Well, it's 4:30am and I can't sleep. This is probably not a good thing since it's the first full day of camp in a few hours but when you can't sleep you can't sleep. I'm going to share my testimony tonight which should be interesting. I think they said I have 15 minutes. How am I supposed to fit 18 years of following Christ into a 15 minute talk? I should probably prepare because if I don't it'll turn into a half hour easy. So far my campers are awesome. We were only a few minutes later than the 10:30 curfew and they went to sleep right away with no one really talking. It's good to see old friends too at camp and hopefully make some new ones as well. I've been having a hard time getting my heart right for this week. Josh told us to pray and really prepare our hearts for this week but I've neglected the heart part of that. I've prayed a little bit about it, but my heart has been distracted with other things.
Women have played a key role in this, which is usually what distracts my heart to be honest. I recently broke my streak of not kissing a woman for 3.5 years so it's weird having thoughts about that aspect of a relationship again. Not that the aforementioned woman and I have anything close to a relationship, we don't, it's merely a friendship, but I simply refer to the fact that I haven't kissed someone in so long I had forgotten what it was like. It seems as though my friend described it best when he said, "Justin, I think you try to be a good boy so much of the time and then sometimes you're just like f#$!@ it, I want some action." Sometimes I have these sudden uncontrollable urges and given the right situation I will fall every time. Not sure how do gain self-control for those situations or even if I'm necessarily supposed to, perhaps the key is to avoid those situations altogether. But as a dog returns to its vomit, so I continue to go back to places that I know will get me into trouble. Not that kissing is a bad thing at all, but you should at least be in some type of relationship or about to start one if you're going to go down that road.
Thankfully, the last couple of days and especially last night/this morning while I was lying wide awake in bed I've been able to pray for this week of camp and particulary my campers. That has made it easier to transition into an expectancy of what God is going to do in the lives of the campers and the staff alike. Josh and Matt talked about expectations and perhaps the best expectation to have this week is to see God move. Sometimes I close myself off to the movements of God but my life is never better for it.
Yesterday at church I gave a little talk on giving. It was decent I think, and pray that it got through to the audience. I originally wanted to come at it hard and almost get fired up but I didn't end up going that route. Instead I talked about how worship could be defined as growing in your love for God in the areas of your heart, mind, soul, and strength. If you want your heart to grow in love for God, then you should put some treasure towards it. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be too. What a true and fascinating statement. Put money towards your house, and you will clean, maintain, and repair it because you care about it. Put money towards your boat and you will take care of it. Put money towards your education and you will value it. Put money towards the things of God, and your heart will grow in love towards God. Many times, the things of this world get in our way of seeing and experiencing God. We covet more and more stuff until we forget where it all came from. Maybe there's something to the fact that whenever I go overseas to 3rd world countries, I notice that the people who have nothing seem to be a lot happier than the people I know back home who have more than enough. Just a thought there. They are also a lot more generous with the little they do have, always serving you their very best food and inviting you into their home, no matter if it's only a tent or a mud hut. They want to serve you, we have a lot to learn from them. Maybe we shouldn't pity them so much as they should pity us. I mean, we have everything you could ask for, every modern convenience, and yet depression has swept our land like the plague. It has swept most industrialized countries as well, as our new availability of connectedness actually disconnects us from the people around us. We're honed into our technology and our own little world while the real world around us cries for our involvement. There are hurting people all around us, and we're too distracted to see it.
I could go on here, but I've written enough for one night and need to at least lay down and try to get some sleep, even if I'm unable to. Not sure why I'm up like this, maybe it has to do with the phases of the moon :)
Yours,
Justin
