With all your heart

For the last six weeks I have been in Ellijay, GA, working at Camp Highland as a counselor.  Camp Highland is a camp whose mission is to lead children (fourth grade to high school senior) into a growing relationship with Christ through high adventure.  So that's what I've been doing for six weeks.  Well, four weeks, to be more accurate, because the first two weeks were for staff training without campers.  It's been an amazing experience and a lot of fun, but also very challenging and revealing as it has been exposing areas of my life that I need to work on, specifically regarding my interaction with kids and people in general.  The Lord has been putting a huge spotlight on my impatience during these last four weeks, an aspect of my life that may not be obvious in public situations but that I know to exist in my home life, and I've been seeing it come out a lot especially during these last two weeks of camp.

The most important thing God has been revealing to me, though, wasn't fully revealed until tonight at Upper Room, my high school youth group's student-led summer ministry.  This week is our break for summer staff, and the revelation that God showed me tonight was that I grow dissatisfied and discontent when I don't commit all my ways to the Lord.  When I know that I should be spending time with God but I don't do it, I feel empty and I begin to doubt Him.  This shows my desperate need for Him, my urgent need to spend quality time with Him on a daily basis.  When I start to lose my desire for Him, I start to doubt Him, and when I begin to doubt Him, I lose my desire for Him.  Thankfully, though, He caught my attention while these thoughts were running through my mind tonight, and He brought me back to Himself.  He showed me just how much I need to spend time with Him, even when I don't think I want to, because He knows that deep down I really do want to spend time with Him because I need to.  If I begin to lose interest in Him when I neglect Him, then the opposite must also be true: that my desire to know Him more will increase as I spend more time with Him.  So even if I don't think I want to spend time with the Lord at the moment, if I do it anyway, He will be faithful to increase my desire for Him.

During the last few weeks at camp, I began to notice that I wasn't making the kind of time I needed to spend with the Lord.  As a result, I started feeling spiritually drained.  Fortunately, God blessed me by continually pouring into me so that I could pour into the campers even though I wasn't actively seeking to be filled in my own personal quiet time.  And now that I'm at home, my neglect of my TAG time (Time Alone with God) is exaggerated.  Don't get me wrong: I still had a block set apart for TAG time at camp, but it was always spent facilitating discussion with the campers rather than studying on my own because my campers have all been eighth graders or younger, so my co-counselors and I have had to keep them focused.  (This was a blessing though, because the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders I had the first two weeks really dug deep into what we talked about during our TAG times, and I learned a lot from them and from God speaking things through me that I never would have thought of on my own.)  Anyway, in response to my complacency, God gave me a wake-up call tonight by showing me that, if I will devote myself to seeking Him wholeheartedly, He will satisfy my desire for Him even as He increases my desire.  In fact, He has to increase my desire for Him because my current desire to know Him cannot match the measure of His glory that He wants to reveal to me.  So if I will seek to know Him more, He will satisfy me and continually fill me with more of Himself.  But if I grow complacent, He will continue to show His glory, but there will be no room in my heart to contain my understanding of His goodness because I will have no desire to receive such knowledge.  So I will have no desire for Him, and as I see His glory all around me and have no room to contain it in my heart, I will begin to feel empty because I do not have what the Lord is offering me.  Therefore, I must seek Him every day with all my heart and devote my whole being to Him.

A main theme at Camp Highland that comes from our many high adventure elements is "Always stay connected."  The point we try to make to the kids through this image of staying connected by way of harnesses is that we always have to be connected to God, through prayer, worship, Bible study, and fellowship with other believers.  But one lesson in particular that stuck out to me during week 4 (or as we've been calling it, week 1.4) was when one camper, a rising high school junior, said that we can stay connected through love and obedience.  It may seem like common sense, but it hit me hard when I first heard it: prayer and Bible study is not the only way that we can come to know God more; if knowing God means becoming more like Him, then it makes sense that becoming more like Him can also help us get to know Him better.  So if we love as Jesus loved, we can grow closer to Him just as effectively as we could through studying His life on earth and reading about how He lived.  Love and obedience are just as much a part of godly living as wisdom, if not more so.

So as I seek to commit myself wholly to the Lord every day, I pray that I would not only seek Him in His Word and in prayer and worship, but also through joyful obedience to my parents and to those in authority over me and also through unconditional love and humble, faithful stewardship of the gifts and talents God has given me.  I pray that there would be no aspect of my life that might raise questions about my complete devotion to the Lord, but that Jesus Christ would be the Lord of my entire lifestyle.  "If Christ is anything, He must be everything." ~ Charles Spurgeon

"Let it not be said of me that I held back anything from You."