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A Time To Weep, and a Time to Laugh

The summer is over.

The Jumonville grounds echo the sounds of a full summer; when you walk outside, you can almost hear the echoes of the kids laughing and the staff shouting out important safety rules, then explaining that every last one of them is a beautiful, unrepeatable miracle, or BUM.

The staff cabins, Andrew and Martha, are now filled with empty beds. I think I miss my room being a disaster area, because when it was a disaster area, it was also filled with friends. The common area once looked like a hurricane came through it. Now it looks abandoned and empty.

The dining hall, once cramped from squeezing fourteen staff members at one 8-place table, now comfortably seated the eight who remained at lunch. Then Tyler’s parents came to pick her up, and there were only seven. Kelly and Caitlin left without saying goodbye, and Caitlin M. is leaving at dinner.

The office is distinctly quiet, so much so that Ree had turned on a television for noise. The challenge course and the tower, yesterday (and even this morning) filled with screaming kids, are now empty and lonely.

True, through Jumonville’s autumn and winter there will be groups who come up to visit, and the forest, the dining hall, and the cabins will once again ring with childrens’ voices – though only for a little while. In the meantime, Ree and the very mountain of Jumonville will long for the coming summer and spring.

When the ground finally shakes off its fluffy white coat, and the green grass makes its bold appearance. When buses from the Laurel Highlands Outdoor School once again struggle up to the mountaintop and through the entryway, and Jumonville will once again be filled with the sounds of squealing bus brakes and squealing children.

There will be another group of summer staff, who will become a body, a church, and a family of friends. Nate and Ree will teach them about love languages, team building, behavior quadrants, and everything else they need to know.

And Ree will tell them that they are BUMs.

There is an appointed time for everything.
And there is a time for every event under heaven…
A time to weep and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn and a time to dance.
~Ecclesiastes 3:1 & 4

Jumonville Update I

Hey everyone! Thank you for your prayers for me and the people you know and love up here… and those you don’t know yet. You know, I’d been thinking of all the things I wanted to say… and now that I finally have a keyboard and a few minutes to collect my thoughts, I can’t think of any of them. Except the GOD IS SO AWESOME!

This is the first week of camp (actually, it’s week 2, but the first since training was over). On Monday, I found out in part just how much I desperately need God to work in and through me. I was facilitating one of the activities and basically just being a jerk – to the other counselors, to the kids, to the dean… It wasn’t right. My priorities were all mixed up – I was so crazy worried about getting stuff done right that I didn’t take into account that these are PEOPLE I’m working with – and kids, even more! So Saturday night I got a chance to pray with James, my accountability partner, and I found out more stuff that’s broken in me. I guess I tend to push people’s buttons.

Continue reading “Jumonville Update I”

“But I tried hard as I could….”

Bear with me. This note is gonna be hard totype because for the first time I’m writing a facebook note with my eyes closed, so I don’t know how it’s gonna work out. Some background….

I was at a friend’s house last night and just snapping wood and tossing it into the fire and when I snapped one piece another chunk flew off and hit me in the left eye. I’m opening my eyes from time to time to make sure I didn’t misspell any crucial words, but this is mostly eyes closed ’cause it hurts less. So forgive any typos and misspellings. On to the content…

I was listening to the radio the other day… I guess it was yesterday… and I heard a pastor say that all our good works can’t get us to heaven, we have to pray and accept Jesus into our hearts. This is true. But see, where I come from, I had managed to make praying the sinner’s prayer a work that I could do to be saved. Something I could do to gain favor with God. I would pray it hard, pray it sincerely, and make sure I used all the right words. And this went on for YEARS! Finally one day I decided to call it quis on sinners prayers and just trust that God would tdo it. That wasn’t when my crazy relationship with this Awesome God began, but it was part.

See, at first all I’d heard was, if you pray this prayer, you’ll become a Christian. And I prayed it and I trusted God to do the saving. Or at least that the prayer was good enough. Then along came more people who said if yo didn’t pray it sincerely or if you didn’t pray it meaning it, you weren’t saved. And so this thing that was meant to be a cry out for God for help became just another good work. So then I was at a place where I could pile up all my good works and add to them this sinner’s prayer and hope that all that together (or just the prayer alone) would be enough for God to save me. Sorry if I’m rambling, but I’m trying to get the point across: that was, for me, a form of religion, where if I prayed right God would love me and save me.

