Its Reality Time

Okay, so God really brought me to working in the inner city this summer. So far it has been amazing! I worked one week as a cabin leader for the overnight camp and now this past week has been our first week of day camp. So far this summer, it has been an adventure to say the least! I have been challenged with how I view prayer a lot. During these weeks (especially at the overnight camp) I've been put in some hard and stressful situations. So God has been teaching me so much abouot what it means to depend on Him, like for real, depend on Him for absolutely everything. And part of that everything is these situations that seem impossible to deal with. There have been quite a few times where I've prayed something that I really actually don't know if God will say "yes" to. But He has shown immediate answers which He used to teach me something really cool. I think I often have viewed my prayers as things that God will answer either long term or not at all. And that very well could be. But that doesn't mean we should expect that it won't happen right aways. We need to be praying in expectation that He is working and He will get His will done. Also, a wise friend of mine also said, don't forget that "no" is also an answer. So that is something I've been keeping in mind too. I just have felt so blessed. If you want to hear an awesome story about God answering some crazy prayers, please ask me. To get your interest, some ways God has answered prayers for me is by:

-providing a turtle (thus restoring a friendship)
-finding a small earring in a large pool
-letting a kid and I get lost in the zoo (yes, you read that right)
-providing back up plan after back up plan
-a late night prayer time with a whole bunch of 8-12 yr old girls!
-etc. please ask me for the stories! God is so cool!!!

As for other things, I am the counselor coordinator for day camps. So I am responsible for finding the counselors, checking their references and then encouraging them and helping them when they are at camp. This is so cool! I especially like the encouraging part because in the mornings, I get to lead a devotion and this is a really important time for me. I love leading devotions because it makes it really neat during my time of reading God's word to ask Jesus, what He wants me to share with the group. One thing I talked about is one of the stories that I wrote about earlier in my study project. In Luke 8 it talks about the demon possessed man who was naked and living in the tombs before he met Jesus. After He met Jesus, It says he was sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. There is so much symbolism in that story. This man passed from death to life in a dramatic way when He met Jesus. So I talked about how I liked this story and the symbolism but then it was really cool, because I hadn't really thought about what else I would say except that Jesus is powerful. But then I hear myself saying, and I think its so important to keep on reflecting and going back to what Jesus is doing in your lives and what He has done. I talked about how we want to proclaim Jesus but to do this right we need to be real. We need to constantly be going to Him and remembering what He has done and identifying what He is doing right now. Because powerful testimony of Jesus in you is only found by Jesus Himself if that makes sense. Like, we can't produce a powerful testimony without Him. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. So I don't know, it was just really cool how God just gave me words to say and I need to keep going back to Him for these ideas. Its really neat. We always need to realize how dependent we are on Jesus! He is Life!

Hmm.. I thought I'd end off with a story about testimonies and sharing them that I heard from a speaker at school this year (so this is not my own material). This is a story to encourage you that when God wants you to share the testimony of Him in your life, and you are obediant to share, He will use your story even if you feel like it doesn't say much. He can use whatever He wants to break into peoples hearts. So hear it is, I hope I don't butcher it too much:

There was a youth group going on a missions trip to another country (I believe). While they were there, they went to this rehabilitation centre (I believe) and they talked with people there who had had some amazingly rough experiences in life from drug addictions to sex addictions and so on and so forth. The youth pastor told this one girl in the group that he wanted her to share her testimony with this group of people. However, she was from a family that went to church every sunday since she was a baby and so she could not see any way her small little story would be able to say anything to these people. So she told her youth pastor this very thing. She said, "I don't have anything to say to tehse people that would matter to them." But her youth pastor insisted that she needed to share her testimony. So the time came for her to do so.

She got up to the front and shared with this group of people her testimony; of how she grew up with loving parents. Of how she went to church her whole life. Of how she had followed the rules of her parents while growing up. She said things how they had happened and for her, what she had said seemed so insignificant. But she looked up to see the reaction of the group. When she did, she realized the whole room was crying and in tears at what she had said. They said, they were amazed at how God could keep someone so innocent.


This girls testimony of what Jesus had done in her life was straight forward. But God used it to reveal Himself to this group of people. I encourage us to press on to know Christ. To seek Him first in everything we do during the day. Jesus is our Life and He is so very real. Lets let Him be real in us. He loves revealing Himself so let us be open to Him using us!! Believe that He will.