Being Refined

Before silver can be sold it needs to be refined. The silver is melted and the impurities rise to the top. Then a worker skims the impurities off of the surface. Each time the silver is purified there are less and less of the impurities that rise to the surface. The worker keeps melting the silver until it is completely pure. Pure silver is more valuable than regular silver.

God uses the trials in our lives to refine us. When we are challenged and stretched God peels the impurities away so that we become more like him. God has a lot of work to do in us. We don't know the reasons for the things that we go through but God does. Trust God and know that He is in control. One day you will get to a place in your faith when you will be able to look back on your life. You will realize what God taught you through that experience and how much you grew during that difficult time. I hope that you will embrace each experience and allow him to refine every area of your life.

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Don't Endure Your Life, EMBRACE IT

Don't endure, embrace.

They talk about this a lot at camp. Sometimes it is easy to do just enough to get by. You want the week to be over as soon as possible. We have all been stretched to this point. We are overwhelmed with things and we want to be done with the week. You don't want to fall into this trap because then you will be missing out on what God has for you.

We encourage the counselors to embrace everything that they are going through. You need to embrace the good and the bad things that you go through. You need to embrace the experiences that stretch you. It is so easy for people to go through life being completely numb to what is going on. They do just enough to get by in life. When you let go and embrace the situation, you can truly live and be free. I didn't say it would be an easy thing to do. It may be easier to embrace the good but we must also embrace the things that challenge us. We need to do this because I believe that there is a reason for everything.

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Peeling Away Layers of Selfishness

Every summer Pastor Koch gives a really good message to the counselors before the campers come. He wants the new counselors to understand what camp is about. I am convicted every time I hear this message. There are a lot of things that you will experience during your week at camp. There are a lot of emotions that you will go through while you are at camp.

The campers live a life of pain and suffering. They are very familiar with rejection and they are used to being pushed aside. The campers experience a lot of physical and emotional pain throughout their lives. At camp you get to experience their life and even some of their pain. For one week you are in their world. We are there to love our campers. But there are also a lot of things that we can learn about ourselves throughout the week.

We have three enemies that tempt us: they are the world, Satan, and our sinful flesh. You are your worst enemy. We are so focused on ourselves and what we want. We are selfish and we gratify those sinful desires. The goal of camp is to take the focus off of ourselves and put it on someone else for the week. There are many different ways that we will be stretched and put in uncomfortable situations throughout the week. We go through these things so that we can understand the campers a little better.

Pastor Koch uses the illustration of a clay jar. We are the clay jar and the hard mold is our selfish being. God uses experiences like camp to make a little crack in that jar. God uses camp to peel away layers of selfishness. We are stretched when we experience pain and suffering during uncomfortable situations. God uses those things to give us an understanding about life. It is a good thing to take the focus off of yourself and care for another person. When God uses experiences like camp to peel away our selfish being we can live life and experience things as He intended.

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Family

The atmosphere at Camp Daniel is very special. There are around 100 people there each week so it is still small enough that you get to know everyone pretty well. You can be yourself and you are loved just the way you are. These people become your family in a very short amount of time. At the end of the week you don't want to leave. The friendships you create that week will last a lifetime. Each year you pick up right where you left off.

Things are different at camp. All of the outside distractions fade away. The bottom line is that we love Jesus and we want to show the love of Jesus to our campers. There are Christians at camp from many different denominations and we don't get caught up on the little things. Jesus is the thing that connects us. We are there to love and take care of our campers. We are there to love and support each other. Everyone is stretched and challenged in different ways. Each person has a different level for their breaking point. At camp you get to put your faith into action. The body of Christ is lived out as it should be. Each person does their part and we are there to go through it together. It is a beautiful thing to see others give sacrificially of themselves. When there are so many people serving in this way and giving of themselves, great things happen. We are all pushed to our breaking points and God draws us closer to himself. He takes us to a deeper level in our faith. We are closer to God than we have ever been.

Some people don't like being pushed to their breaking point, in fact, I don't think anyone does. I think that is why some don't come back. There are only a few people who truly understand what is taking place at Camp Daniel. There are even fewer people who truly embrace what they go through and crave more of it. I am one of those people. God opened my eyes. I can see what happens at camp and I can't stay away. I want to be growing in my faith and surrounded by people who want the same thing. Camp Daniel is one of the few places I have found that.

