"Delight yourself in the LORD and He will give you the desires of your heart."

Here are some pieces of a journal entry I wrote during our FOB (flat on bunk) time on Friday of this last week...

What a day today! Last night I was really down and discouraged, and my desires were for anything BUT being here doing what I'm doing...I went to sleep begging God to give me rest adn escape and a fresh start with a fresh spirit in the morning. I woke up to Haley whispering that I was on the schedule for ropes set up and it was 6:45am--the time I was supposed to be out on the ropes. I had completely slept through my alarm...I shot out of bed and for the first tiem all week--and probably a while before that--I wasn't sleepy waking up! You know when you sleep so heavily adn you feel like you've just been absent for a long time? That was how I felt! Praise the Lord for that answer to prayer!

Anyways, I was already late so I threw my clothes on and ran outside. I was in a somewhat pleasant mood until I was setting up the giant swing and I couldn't do it right because it was missing a carabiner. Needless to say, I was already in a rough mood heading back to my cabin to help Annette get our girls to breakfast. I have been realizing something about my heart this week. I know that as Christ-followers, we are able to have the sustaining joy of the Lord ALWAYS. There may be struggles that bring us down a bit we have JOY at our foundation. My heart has not been like that recently, however. The root of my attitude has been discontenment and sometimes when things are are fun or go well, I feel happy and my mood is brightened. This is NOT a very satisfying way to live...I have been finding myself desiring so many things that I don't have in my life right now--home, family, theatre, my voice (I am not able to take care of it the way I do at school), DANCING, friends from school, etc. One of my sweet friends, Lauren, asked at breakfast how I was doing and I told her how I was frustrated with the way I was feeling. She just encouraged me and said she'd be praying for me--and I knew she would.

After breakfast we headed to morning chapel and reflection groups (small groups which went really well) then we headed to the BOATS for our first activity. It's always great to have boats at the end of the week because we know the girls well by then and it's that much more fun to ride with them! Anyways, we have a new tube that is much bigger than the one we'd been using and it was my first time riding on it. Tubing is my absolute FAVORITE thing to do here!! I even got a counselor ride by myself after all the girls had gone so that the girls could watch me go flying and get thrown around--SO FUN :)

Then we switched to the banana boat and I was riding on the back with 5 of the girls in front of me and just kept wrestling in my heart with WHY I was so discontented when I have a SWEET job here-- that's just really hard sometimes--but I get to see God work every day! The verse I'd been clinging to all week is Psalm 73:26, "My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." But another verse also popped into my mind right then--Psalm 37:4, "Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart." Suddenly it clicked for me. My OWN desires are not satisfying to me and a lot of them cannot even be fulfilled right now. So many of them are selfish desires that create an unfulfilling and never ending sense of greed in my heart. But for the first tiem that verse meant something to me that it never has before. It doesn't mean that if I delight in Him, He will reward me by giving me what I want. No, it means that when I delight in Him, He will give me things TO DESIRE that are His desires. What a difference! My heart was immediately encouraged. Now my question is how exactly do I fully delight in the Lord? Still meditating on that one... :)

After boats we went to the pool and Annette (my co-counselor) came up to me and said, "I want to serve you today. What would you like to do for this activity--lifeguard or run the games?" I was SO blessed by that! I was able to lifeguard and not talk--I've been struggling with a scratchy throat and a hoarse/strained voice. After the pool we headed to lunch and one of my girls came up to me with her Bible and asked if she could show me some verses that she'd found and underlined on her own. We spend probably 10 minutes before lunch started looking at each verse and talking through what each one meant. I would ask her what each verse meant to her and we'd break it apart and talk through it. At the beginning of the week this same girl had told me that she didn't like to read the Bible because she never understands all the big words but she was telling me what the verses meant! It was incredible to see right then that the Holy Spirit brings UNDERSTANDING to those who read the Word. I also got a letter from one of my campers who was here a few weeks ago, and she asked so many questions about camp but at the end of the letter she said, "The most important question I have is are you doing your devotions? I am." SO PRECIOUS.

God is showing me that He is FAITHFUL. Even when it's hard to be here. He is giving me opportunities to sing (helping lead worship this last week and singing the National Anthem on July 4th) and I'm in a drama that runs as a continuing story for the campers throughout the week. He knows what He's doing with me here and He is gently giving me the sustaining strength to TRUST that.

Sorry this post is pretty long! I wanted to let you know a little bit of what a day looks like here! Love you all--thank you SO MUCH for your prayers!

His Glory.

Just when I think I have it figured out and I'm "going strong" and thriving and serving the Lord, something hits me and God reveals more to me and I'm humbled again. Today it was this: My ultimate goal should be to bring HIM GLORY--not to live in peace and happiness in my own life. I have been focused on seeking God because His way of life is the BEST way of life--which is completely true! However...if that is the REASON why I seek God than the root of my desire and motive is for my own personal freedom and happiness. God doesn't promise to give me a happy life...HAPPINESS is because of circumstances but JOY is in spite of circumstances. He promised to give me sustaining joy but not necessarily sustaining happiness. That's hard to swallow...there are very few times that I have genuinely desired God's GLORY alone...it's a humbling thing.

