She was the first camper to really turn my world upside down. She was one of my campers during Performing Arts camp. A camp that I had become the dean of three days before it started, and had spent the whole weekend planning the whole thing from scratch. The first day I noticed that she didn’t want to sing with everyone else at Praise and Worship time and didn’t act like she wanted to be there. I pulled her aside to ask her what was going on and immediately she said “I don’t even believe in Jesus, I’m only here because my grandma made me come.” I felt the weight of the world fall on my shoulders and kind of panicked. I wasn’t quite sure what to do. We were taught how to bring someone to Christ but nowhere in my training were there instructions on what to do with a sixteen year old who was completely set on not believing in Christ. For the rest of that week my entire being was set to making her see Christ and come to understand that she needed a relationship with him. Even though all of my prayers and energy were focused on her finding the one thing that I have always known, there was no “happy” ending for that week at camp, until she returned the next summer much to my surprise. That summer I learned what it meant for something or someone to be more important to me than myself. I also learned what it felt like to really experience the Holy Spirit working in me. Looking back on that week, there is not much that I can remember, and what I do remember are things that don’t really seem like me. I spent more time in prayer that week than I had my entire life. I got closer to God than ever and it was an amazing place to be, which was good considering the next week I faced something that traumatized me for life. As a lifeguard for five years, I spent my last day of my first summer at Horizon back boarding a child who dove off of the diving board straight into the deck. I was mortified, and swore that I would never lifeguard again. But in the same way that the boy was fine and came back the next day ready to go again, eight months later I got back into the stand and am still a lifeguard. I know that God gave me the strength to make it through that experience and the strength to make it back into the stand.

My second summer at Horizon started off a little rough, I felt like the passion that I had discovered the summer before was gone and I didn’t know why I was still there. My school year had been really rough and I was so lost in my own life that I didn’t feel like I had a purpose for being there. I knew I needed a new “Jane” to give me a reason to be there. Her name is Sally, and she not only turned my world upside down but she stole my heart. From the first day of camp she latched herself to me. She is probably one of the sweetest little girls I have ever met. One day she decided to confide in me just how bad her home life was. When I asked her why she was at camp she said that her dad’s boss paid for the kids to go. She came with no money for the canteen and no Bible. She wanted nothing more than to learn everything we had to give her and she hated that she would have to leave at the end of the week. Some of my campers from the summer before liked to call me “mommy” and Sally said, “I wish you were my mommy.” At the age of twelve she had already discovered more of life’s hardships than I had ever dreamed of. She showed me the scars on her wrist from a time when she had tried to end her life, and that broke my heart. I didn’t know how to help her. I did not want her to go back to the home where the emotional abuse was going to continue until she was old enough to leave. When I offered her my phone number in case she ever needed anything she told me it would just make her mom mad. So I started trying to find a way to hide it where she would only know where it was. Then I realized she didn’t have a Bible. So I got one out of the staff house. I highlighted all of my favorite verses about strength and love, and wrote my number in the dictionary in the back under the word love. I was the first person to ever tell her that she was beautiful, and worth it, and it was the first time she heard the words “I Love You” and believed them. When it came time for her to go home, she gave me a hug in the morning and begged me not to talk to her when her mom got there, because her mom would be jealous of her having a relationship with someone other than herself. So I did as she asked, and also made sure that none of the pictures in the weekly slideshow were of her and me.

 Letting that little girl go was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I wanted to help her so badly that it hurt and all I could do was let her leave. So I prayed every single day for her for the rest of the summer and into the school year, hoping that she would find some strength and happiness. I prayed that I had given her the tools and words of wisdom and life that would carry her through all of the horrible times to come with a woman who hated her. One morning I woke to a text message that said, “Hey its Sally, do you remember me? I miss you...” I almost screamed. Of course I remembered her. From that day came early morning texting and a few times after school, she had memorized my phone number and was using a friend’s phone to talk to me while she was on the school bus.

In October I started to get an overwhelming weight on my chest with a feeling like something horrible was about to happen. It was a crushing feeling that I couldn’t completely understand, I knew God was telling me that something was going to happen and I needed to prepare my soul for this. It scared me, I prayed fervently that it wasn’t going to be any of my close family or friends that I was going to lose, and if so that He would give me the strength to make it through. Then on a Thursday morning Sally’s text came with no strength left. She said I need to tell you something but I’m afraid you will be mad at me. I told her that I could never be mad at her and asked her what was wrong. She said sorry, I have to go. I worried and prayed all day long, because I knew in my heart that the one thing she would think that I would be mad about was her ending her life. We had talked about it, and I told her at camp that there was nothing in this world worth ending your life for. I was so scared that she wasn’t going to get back on that bus the next morning, but she did and another text came. She told me that she couldn’t do it anymore, that it was too bad, and it wasn’t worth it, that she wasn’t worth it. I texted back as fast as I could trying to assure her that she was worth it and that I loved her even if her mom didn’t. But her strength was gone and she could not promise me that she was going to make it back on the bus on Monday morning. So I got out of bed and called my mom, crying. She told me that I had to make the call, I had to turn it in, and I was so scared because, if they didn’t do something drastic like take her out of the home, then her mom would just make it all worse. But I called the school and talked to the counselor and told her everything. Then a couple hours later I got phone call, from that beautiful little girl who was crying and just as scared as I was. She didn’t know what was going to happen to her, and didn’t want to get off the phone with me. They hospitalized her for a week, just a few days before her thirteenth birthday, and the counselor called me once to give me as much information as she could, because she knew how worried I was. The lines of communication between Sally and I were gone. She wasn’t allowed to ride the bus for awhile, and then when she did she didn’t text me much. Until the week of finals, she was staying at a friend’s house for the night (which was something she had never been allowed to do) and we started texting. I asked her if she was excited about Christmas, and she said she was, I was shocked. She then told me that her and her mom had been going to counseling ever since I had made that phone call. I had spent two months praying and worrying that I had made her life worse, and in the end I realized that God had put me in her life to save it, and her in mine to give the passion that I had been missing.

Through my two summers at Camp Horizon and a semester of texting Sally I realized that there was more to my calling that just youth. I have a huge passion for children of all ages, but my heart is easily ripped out when it comes to girls of the middle school age. I want nothing more than to tell them all that they are loved and that they don’t have to live up to the world’s standards. They are beautiful the way God made them, and they are Princesses, because their Father is the King of Kings, and should never settle for less than a Princess deserves when it comes to living in this world. I want every youth to know that there is always a way out that does not include ending your life. I know that the rest of the staff at Horizon back me up on this message as well. I have created a Bible study just for the girls with this message. And the guy counselors have created one for the boys that is designed to teach them how to be young men of God and how to be worthy of serving in God’s army!

 “This Could Be Our Day” – Addison Road

What we do here is just the beginning

New life is starting at every ending

We are a part of the story unfolding

This is the weight of the world we are holding

This could be our day

This could be our day (3rd& 4th time)



Clearly it's time to make a change

Or I could keep sitting and waste all day

I know that it's time for me to move

I've been given this minute to use

And given this moment to prove that



Chorus

I was holding back

Now I've come undone

I want to touch the world

Heal the broken ones

Ending the cycle has just begun

We've been given this minute to use

And given this life to prove

Chorus

To give ourselves away

For something beautiful

A million miles away

To the one who's hungry, and thirsty

And needs some hope

To the people that are weary and

Broken and left alone

I'm giving myself away

I'm giving myself away

My challenge to you today as a congregation is to find a child to sponsor for a week at summer camp. Help us make a difference and send us one kid, because this IS our day, our minute to use, and we really are holding the weight of the world; and it’s time to give ourselves away