Thursday, July 1, 2010

Castaway

As I've mentioned several times before, young life camp is one of the most wonderful and difficult weeks of my life every year. Wonderful because you are in a beautiful place doing tons of crazy/fun things and getting to share life and Jesus with high school friends and difficult because you are exhausted, high schoolers come with their fair share of drama and you want nothing more than for them to just love Jesus with their whole hearts and stop living for the things of this world, but that is up the to the Holy Spirit and not you.

So, I took an 18 hour bus ride to Minnesota with a group of students from LCA and experienced just that. This was my first trip to Castaway Club and it may be my new favorite young life camp. It's situated on a gorgeous lake, and the weather was perfect. So much cooler than it has been here, but still warm enough to enjoy being in the water. We tubed, banana-boated, wake-boarded/water skied, went para-sailing, rock-wall climbing, played wiffle ball, made bracelets, laid in hammocks on the beach, sat in chairs on the beach, played all sorts of ridiculous games and had an absolute blast.

The camp speaker was one of the best I have ever heard. He explained sin in a way that really resonated with all of us - especially kids who have grown up in a Christian school whose lives aren't full of blatant sin, but who are slaves to it and to putting their hope in things other than Christ. He did an amazing job of explaining what it means to really follow after Christ, and not just have a luke-warm, safe faith that we give lip-service to because it makes us feel good, but as soon as it gets hard or we have to choose between me and God, we choose me. We had some great discussions in our cabin about all of this, and I think that some of the girls really want to try and go after God. The hard part is being back at home with all of the distractions of the world and the million things they have going on and living out what they said they wanted to do at camp.

There is lots more I could share but I think I will cut it off here for now. Below is a video slideshow from our trip. Enjoy!

1 comment:

Callie said...

That's so great that you were able to be involved in a Christian summer camp like that! I went to camp every year as a kid, and I was a counselor one summer - I think the Lord grew me that summer more than He even grew my girls!
P.S. I left you an award on my blog! :-) I hope you had a great Fourth of July!