This weekend off has been absolutely WONDERFUL and I've been able to spend time with and have incredible conversations with some incredibly precious girls here. I'm surrouunded by missionary kids and their perspective on life is refreshing, challenging, encouraging, and fascinating. We watched a sermon by Tullian Tchividjian online this morning called "The Glorious Impossibility" (Part 1) and I was SO challenged. There's always more to learn, more to understand, more to show me how depraved and sinful my heart is, and more to show me how GRACIOUS and GOOD He is to save me and love me.

I miss my family! Miss my precious little sisters and wish I could be there for them and wish they could come and do all the activities here at camp! I miss my daddy--Father's Day was last week and his birthday was TODAY! Happy birfday, Daddy :) Miss my sweet mommy and love every chance I get to talk to her! Miss my big sister and her sweet wisdom and love! BUT I'm hopefully going to get to see her this Saturday because she'll be in Houston for a wedding!

Thank you all for your love and prayers!

One month down...two to go!

Precious Lord, give me Your words to present the Gospel clearly to these girls at every opportunity. Help me to love them relentlessly just as You love me remembering “my reward is with my God” (Isaiah 49:4). Speak, Lord, I beg You. Penetrate their hearts this week and transform their lives. Take me out of the equation. Only Your glory.

This is a prayer I wrote in my journal this past week, and it expresses a lot of what my experience here has been. I’ve been with three different groups of campers so far, two of the groups were 5^th graders, and the most recent group was 8-10^th graders. With the first group, we didn’t live in with the campers, we were just team leaders and went around with a certain group of girls and their leaders and facilitated the activities.

The Lord has been so faithful to make the Gospel CLEAR to me so that I have CONFIDENCE in sharing it. This is something that I have never experienced before and I am so incredibly grateful!! There is SO much that the Lord is teaching me--I have never been in a place of such joy and understanding! As I am acclimating and feeling more comfortable and at home here, it all feels like such a great adventure! I absolutely LOVE being in the outdoors--hearing the super loud crickets at night and staring up at the stars. We had an INCREDIBLE thunderstorm last week and it was a kiss from the Lord because it gave us extra rest time in our cabins and it was so peaceful and refreshing :)

I have discovered that boating in one of my favorite things in the entire world and we get to do it every week with our campers! We are required to ride on the tube and the banana boat with every group of campers so that there is always a counselor in the water with them :) I also love being on top of the 50ft tower, hooking the campers in and sending them of the 1,000 ft zipline! These are just a few of the super fun activities we get to do with our campers :)

Here are some verses that I've been holding on to this past week...

"...if we are faithless, He will remain faithful, for He cannot disown Himself." 2 Timothy 2:13
"But God's word is not chained." 2 Timothy 2:9b
"Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who CORRECTLY handles the word of TRUTH." 2 Timothy 2:14

Please continue to pray for the Lord to work here! He is POWERFUL and WORTHY of all glory and praise! Pray that He would open the eyes of every camper that comes through our gates. Pray that He would reveal Himself to the hearts of the precious kids that have been here and are now gone and those that are going to come.

"For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline."
2 Timothy 1:7

I love you all and thank you for your prayer and support!! I am encouraged every time I think of you.

First week over!

Hey Everyone! Our first campers left after lunch today! I have SO many stories and God was SO faithful to fill me up and use me when I was completely spent. I wish I could write more now but we have more campers coming at 10:30am tomorrow morning and I am sooo sleeeeepy! Please pray for physical strength to persevere on little sleep! And for our new campers coming--that they would see the Lord clearly!

Seeing God...

Matthew 5:8 says, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God." Something the Lord has been teaching me about here is that we see Him most clearly when we live in purity. This past semester I lived in such apathy and was so frustrated because I lacked desire and thirst for God and His Word. In just these last two weeks that I've been here, the Lord has revealed more to me through His Word than ever and I have been so eager to hear from Him in my quiet time in the morning. This verse in Matthew opened my eyes. I have been so caught up in the distractions of the world--cell phone, TV shows, movies, facebook, competing for friendships and attention, etc. When all of those things were stripped from me here, I was forced into a very disciplined schedule and the only thing to do here is read my Bible and talk about God all day haha!! We get up early in the morning, have strict meal times, lots of sunshine and physical activity, and lots of hard work. Although the discipline has been tough, it has grown my intimacy with the Lord incredibly. So many impure and worldly distractions have been removed from my life and through that I have been freed to seek the Lord in purity and SEE Him clearly! His ways are pure and there is FREEDOM in a life of discipline! Who knew?? :) 2 Corinthians 3:17 says, "...where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is FREEDOM." The Lord is giving me a taste of that here and it is wonderful.

We get our first campers on Monday!! My next night off is Friday (a week from tomorrow) so my next update will be full of new stories and experiences I'm sure!! Please pray for patience and perseverance as I have no clue what it's going to be like! I'm nervous but very excited! God is good :)

Thank you all for your prayers!!

