Satan is defeated, but he is no idiot...

We had a great close to camp. Worship that I "tweeted" about was filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit...the message from Brad Bell was simple and to the point...our old life is still at home, waiting for us, and those same old habbits will be pursuing us...we have to be ready...With new lives in Christ we haven't arrived at the end of our journey, it's only just beginning...we are to FOLLOW CHRIST...time to turn away from many things...

From there it was off to Victory Circle...an outdoor amphitheatre known as "The Greek" cuz it kind of looks like something well, Greek. We had some more acoustic worship and then students asked to share, in 3 words, what God had done in their lives. What had he shown them? The responses were genuine, and felt. If you've ever thought you couldn't talk to your friends about Jesus, how about narrowing it down to 3 words and starting from there. I've just seen it from teens, you can do it...

After they dismissed the ladies, Brad came one more time to challenge the guys to three things based on "weak-sauce sissy Adam" in the Garden: 1) Reject Passivity 2) Accept Responsibility 3) Lead courageously ...

Finally it was back to the dorms...where we started packing and then met one more time as a group of guys from Horizons (one of my favorite things about what we've done this year)...

I challenged each of the guys to write down one specific action they would take before church on Sunday as a result of this week...responses simply gave me goosebumps..can't wait to hear about it on Sunday!

and then, on a personal note...the rug was pulled from under me...one of my former kids, a 23 year old young man I love and have knows since he was 7 or 8, absolutely tore into me for all the ways I've failed him and his family. He posted it all over my facebook, which I deleted, but they'd been up for an hour or so...decided it was probably best to block everyone from posting at this point, I don't want to block him as a friend, as I still care for him and want the chance to respond. Tried to deal with it for a while, knowing that it was absolutely Satan's timing to attack me, but still needed to talk w/ Liz. So with lots of tears, I called her at 1:30am or so. Instant cheer up as Caleb actually answered the phone! And Liz was the support I knew she'd be.

I'm so far from a perfect man, but I love these kids dearly. Whether it was this week, or this young man from many years ago. It hurts to know that maybe I could/should have done more to stay in touch when he was graduated and then moved away. I'm not a good "follow-up" person, as many of you know. I'm a fairly good "responder", to a crisis, a need, a text, an email, you get the idea. But if I don't respond right away, I often/usually forget to follow-up. And that's a big part of what this fiasco is about. Pray for my young friend, and that hopefully he and I can have a Matthew 18 moment as I go to him in love, but so far he isn't really responding to me.

But now I just can't sleep. I haven't packed yet, we've got so much to do to be out of here in 5 hours...packing and leaving dorm before breakast at 8:00am. We've got our Tradition of the last day (can't say because it's a secret from the first timers)..then it's off to the beach where we'll be having a number of baptisms! Hopefully heading home by 11:00am or so. I'll write one more hopefully by Saturday afternoon.

I will still say...awesome week!!

GOD RULZ!

TN