Category: Sky Ranch

I don’t believe that God is sovereign.

There is strength within the sorrow;

there is beauty in our tears.

And You meet us in our mourning,

with a love that casts out fear.

And You are working in our waiting,

You’re sanctifying us.

When beyond our understanding,

You’re teaching us to trust.

Your plans are still to prosper; You have not forgotten us.

You’re with us in the fire and the flood.

You are faithful forever–perfect in love,

You are sovereign over us.

If you can tell me you honestly believe every word in that song every minute of every day and you’ve never doubted it I’ll give you $100 right now.

Seriously. You tell me right now that this hasn’t been a question for you ever and I will drop everything and give you a crisp one-hundred dollar bill.

If it were the other way around and you were offering me that cash, I wouldn’t get it. I’d have to be straight up with you and say I doubt that. I doubt it every day. I mean, if we’re going to be 100% honest I can’t tell you I believe that God really is sovereign often enough for it to make a difference for me, and I doubt you’re much different.

I mean, think about it–I fall off a cliff and I look at my life post-accident and I find myself wheelchair-bound and hopping around with a walker to the point that going about 200 yards knocks me out and makes me stop to catch my breath every ten steps. What would that do to you when you’ve spent the last 20 years of your life more active than half the people you knew? I ran track for almost ten years, played basketball, football, ran cross-country, spent my college years in the gym and running and working on my feet for sometimes 12 hours straight, and now all I do is sit at home and watch The Walking Dead and The Office while my dog tries to lay on my lap and I keep having to kick her off.

Even worse, I’m a people person. I spent my days interacting with dozens, if not hundreds of people. You know who I see now? Pretty much just my mom, dad, and sisters with a few friends sprinkled in every now and then. And while I love my family to death and would spend the rest of my life with only them if I needed to without question, it’s not what my life was before.

And to top it all off, I spent the summer of 2015 discovering that Jesus has given me a passion to serve Him and also kids at my single favorite place on earth–Sky Ranch. But now, there’s a solid chance I won’t get to do that again this year. I’ve already had to drop out of school for the semester. Will I have to drop camp, too?

Capture
A quick shot from one of our community nights last summer.

Honestly, I think I’d feel better if I had a solid answer–a yes or a no, not a maybe. But I don’t. I have a nice, strong, brutish maybe. I can start bearing weight on my foot the week staff training starts, and some people with my injury haven’t had required therapy. So since I have no idea if I’ll actually need therapy or not, and won’t know until my eight weeks of non-weight-bearing are up, I’m kind of freaking out here.

I want to know. I want answers. I want the security that comes with having enough information to make a plan.

I hate not having a plan.

“Lean on Jesus and trust Him to take care of it all in His timing–that can be your plan,” you might say. But I have a serious problem with that. Not that I disagree, but that I have serious trouble actually buying in to that. I lay awake at night wondering what it’ll feel like in May thinking about how surely I knew that Jesus was sending me to camp for the summer, but instead I’m 627 miles away sitting on the couch watching Netflix all day. I have actually lost more hours of sleep over this than I’d like to admit.

I really suck at believing that God is sovereign.

Capture2

I want this recovery process to be over and to be back on my feet. I want to go to camp and love Jesus in a way kids can’t ignore, get to know them and my co-staff and make lifelong friends. I want to meet Jesus through those people, and through the quiet, calm serenity of camp. I want to get sweet tan lines from my  tanks and my Chacos. I want to go to camp.

But what if I don’t?

What will happen in May if I don’t go to camp?

How will I feel?

You know what the answer is to all of those questions? It doesn’t stinking matter.

Jesus said something pretty profound in Matthew 6:34–

Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Dang right it does. Today sucks.

Which is exactly what He wants me, and you, to get a grip on. In my case, stop worrying about May. Stop worrying about camp. Just completely forget about your tan lines. Focus on today. What do you need to do today?

I need to talk to Jesus, learn His word, and see where He wants me to go today. And where He wants me to go is where I already am–living where He’s put me and acting like His sacrifice on the cross and His resurrection we just celebrated last weekend actually means something to me. It means everything, and I need to show it.

Here’s another song I need to start playing until I can’t get it out of my head:

I don’t know about tomorrow–
I just live from day to day.
I don’t borrow from it’s sunshine,
for it’s skies may turn to gray
I don’t worry o’er my future,
for I know what Jesus said!
And today He walks beside me
For He knows what lies ahead.
Many things about tomorrow
I don’t seem to understand.
But I know Who holds tomorrow
and I know Who holds my hand.

