The Night Is Young…

July 26, 2010 at 12:05 am (Summer Camp) (Epic)

The night may be young, but it’s been a long day.

I can’t believe the 4:15 alarm this morning was actually THIS morning!

The bus ride up here was great. It was a great time of fellowship, community, and lots of movies. It was cool to see the students and leaders take advantage of the 8 hour long bus ride and use it as a time to invest in each other, rather than gripe about “how much further till camp?”. Leaders had time to go around and individually meet with students in their small groups on the bus and get to know more about them as a person, their hobbies, their family, and hopefully got a glimpse of their story that they call life.

Once we got to camp things went into overdrive. I might be off on my numbers here, but there very well could be well over 300 students here. 125 of them are from RHCC. The students had time to get settled into their cabins and explore the camp grounds before dinner.

After dinner (which was really good!!!) we had our first session in “The Tab” which is short for the tabernacle. Sixteen Cities (www.sixteencities.com) are here this week to lead the students and staff in worship and our speaker this week is a guy name Dave (last name unknown) who is a teacher from the local area who teaches science in the public schools. He did a great job kicking things off talking about God’s “EPIC” story and how it all began. He drove home the fact that God (the trinity 3 in 1) was the author and perfecter of not only you and me, but of all creation. He began to paint the picture of how we all are woven in together in God’s grand story and has really set it up for a great week of sessions and discussions.

Here are some prayer requests you can be praying for:

• Pray for our leaders as they lead these students in our small group cabin times. Last week at camp here they said that they had 50 first time decisions to follow Christ and they ALL took place in the cabin small group times NOT in the main sessions. So be praying that the Spirit will be flowing in and out of all conversations and questions that are discussed during these times.

• Prayer for continued safety here at camp. Darla Maier who is a mom of one of our students came as our camp nurse originally but is now the camp nurse of the entire camp (she knew before so this wasn’t a surprise). Be praying for her and her helpers as the tend to our students throughout the week. Often times the major sickness they deal with is homesickness. Pray for those opportunities to be Christ to those students who are missing their families back home.

• Pray for energy and strength. Like I said earlier, the night is young. We have free time, then dessert, then an all out night game and lights out won’t be until 11:00pm tonight. So pray that students sleep hard tonight so that way tomorrow morning we can hit the ground running.

Thanks for your prayers and sending your students with us to camp this year. Such a fun group and I know that as amazing as they are now, it’s going to be one large family by the end of the week!

Until next time…

Tyler