Extraordinary.

This is something I wrote this summer while I was serving at a summer camp for a week in Washington State.  So grateful for the opportunity to be there, thank you! With love from the Atlantic, Krissy.  

I’m at camp this week and have snuck away for a precious few minutes to write. 

Camp is something I love more than just about anything else in the world. I’ve had the privilege and blessing to be able attend, serve, and lead at camps across the world for well over half my life.  It’s physically exhausting but at the same time entirely life-giving – so when I was asked if I would consider returning to serve this year, even though I now live 5000 miles away, I said yes, absolutely.

I knew I was supposed to be here, to serve the kids and the staff and walk out this life-to-the-full calling I’ve been given.  Little did I know where I would hear that still small voice the most clearly!

We had a wave of sickness pass through the camp yesterday.  It was messy.  I mean, really messy - and I found myself in the thick of it. In the thick of all the tears and calling parents and packing up and throwing up and cleaning up and disinfecting and more tears and more bodily fluids than I can actually write about on this blog.  As I knelt beside one little girl, holding her hair out of her face and rubbing her back as she heaved, I knew I was right where I was supposed to be.  These little ones in their most vulnerable state needed all the love and compassion I was able to give them as they tried to catch their breath and bearings and make the world all right again. 

It was a profoundly moving experience that I’m having trouble finding the words to describe… but it was there, in those messy moments, it’s like something clicked.  I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I do hear God’s voice, that I do walk with him, that I had been called there, and he was saying well done.  Not just in a someone-has-to-clean-up-vomit way, but in a deeper sense of being, of calling, of purpose and reason and depth beyond words.

The devotion I shared with our girls’ leaders this morning were words that were given to me weeks ago in preparation for this time – words I had no idea would mean what they mean to me now.

The supernatural isn’t always extraordinary.

Sometimes supernatural experiences are full of lightning bolts and thunder claps and excitement and emotion – and those are totally awesome. But sometimes they aren’t.  Sometimes it’s in the messiest experiences, with the least fanfare and preparation and words and hard work, that God shines through.   That’s where we can see the beauty of redemption, the beauty of washing the feet of our enemies, the beauty of a savior born in a barn, the beauty of true service and love in action.

One might ask, you came 5000 miles to clean up vomit – how does that make you feel?  Awesome. Honored. Blessed. Really.  And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

 

Some of our campers the last night of camp. Photo courtesy of our camp photographers.