However, I quite enjoy working outside because that's where most of the action is. This weekend was particularly action filled because it, in fact, involved tubing down a giant snowy hill...at night in the complete dark. And I flew over a rather large snow bank...and flipped upside down, not once but twice. Completely upside down. As in I was hanging onto my tube for dear life, and hoping and praying that I wouldn't roll all the way down the hill like this. I figured, as I was rolling, that since I wasn't really in pain and all my limbs seemed to be intact, I was fairly uninjured, but when I finally came to a stop I opened my eyes and found myself completely surrounded by pine branches. Yes, I had become lodged in a fairly small pine tree. So I pried myself out from the branches and made my way down the hill, laughing, and extremely thankful that I was neither broken nor concussed. Successful adventure if I do say so myself.
Besides that little tumble down the hill, one of the highlights of this past weekend was how I was able to observe the power of prayer. Last week in my room some of us prayed for ninety campers out of the 420-some who were supposed to attend this past weekend, to accept Christ as their Savior. A funny thing happened. Ninety campers did not get saved. This is okay. We didn't want to put God in a box with our prayers. Why ask God for something tiny if we know He can do something so much greater? Don't put God in a box. The funny thing that happened was that forty-five campers got saved. Forty-five. That's exactly half of ninety. Kind of stinkin' cool. God and the angels definitely had one crazy party up in Heaven for those forty-five souls. We now have forty-five new brothers and sisters in Christ!! So awesome!!
Something I've really been working on pretty much since I've gotten back to school from break is my prayer life. I've always been miserable at specifically devoting time for prayer, and something my Bible Survey professor once said is that the concept that is being dealt with in 1 Thessalonians 5:17, which says "pray without ceasing," isn't that we should forever be on our knees with our eyes closed praying. It merely means we should be in constant state of prayer.
This is a concept I've been really trying to apply to my life for the past few weeks, which for me it means that whenever the thought of prayer pops into my mind, I should pray. If I'm walking across campus I should pray. I should pray in the morning when I wake up before I've even gotten out of bed. I should pray when my mind wanders late at night because I can't fall asleep. If anyone mentions a prayer request, I should immediately pray about it so I don't forget about it. So far it's been pretty good.
Putting this into application:
So this past Friday night, I really didn't have anything to do after I finished working, and there were just tons of campers running around everywhere on campus. It was slightly organized chaos. This led to me aimlessly wandering around for a while until I came up with something to occupy my time. After a while I decided that instead of wandering around pointlessly like an Israelite in the wilderness (...Bible college references......), I should attempt to find as many of my friends as possible and just go around and ask them each for a specific prayer request. Some of them had to do with Snow Camp, some had to do with more personal stuff, and many of them had to do with various illnesses that everyone has been catching. Then I made a list of everything and tried to pray for at least one of my friends whenever the thought popped into my head. It became a reminder to me to be in a constant state of prayer.
~grace&peace~
Song of the Day: "Woods" by Bon Iver.
