a summer of answered prayer.

every one of my summers has had a theme.

growing up very fast.
letting go.
beautiful friendships.
my weakness and God's working anyways.

normally it takes me a few months after summer's end to come up with a word for it. but i've known what to call this one since may.

back in february, me and kathleen went to do a camp promo together in camden. we were talking about how we both wanted this summer to be all about prayer. we wanted to ask God to do big things, not just to help us do the little we thought we could. so we agreed on two big things we wanted to pray together for over the next few months.

we asked God for 1500 campers. we got 1598.

we asked him for 30 staffers. we got 31. and not only that, but as a bonus, he gave us the most guys(and the BEST guys, no less) that we've ever had to work for coed week.

those were the two biggest and most significant, because they were so specific and we'd prayed for a long time. but there were others too.

me and hope started praying together for the staff in late march early april-ish. we agreed that both of our biggest concern was unity. so we asked God to bring us all together like we'd never seen before. as i've written in so many posts already, he gave us a community so infinitely beyond anything i imagined, even in my "what the staff would be in a perfect world."

when me and carrie went to camp mccall for adventure rec training, she told me how she'd been praying a lot about what to do after graduation next year. over the next couple days i prayed for her too. and over those few days, God showed her exactly what he wanted. that was when i knew it was gonna be an amazing summer; before camp had even started God was already doing huge things.

i asked God to show me something new. well, what i actually said was, "surprise me." he showed me the heart for acteens i had no idea i'd had.
i asked him to give me a clear answer about something he'd been tugging at my heart about for a few months. he gave it to me.
and while this sounds really minor, it was a really crazy answer and a big deal for me. in may i found out that training camp for cross country was the same dates as the last week at la vida. so i'd have to either go back to school 3 hours after the second to last week of camp ended and miss the goodbye ceremony and a lot of my most special campers, or stay for camp and be impossibly behind the rest of the team. i knew cross country was a God thing, but i also knew camp was where i was supposed to be, so i was flip flopping between the two all summer long. some time in mid july i knew that even though it would be really hard to catch up with my running, camp was where i needed to be. three days after i said yes to God, i got an email saying cross country had been bumped up a week. not only would i get to stay for all of camp, but i'd get a day in between to rest before i moved into school.

prayer works. i'm convinced that that's what made this summer so different for me.
on sunday night, our end-of-summer sharing time lasted longer than it ever has in other years(though, to be fair, it was on a monday morning one year and a wednesday during rest time another), and almost all the stories had to do with things people had prayed about and seen answered. big, small, or just plain crazy things have happened simply because we asked God for them. 

the moral of the story: in the words of hawk nelson, life would be so simple if we all just learned to pray.

i'm already lifting up next summer. =]

and this is the confidence we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. and if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.~1 john 5:14-15