The Gideon army

Judges 7:2-4

"The Lord said to Gideon, 'You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands or Israel will boast against me. Now announce to the army "Anyone who trembles with fear may turn back and leave Mount Gilead." ' So twenty-two thousand men left, while ten-thousand remained. But The Lord said to Gideon, "There are still too many men. Take them down to the water, and I will thin them out there for you. If I say 'This one shall go with you', he shall go; but if I say 'This one shall not go with you', he shall not."

If you know the story of Gideon, you know that out of 32,000  men that Gideon began with, The Lord thinned the army to 300 men. And those 300 men ended up conquering the  army of 135,000. I read through this story in a bible study with the intern team before summer. I read it not knowing The Lord was about to have the camp team go through the same battle. 

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Every week booked full of people from all around the world, people of  all ages. People you would meet once, then say your goodbyes. A typical week would be Sunday night-Saturday morning (You would have a day off rotated in somewhere) with 3-4 meals a day. There were 5 activities each day. And at the end of each day, we have what is called "Fireside". It is a worship session, and a word from the bible. If you can't picture exactly what it would feel like, just picture this.

You are sitting in rush-hour traffic on the highway. You are alone in your car, and don't have directions to where you need to be in 5 minutes. Even though you are stressed because you hear the car behind you honking at you, you somehow feel relieved. You might be late, but its all worth it. You got stuck in traffic with the most beautiful view next to you. You are listening to your favorite worship song, and you give a sigh. (Maybe not the best  analogy, but the best I could think of)

So yes, it can be stressful, but somehow you just don't mind, all the craziness is worth it in the end when even one person says "YES" to The Lord.

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Each year the camp team spends hours recruiting staff members at events all over the state of Washington. Our hope (the camp team) is to have around 200 or more applicants so that throughout the summer, there would be 20-30 staff members at each property, for each session (each session is 2-3 weeks of the summer).  

Let me give you some advise. You can have all expectations you want for something, and hope it turns out the way you want it. But my advice would be, put everything at the Lords feet and let His expectations play out. It might not be easy, but you learn a whole lot more when you give it all to Him. Not only that, you receive more blessings that way

Our plan did NOT turn out the way we had hoped. It took us a while to see the connection, but almost as soon as summer started we connected the dots and realized we were going through our own battle with an army of 300. However in this case, we hoped it would be 100 for the whole summer, and we ended up with 23. 

Yeah, not exactly what we were hoping for, and for awhile we struggled to see how it would work. 

The daily schedule was tight, little/ no sleep  (maybe 5 hours IF you were lucky), day and night we were exhausted.

By the grace of God, we saw the finish line. We were on the last week of summer camp. The picture you see above was us celebrating the end of an amazing summer. Because even though our plans fell through, The Lord had His own, and His succeeded, no surprise there. 

CRISTA advertises the programs in the summer as different levels of leadership training. And not only did the summer staff of 2015 learn individual skills at becoming better leaders, but we learned how to be a team. In my opinion, if we would have had a team of 40 people; we wouldn't have had such an incredible friendship among the team. We weren't just a team, we ARE a family.

All in all, I am SO thankful we only had a small amount of people, I'm pretty sure I can speak for the team when I say; It taught us  the most valuable lesson.

 Matthew 19:26
"With man this is impossible, but with God ALL things are possible"