Bloom (& Make Fruit) Where You’re Transplanted

I’ve got a lot going for me.

If I’m being honest with you, I can’t hold that back. The Lord has blessed me in a bajillion different ways: I’m going to school for literally 1/10 of the cost of most Americans. I’m pursuing a degree in a field that I stinking love. I have a family full of people who love me to death. I have a job at one of the greatest locations of one of the most efficiently-run and highest-rated companies in the world, and I’m being trained to work in the department of that company in which I originally wanted to work the most. I have friends who love me and are there to support me and help me when I’m down. I had the craziest opportunity to serve the Lord at Sky Ranch as a counselor this past summer. And above it all I have a Savior who loves me so much He literally died for me. And you’d think with all that going for me, it’d be pretty easy to stay peppy.

But it’s not.

I feel like I should be somewhere else. Specifically? Sky Ranch. If I were able to describe how wonderful the summer of 2015 was, I would do it, but its brilliance was so beyond my ability to comprehend that to try and describe it would do nothing but drag it down. The Lord moved in such a magnificent way–it was, and still is, impossible for me to recall it all, let alone describe any of it adequately. I found a new kind of home in Van–one where the people are constantly pushing each other toward the Cross and where Jesus is proclaimed in literally everything that happens. That kind of community doesn’t happen often. In fact, it rarely happens at all, which is why coming back to St. Louis and being out of that community directly is hitting me so intensely.

Staff_Training

Don’t get me wrong–I’m still connected. GroupMe can be a curse of an app at times but when you’re 700-1,000 miles away from everyone, it makes a huge (good) difference. I don’t feel like I abandoned anyone or that anyone abandoned me–it’s simply that the Lord’s time for me at Sky is over, for now. He closed the gates for the summer of ’15 and I have to be okay with that until He reopens them for me in the summer of ’16. Problem is, I’m totally not okay with that. I miss my Sky family. I miss the beauty of seeing a child’s eyes light up when you tell him how proud you are of him when he finally listens and shows you Jesus in his actions. I miss the joy of watching my boys step up and take leadership when they were asked to, or maybe even when they were not, and seeing them be the spiritual leaders Jesus wants them to be. I miss the brand-new fire in a young man’s eyes when he decided to follow Jesus and be a child of the king. I miss the beautiful, yet at the same time horribly ugly, harmony that the staff had as we tried to scrap together our utmost for His highest and serve Him well. I miss Sky Ranch. But Jesus doesn’t have me there right now.

He’s got me in St. Louis, in a city where racial issues and poverty are tearing the fabric of society apart and are likewise showing the kids of the city the absolute worst example of manhood and womanhood that they could possibly see; in a school where His name just isn’t spoken unless it’s a joke or an exclamation, and the majority of the students know absolutely zero of His love for them and the reality of His deity. Looking at those two alone should motivate me enough to live on mission and be excited for the calling I have here, but I’m struggling. I’m failing.

Celebrate_Freedom

If you’ve made it this far, I apologize for the depravity of my tone. I know it sounds like I feel more miserable than any person who’s ever lived, and to be honest, sometimes I feel that way. But the reality is that as I write, I can honestly acknowledge that I know this desire to be at Sky Ranch right now is a distraction. It would be one thing if I was simply excited for next summer, which I am, but that’s not all. I want to be there now, but that’s not where the Lord wants me at this present moment, so it is therefore a distraction. There are at least 2 major reasons Jesus wants me to serve Him here specifically and to desire serving Him elsewhere so strongly would be a foolish mistake.

“And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
Esther 4:14

This one verse is gonna have to be my life song for the next two semesters if I want to be the vessel that Jesus wants to use me as. Esther was dedicated to serving the Lord. And by dedicated I mean 1,000,000,000,000 percent. This chick was on FIRE, and in this moment, she was starting to lose her flame. Not because she didn’t want to serve God, just because she wanted to serve Him in a different way than He wanted her to. That’s just as dangerous as not serving Him, because if the enemy can get our focus on the wrong thing, whether we be motivated by service to Him or not, he’s already won.

DCS_Session5

The point is this–I was planted in Texas for 3 months. That much is true, but now I’ve been transplanted and I need to either bloom here and produce fruit or shrivel up and die. The only real answer is the former, but I’m not gonna be able to just make it happen. I’m going to need to empty myself, beg Jesus to scrape out my desires and fill me with nothing but His. Honestly there’s nothing I can do to focus myself except plead with the Lord to pour out His love for these people into me. If I want to bloom where I’ve been transplanted, all I can do is let Him work.

When that happens, miracles will occur.