Jesus is Better
Before stepping into my role as the Director of Programs at Camp Luther, I worked at a camp called HoneyRock for three years. Each summer, I would spend six weeks training and leading our summer staff, preparing them to serve as cabin counselors for a four-week long summer program for high school-aged campers.
The first day of camp happens. The kids arrive, they meet their counselors, they do all the classic get-to-know-you type activities—everybody seems like they’re having a good time. That evening after things wrap up for the day, I’m in my office working on preparing for the coming weeks when I hear a knock on my door. It’s two of my counselors. They want to talk.
I invite them in, they sit down, and they begin telling me about one of their campers. Turns out that she wanted absolutely nothing to do with this camp experience. She was struggling with a bunch of issues in her life, and so her parents had sent her to HoneyRock as kind of a last gasp attempt to get through to her; to make a change in her life. She didn’t want to be there. She made it very clear that she didn’t want to be there. And underneath that surface, there was a kid who was clearly in rough shape. At that time, we didn’t really know the full extent of some of the things she was dealing with, but even a surface level understanding showed a lot of brokenness.
And so her counselors sat there, and told me all this, and then asked me this question: “What do we do?”
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“In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own.” -Madeline L’Engle
I firmly believe that, as a part of the process of ministry, God wants to break your heart. I have cried way more since starting down this path of camp ministry than I ever did before. Sometimes it was just stuff going on in my life, but a lot of the time it was what was going on in the lives of the people around me, and God calling me to enter into that hurting and brokenness and pain.
God wants to break your heart. And that’s scary. Ignorance is bliss. Opening ourselves up to the messiness of life is rough. We don’t know what to say, we don’t have time to deal with it, and we don’t want to open ourselves up to the pain of the people around us.
God wants to break your heart. But he does it to make our hearts more like his. Jesus is the broken heart of God. Jesus is God saying I’m going to enter your pain, even though it’s going to hurt, it’s going to get messy. I’m going to open myself up to all of that because I love you.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort. He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us.” -2 Corinthians 1:3-5
The word typically translated “comfort” is better translated “coming alongside.” We come alongside hurting people because that’s what Jesus has done for us.
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This kid at HoneyRock. Her counselors didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do. That evening as they sat in my office, we just prayed. I prayed for them, that God would give them the wisdom and guidance to navigate the tough situation that had been placed before them. And we prayed for this kid, for everything she was dealing with, that God would heal her brokenness and soften her heart to these people and this place.
As the days went on, it became clear that this kid’s heart was in shambles. I was in constant communication with her counselors, with the kid’s parents, trying to figure out how to handle this and what to do with this girl. She was struggling with every kind of addiction and sin issue imaginable. The first week or so was beyond rough, for everyone involved. And her counselors couldn’t do much, beyond just loving her. But they kept on loving her, and kept on loving her, and kept on loving her. Even when it was really, really tough. Even though they couldn’t fix a lot of the stuff that was going on. All they could do was be there with her in it.
One of my staff, in particular, really opened her heart to this kid, and listened to her story, and didn’t shy away. And through that place sharing, she was able to start to bring the love and the hope of Jesus Christ into this kid’s life.
And we began to see a change. We started to see some healing taking place. This kid started to open up and come out of hiding.
On the last night of camp, we had a final celebration, a time of worship and remembering and sharing, where anyone who wanted to could come up and share a bit of the story of what God had been doing in their life through their time at camp. They were at camp for four weeks, remember.
It’s always a risky proposition to ask a high school student to get up in front of their peers and share anything, let alone something so revealing as their story, but every year I was surprised by the courage of some of these teenagers, to risk showing themselves in front of everyone. Some of them would share how much they appreciated their small group, and getting so close to one another. Some of them would share funny memories from their time together. But some of them dared to go deeper.
And so on our final night people are sharing, and it’s the usual mix of kind of funny and lighthearted with some more meaningful stuff mixed in. Then this kid stands up. She stands up in front of sixty of her peers and talks about some of what she’s been struggling with and the person who she was, but how what she’s found this summer is that Jesus is better. Jesus is better.
And how she’s a little scared to leave camp, but she also can’t wait to go home and do some damage for the Kingdom. She’s crying. I’m crying. I look over at her counselors—they’re bawling.
Jesus is better. That’s the truth that you have the opportunity to live out each and every day. Amidst the hurting and the heartache and the brokenness of this world—we can hold onto the truth that Jesus is better.
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Written and shared by Kardia.