Campfire Saturday–Middle School Camp 1–The Father’s Heart!
Hello, Blog friends. It’s Campfire Saturday! Please enjoy this sneak peek at one of my blogs written for Camas Meadows Bible Camp. And please forgive my tardiness. It’s taken many months to recover from the bad concussion I received this summer and I still have a ways to go. But it is Saturday and I’m sharing blogs now, so please enjoy!
We had a rough weekend leading into Middle School Camp 1. Good friends stayed at camp as they set up a memorial cross for their daughter by the campfire where she spent so many summer evenings.
She had been a camper, counselor, and camp intern and when she lost her battle with depression it broke us in ways we can’t fully express or understand.
Scruff had also asked one of our former staff if he would help us fall some trees around the camp to make the area safer. With the pine beetles sweeping through our local forest, dead trees are increasing.
As the grieving family of this dear young woman put up a handcrafted cross in a grove of aspen near the meadow, this young man cut down pine trees. He had just heard about the death of a close friend, once again a young person who lost their battle with depression. All three were in the same graduating class from the same high school and now two were gone.
I was one of that young man’s AWANA leaders and remembered him as a pesky and vibrant kid who was so fun and bright-eyed and made sure there was always a lot of action in the room so the leaders wouldn’t get lazy!
It was a lot. Missing a staff member who had been one of our camp daughters, hearing about this second death, watching others in their grief, grieving again ourselves.
It begins to feel hopeless. When you have answered the call to ministry and poured out yourself to the best of your ability and walked forward knowing that your heart would break, but despite it all, to lose the precious young ones you tried to love. These are dark moments.
What do you do when you point the way to Jesus again and again, and some are still lost? What do you do when your loved one finds Jesus, but then they are lost to you in a different and terrible way?
I know the answer just like you do. You keep pressing on. God is still there. The darkness won’t win. Oh, I know it’s all true. But it doesn’t feel like enough when the one you loved is gone.
Then Spiro, our speaker for Middle School 1, told her story.
And that wraps up this sneak peek of life at our Junior A Camp this summer. For the rest of the story, please visit The Campfire Blog!