And that was totally arrogance on my part but I had no idea.

Continue reading ““But I tried hard as I could….””

Saviour, renamed.

So I was reading Numbers a week or two ago and I came upon this odd little verse tucked away in chapter 13:

“These are the names of the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land; but Moses called Hoshea the son of Nun, Joshua.”

Why, I wondered, did Moses change Joshua’s name to Joshua? What did his other name, Hoshea, mean? I looked them both up in my strong’s hebrew reference. Here’s what Hoshea means:

Howshea, from the root yasha, meaning 1) to save, be saved, be delivered, to be liberated, be saved, be delivered, to be saved (in battle), be victorious, to save, deliver, to save from moral troubles, to give victory to.

Well, that’s pretty clear. Hoshea’s name meant saver, deliverer, liberator, victor… savior. But what about Joshua, the new name?

The Hebrew for Joshua is Yĕhowshuwa. It’s a blend of Yĕhovah and Howshea. Yehovah. That’s the word most English bibles translate “the LORD” with LORD in all caps. It’s God’s holy name. It means “The Eternal One,” “The Existing One.”

So Joshua is a mix of two words: One, the name of our Lord, and the other, Savior, redeemer, rescuer. What just happened here?

Here’s what I personally believe: Moses needed Hoshea to know that he is not the savior. God is. So Moses changed his name to “God Saves.” It was a reminder that no person gets to be savior – God does. I wrote some of this down in my notebook. Hosheas must be renamed to Joshuas before they can be of any use to God. Before we can be of any use, we must be renamed from “I save” to “God saves.”

And then over the past couple weeks He’s been showing me how desperately I try to be the savior. I use Him for my plans to save people, instead of allowing Him to use ME for HIS. Last sunday in church I hit my knees and repented. I’m praying now…

God, I’m not the Savior. You are. I don’t want to use YOU as a part of my plan, but instead I want YOU to use ME as a part of YOURS.

Goodbye, Ordinary (or) Finding Home

Hey guys!

Thank you SO much for your prayers! I’ve got a line on the first floor of this house in Greensburg that they’ll let me rent for three months, and I can move in this weekend!

I keep thinking I need to get this out, so here goes:

I feel like I’m waving goodbye to the ordinary life, the life I thought I’d have. My life schedule used to be something like

Grow up
Save money
Buy a house
Get married
Raise kids
Uh… live happily ever after.

But my list got trashed. Continue reading “Goodbye, Ordinary (or) Finding Home”

Huge Prayer Request

Most facebook notes are about 25 things about me. Most are outdated. Most are posted because I wasn’t doing anything else and I had to make it seem like something was happening. Just bein’ honest. This one, however, is a little different. It’s a little crazy. In fact, it’s absurd. But it’s happening. And I really need your prayers.

So here’s the scoop: The Saturday after Christmas was a bright, sunny, warm day. Scotty, Aaron and me drove down to a place called Camp Jumonville to walk around, relax, and forget that we have day jobs. It was a pretty awesome day. We just pretty much hiked and chilled. My perfect day.

And then it got a little out-of-hand. Scotty told me they’re always looking for people to work there. I leaned out the window and asked God, “Could I? Could I really work here?” Continue reading “Huge Prayer Request”

“Are you ready for Christmas?”

I hear that question all the time. “Are you ready for Christmas?” I asked one person what they meant by that. It was what I figured. “Do you have the decor up, have you sent out Christmas cards, have you bought all the presents for everyone on your list?”

A Todd Agnew YouTube video challenged me about that, though. He pointed out that the wise men spent a lot of preparation time getting ready to come and see a king. They gathered their finest gifts and traveled a long, long way so they could see this king. And when they arrived, they found more than they’d ever dreamed of. In Todd’s words,

We’ve traveled far
come to seek a king
but how could we know
that He would be
God with us?

He said God challenged him and asked, “Are YOU prepared for Christmas?” This happened long before Christmas. Not in the sense of physical, like gifts or decorations or lights or cards, but in the sense of the heart. Have you thought about this? God, becoming human? The Eternal One climbing on the merry-go-round of time – and not as someone powerful, but as a baby. A helpless baby. A baby who can’t even walk.

Continue reading ““Are you ready for Christmas?””