Whining for Camp

(It's late. I'm beat. And I have to be up early tomorrow. But I want to share this brief snapshot.....)

This week has been hard. I don't really know what else to call it. We've been inside again, so recruiting has been a challenge. You might remember how discouraged I was last week when we started with four kids. I thought it couldn't get worse than that. Really God? Do you have a cruel sense of humor? I mean, what else was I supposed to think when we had one kid an hour into our first day of camp? One kid. Twenty-seven volunteers and one kid. One. Not one hundred. One. Singular.

I wasn't the only one who was discouraged, but I was the one responsible for everyone else's discouragement. And I realize I'm biased, but I think that's worse.

So yeah, this week has been hard. Yesterday the majority of our volunteers got pulled to another project, and we faced a whole new set of challenges. Energy was dragging, enthusiasm was low. Discouragement, on the other hand, was running high.

Awesome.

We regrouped today. We prayed specific prayers. We talked about the importance of being excited for the kids. We prayed that we'd encounter Jesus. We begged God to send us kids.

He did. 32 of them. And when we debriefed at the end of the day, one of the college students said, "The other day Lud prayed a creative prayer. She said, 'God, would you make these kids whine so much about wanting to come to camp that their mom finally gives up and lets them come?' I didn't think much of it, but today there was a mom who brought her two daughters upstairs. I asked her how she found out about the camp, and she said, 'We got a flyer a couple days ago, but I threw it away. I got another flyer today, and my daughters saw it and whined so much that I finally gave up and brought them.'"

My eyes filled with tears. Because not only was it an awesome account of a specific answer to prayer, but it was also a much-needed reminder to ask him for specific things. Because I can't faze him by asking for something to big or too specific. He's in the small stuff. And it's all small stuff.