Dont' Discount those Summer Camp Experiences

As this new calling began to unfold, I began to look back through my life. The summer before my senior year in high school, I responded to an altar call at church camp saying that God was calling me to missions. I said at the time that I did not know whether it was to serve in missions here in America or in a foreign country, but I felt that God had something beyond local church ministry for me some day (several years earlier I had answered a calling to serve God vocationally on church staff).

Honestly, though, as the years went on, this calling to missions seemed to wane. I had even begun to think that my response that summer evening of 1987 was just an emotional camp experience. It had just seemed to go way so I reasoned that my sensing a call to missions was not genuine.

As God began to unfold His calling for me into the chaplaincy, that summer night came back to me. I can still see myself sitting up in the choir loft at Falls Creek camp. I can still hear the camp preacher giving an illustration about climbing up the mast of a ship and getting scared, stuck half way up. The preacher said we needed to stop being afraid and climb the rest of the way so I walked down out of the choir loft and surrendered to this call. (Actually, when I went to tell my in-laws about what I was doing, my mother-in-law immediately remembered this and mentioned it, and I think when I told my own parents, by mom remembered it as well.)

What do you know? Don't discount those summer camp experiences.