February seemed to fly past me at a blinding pace. Last I looked I was just remarking that it was the end of January, and now I missed all of February. Whoops.
February is a crazy month in the world of youth ministry at my church, so that accounts for why I was MIA for the past 30 days. We take our teens on a three day retreat--aptly named Snow Camp--and the preparation is brutal for the the two weeks leading up to leaving. Every year we say we are going to start earlier and every year, we never do. This year, our theme was the Hunger Games. It was pretty freaking epic. Our speaker, Brock, talked about how to Overcome things in our lives and the games and activities were District centered and it was a blast. But the decorations were pretty killer (if I do say so myself) and it took many long hours of breathing in black sharpie and spray paint before we were done.
My personal baby of the whole thing is always the Prayer Room. This year, I stepped it up a notch and spent every spare moment I had researching other ministries, Pinterest (I'm not ashamed!!), and creating 5 stations that would be powerful for this group of teens specifically. I spent time praying over each station, praying over each person who would enter the room, praying over each and every burden the teens would carry in there with them. It has been a long three weeks of preparing, and praying, and crafting (LOVE IT) and as I set up the room on Friday afternoon before the kids arrived, I couldn't help but feel like God was going to do big things in the room...not because of me, mind you....but because of the way He has been guiding these teens' hearts to Him for months now and this weekend was the time where they were going to have to finally decide what they were going to do with His presence in their lives. It was an amazing feeling to know that God was ready to move...I just had to be ready to respond to it.
And He did. Hearts were broken, wills were shattered, lines were drawn, and decisions were made. Tears and laughter, heartache and joy, restoration and forgiveness...God was there. But here's the problem. It's over. I had to go into the prayer room on Sunday and take everything down. As my friend Andy and I took everything down, we talked about our debrief groups and how we felt everything went, but part of my heart was really sad knowing that everything was over. Andy and my best friend Lexi (who both came up to be leaders this weekend) will go back to college, the teens will be back in school, I will be back nannying with my kiddos, and we will only interact a few times a week. And this amazing weekend of focusing on God and our relationships with each other is over. It's a bittersweet thing to come down off the mountaintop isn't it? Because the moment I got home, everything became real again and my room was still a mess, and work was still work, and there was still drama to deal with and time didn't slow down or stop for me to dwell in the victory of this God-moment.
Blink and the moment is gone.
The beauty of God-moments, however, is that they can be multiplied a thousand-fold. We can have God-moments anytime, anywhere. By yourself, with friends, alone in a crowd, God will always show up. That's what made this weekend so wonderful for me...because I knew God would be there for some of my teens who have never experienced Him before. And once you taste a God-moment, it becomes easier to sacrifice everything else in your life for Him. Because He is worth all of it. The reward is great...far beyond what we can comprehend or imagine...but again, more on that later!
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