Today at Camp Carl, 4 cabins of day campers arrived early in the morning for their first day of camp, and the counselors were getting ready for their first week of campers for the summer. Today at Lake Ann Camp, the same thing was happening for 4th-12th graders and many of the counselors, who were all so excited for the first day of campers. This morning, instead of being excited, I was so stressed about everything that needed to get done before our first chapel in the evening that I lost sight of that excitement. Gradually I was fueled by my new counselor friends' excitement, and Dane's excitement as well, and soon I was relaxing into an incredibly content and joyful attitude toward my role here at Lake Ann Camp as a member of HeartSong.
For the last week, we have been to two churches on the weekends and spent the middle of the week with the Lake Ann staff during their training. Our first host home of the summer was a darling older couple who had refurbished their house to include a guest apartment, as well as a rrrrrrreally tall bed that came up to my belly button! At that church we played for the graduation Sunday service, and afterwards I called my sis, who was graduating, and we all screamed "CONGRATULATIONS!" to her over the phone. Fast forward to this past weekend, where our host home was a young Coast Guard family with two adorable kids, 5 and 3 years old. We had a delicious, healthy dinner and then went to town for pie for dessert. Sunday morning we played a full program, probably our best performance yet! I am so excited that we are gelling better and better musically.
But the place where God has moved in my life this week wasn't in the churches, but at Lake Ann during staff training. We arrived right in the middle of their 2 weeks of training and sat in on some of the sessions, but we felt a little excluded at times because a lot of the training didn't apply to us. We had a few chances to rehearse, but we were all staying in different cabins mixed in with the rest of the counselors and after a few days I felt like I hadn't been with my team in a long time. I was really enjoying getting to know some of the counselors: Becca, who was born without a left hand, Aubrey, who had just got back from a trip to India, and Bethany, the program director for the junior camp, among many, many others. I jumped right in to all the camp counselor craziness really fast, but it was so strange that a lot of what director Ken was telling them didn't apply to me, even though I really wanted it to. I was stuck in a weird place between camp counselor and band member and struggled a ton with figuring out my role. Should I dive into the counselor thing and leave my HS team in the dust? Should I distance myself from the Lake Ann staff and cling to my team? Obviously I can't do either. But I didn't know where I fell in between the two. Dane and I talked for awhile about this because we were both feeling the same way.
I tried and tried to figure out where I stood in this new place of Lake Ann, but as is typical, the harder I tried to figure out my life for myself the more things fell apart. I sing about and hear about the brokenness of humanity and know that I am a sinner, but I am beginning to understand how to live in that brokenness. When I was in high school, my small group leader Monica took a small, beautiful statue of a flower girl, broke it into pieces, and glued it back together. The broken and cracked porcelain doll was very ugly compared to the beautiful whole doll that it had once been, and I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to be the broken doll. But Monica set up the doll on a large flashlight, and because the doll was hollow, a beautiful glow shone out in all the cracks, and the broken doll was more glorious than the whole doll could have been. This past week this object lesson has been resonating with me. I am a broken spirit, a sinner who has been restored, and God's power is made perfect in my weaknesses; through my cracks God's glory shines through.
I am in a place right now that is so different from anything I did last summer and also so different from anything I did with HeartSong during the school year. I still can't figure out what I'm supposed to do or what line of thinking I should cultivate. That is my weakness, and I need God to step in the crack and shine through my brokenness. This has been my prayer for the past few days or so; that I can serve wholeheartedly every person I meet, HS member or counselor or support staff person, and that God's awesome, beautiful glory will shine brightly through in my weaknesses all summer long.
SOLI DEO GLORIA!! Let me have none of the glory for myself.
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