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Worship pt 3

I want to tell you about a few times of when I have seen beautiful worship.

The first story is about a camper named Cathy. Every year she sings an old hymn, all four verses. She sings it with tears in her eyes, looking up to heaven. She sings this song wholeheartedly to her Savior. This will always be a beautiful picture in my mind.

Now I want to tell you about how I experienced worship this summer. For the third week of camp the worship pastor from Living Hope Church gave the message and lead worship in the evening. There was something really special about that week. Worship was really powerful during the evening service. There was this flow to the service and the presence of the Lord was in that place. There were several times every night that I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit so powerfully that it took my breath away, and I had to stop singing. During worship there was a camper named Larry right behind me. He is a really intense person. He shouts the songs like he is at a football game. He is like this all the time. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry because I was feeling so many emotions. He wasn’t goofing around. He was singing with his whole heart. You can only experience worship like this at Camp Daniel.

The last story is about an autistic camper. I was running the power point for worship and this camper was in one of the back pews with his counselor. He was standing up and facing me while he was rocking back and forth. Every once in a while he would turn around to the front and look at the words. Then he would turn back around, and he would say them as he continued to rock back and forth. It was over stimulating for him to face the front because there was too much going on, yet he worshiped in his own way. This is a camper who has been coming for a few years and he is in his own world most of the time. He doesn’t communicate very much with people. Every year the campers get a little more comfortable being there and express more of their feelings. Sometimes you question whether this is making a difference in their lives. He was comfortable enough to worship and that was the first time I have seen him worship. This summer a camper who doesn’t communicate very much with people was worshiping Jesus. I would say there is a lot going on in his heart. God is working, and it takes my breath away.

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Worship pt 2

The morning and evening chapel services are split between slow and fast worship. The morning service is designed for lower functioning campers and the whole service is at a much slower pace than what we are used to. The goal is to have them sing the songs so they really know what they are singing about. This way they can have time to process things and really worship. The message is also very simple with one main point. The evening services are geared toward higher functioning campers. The songs are faster and they are more like what we are used to.

Most of us would like the evening service because it is what we are used to. Everyone has a good time of worship and the service is fun. You have to learn to really appreciate the morning service because it is at their pace. They can be involved with the service and experience worship that really ministers to their hearts. They understand what they are singing about. At this pace, they have the opportunity to lead worship and it is a beautiful thing. There are some that are born leaders and it just comes naturally to them. Others have the opportunity to lead and it is a new experience for them. Leading pushes them outside of their comfort zone. There were many who lead us in worship at camp last summer and it was amazing. There was a blind gal at camp last summer who was born to be a worship leader. I got to experience her leading worship. There is this indescribable thing that happens when they take over the service.

A few of the campers have the gift of preaching. One of the guys who gave a few messages last summer was Jesse. When he got up to preach I didn’t understand a word he said, yet he was getting a lot of reaction from the campers. There were a lot of amen’s and nodding of heads. They understood what he was saying. He is one of them, ministering to them. I don’t have words to describe how amazing that is. He understands them better than anyone else. He knows what they have been through. He has experienced what they have experienced. He can reach them on a level that we will never be able to.

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Worship

I want to describe what worship is like at Camp Daniel. I will do my best to give you a clear picture. Chapel at Camp Daniel can be loud, crazy, fast, slow, and exciting. When you are in chapel the campers do a lot of different things. Some campers sing loudly and some are very quiet. Other campers are singing the wrong words or they are out of tune. Then there are those that clap their hands and stomp their feet and dance around. The dancing thing is mostly for attention. (I sure have some funny stories about that, haha.) And then, to add to the chaos already taking place, sometimes they hand out instruments for the campers to play. So there is always a lot of noise at any given time.

Amidst all of what I would call beautiful chaos or beautiful noise, the presence of the Lord is in that place. It is unlike anything else I have ever experienced. There are so many different and unique ways in which the campers worship. Each one of them expresses their worship differently. I don’t know how to explain it, but they have this ability to be immediately in the presence of God. We are lucky if we even get to that point, and the campers do it right away. I think it is because they don’t have all of this junk in the way like we do. We have to get rid of the junk in our lives. We have to get rid of everything that separates us from God, only then can we get to that place of complete worship.

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