Sunday, May 27th

Another night off! Don't have time to write a long update tonight but things are going well!! I'm so grateful for the Lord's faithfulness to me and the peace He has placed upon my heart day in and day out. Next night of is Thursday!! Then we have our first  CAMPERS on Sunday!! Please pray for physical stamina and perseverance in my spirit! And for the other staff here! We're going to have 10,000 campers coming through here this summer--pray that they would see and experience our great God!

Obedience.

Hello Everyone!! The Lord is working in Texas! The last 5 or 6 days have been rough for me...God is completely stretching me by pulling me out of my comfort zone and it's been hard! I really struggled with letting go of my comfort zone back home (my communication to everything was cut off so abruptly) and I've been forced to just be HERE and jump into a completely different world. Earlier on I felt forgotten by the Lord and wasn't trusting His love and His watch and care over me. Then He graciously led me to Ezekiel :) As I read the first two or three chapters, the Lord started to speak to me saying, "I have you here and I know what I'm doing. All you need to do is OBEY--the results are not up to you." There is so much I want to write and say but I have to turn in my electronics :) It's a very simple lifestyle here but unbelievably pure and refreshing. Please pray for my heart to be open and loving towards this place! Also, pray that I would know and choose to live in GRACE so that I can share the Gospel of GRACE to my campers when they come in 2 weeks!! God is good :)

My next time off is Sunday at 5pm! Talk to you then :)

Heading out!

Hey Everyone! I'm going to try to keep updates on my summer in Texas on this blog. I really have no idea how much I'll be able to write but I'm going to try! I'm flying out from the Roanoke airport at 7am tomorrow morning--just finishing up packing and everything tonight!

As I've been preparing to head out, I'm so aware of how spiritually dry I have been lately. I really wanted to be leaving for Texas having spent oodles of time with the Lord, feeling strongly connected to Him and ready to minister! But I feel pretty exhausted, burned out, and empty. On top of that, I got the stomach bug last night and today...so I'm feeling pretty lousy! Despite all of that, the Lord has given me peace.

The Lord has graciously revealed to me through conversations with precious people over the last few days that I have had a very selfish mentality. If I am empty, then there is more room for Him to work. Praise Him for that! Here are some reflections I had from reading in Esther this past weekend...

For such a time as this...

I was reading Esther this past weekend, and came upon the well-known verse, "For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father's family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?" (Esther 4:14)

The more I think about this verse, I realize that it means more than "God has you in a specific place for a specific reason". While this is COMPLETELY true, I have realized that that's not all there is. My Bible has a summary in the beginning of each book and the one for Esther says,

"Silence. Utter, complete silence. We read the pages of Scripture expecting to hear God's voice, but when we turn to the book of Esther, we find only silence. Nowethere in these pages is God's name mentioned. No direct words. No prophesies. No prayers. The nation of Israel was in exile, living in subjection to a pagan king. God was silent, but He was not absent.

It is there, in heaven's stillness, that a young woman enters the scene. Esther is a Jew, but she finds herself upon the stage of the Persian court with all its foreign customs and intrigues. And God has a purpose for her, right where she is. As Esther's story unfolds, watch for God's providence. You will not see His hand, but you can see His fingerprints all over the situation."

I've been going through a phase in my spiritual life and I feel like the Lord has been somewhat silent--I haven't felt His presence, I haven't heard Him clearly, and I haven't seen Him working in huge ways. I have been so frustrated and for this reason, the last sentence of that summary stood out to me. I decided to read through Esther and look for all of God's fingerprints within it.

The fingerprints that were the most obvious to me were the ones covering Esther's life. "Mordecai had a cousin named Hadassah, whom he had brought up because she had neither father nor mother. This girl, who was also known as Esther, was lovely in form and features, and Mordecai had taken her as his own daughter when her father and mother died." (Esther 2:7) God created Esther's beauty. He created her with unique beauty that would enthrall the king and allow her to win his favor over every other beautiful girl in the kingdom. He also created her in such a way that she didn't look like a Jew. Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but the fact that she was able to hide her identity as a Jew meant that she did not have strong and noticeable Jewish characteristics. God knew the purpose He had for her and created her to fit that purpose. To think that He does that for each of our lives! Psalm 139 says, "My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be." (Psalm 139:15-16)

Now that I have started to see God's fingerprints on Esther's story, I have started to see the choices that Esther made in response to the life she was given. Going back to Esther 4:14, the first part of the verse, "...relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place..." has started to stand out to me. Esther was placed in her position as queen for a purpose, and looking back, we can clearly see what that purpose was. However, I wonder if it was as clear to Esther then as it is to us now. In making her decision to go to the king, her sacrifice was huge, and she could have played it safe. It's interesting that Mordecai was completely confident that God would save the Jews another way. God didn't need Esther to decide to face the king. He graciously offered her an opportunity to take part in His plan. She chose to trust Him and the benefit was hers. She was blessed because of what she did.

This has convicted me in my spiritual life. How many times do I face opportunities in my life for which I am uniquely created? How many times do I refuse the Holy Spirit and miss out on the blessed life that comes by living a life of trusting Him? I want to choose His way over mine--He brings PEACE in my life and that peace makes all the difference in the world to me.