There are many reasons for this.
Family.
Friends.
Dreams.
...camp.
I know, it might sound cheesy or just odd.
I went to a Christian camp exactly five years ago for one week and I experienced something so fulfilling I went back every year after that.
Here are some things that have happened since then that are the only words I can share, like testimony, to describe to you how these events have affected my life.
1) I felt God in a song for the first time. A throng of people my age--and not my age--rushed together in songs and claps and harmony. We didn't know eachother, not really, but we sang as one voice. The lyrics didn't matter. We could have been singing about bubble gum--we might have been singing about bubble gum. And that made no difference. I saw the faces around me and they saw me--and for that moment we called each other family without saying a single word.
2) These not really coincidences: I built a deck every year at camp. This is a coincidence because there are so many things you can do at camp, but every year I was given deck. So one year I put on the finishing touches. I laid down the last of the floor boards. I sanded and I tainted. The next year I started a deck. I dug the post holes and watched the structure rise over the course of one week. I walked on its surface even--the total five feet that we had finished. The next year I happened upon a deck that looked nearly just as I had left last year's deck. And a week later I left it in the shape of the previous year's deck. The last year...I got no deck. I worked on a campsite and built camp fire pits and cleared roads and made benches out of logs, but I made no structures by houses with power tools and nails. But! My little brother Lantern went to camp for the first time...and guess what?
He built a deck.
3) I am not going to camp this year for I am too old. I was thinking of trying for a job at camp, but it just didn't work out. Then I got a call from a lady at church asking if I was interested in going to Duke University in North Carolina for a long weekend to be a part of a young women's conference. I said yes! I'm not going to camp. I will not build a deck for a family, but I will work with others like me and make an even greater difference in my world. The one God put me in.
Lucky me.
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
My brother was too much of a butt to take a photo of the deck and himself together. But here are the fruits of his efforts.
I have so much to be thankful for.
Some people think they need God to move mountains or cure diseases in order to believe. They need to see more than a coincidence.
Sometimes something darker in me says that's just what it is. That's all it is.
But then I hear the magic of guitars strumming and feel the energetic rush of tired, laughing bodies all around me.
And I'm surrounded not by coincidences, but by blessings.
Here's to the music in us all.
Here's to making something...out of a pile of dirt.
Here's to seeing the magical amongst the ordinary.
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