Student Life Camp



 

youth group photo from camp
From June 23 to 27, Heartland youth travelled to the Student Life Camp at the Windermere Baptist Assembly in the Ozarks. This was an awesome time of discipleship and group building. The camp theme this year was “Here And Now.”
  

Here and Now

For many students, both Christian and not, nearly their entire life is presented as preparation for something else to come.
   
When they’re kids, they can’t really do anything because they’re “just a kid.” They can really do stuff once they get to junior high and in the youth group. But then they’re just in junior high and should wait ‘til high school. But once in high school, they’re not really anything until they’re seniors. But once they’re seniors, they should just wait to college, then until they graduate and go to grad school and eventually get a job and then have to find someone to marry and then start a family and plan for retirement and everything else.
   
Everything is about what’s to come. They’re in school to get trained to go until college to get trained for a job. They’re in relationships to realize who it is they want to marry. They’re getting jobs to train them to have a good work ethic. They’re in church so they can learn to do things right so that they might be good Christians one day.
   
This constant preparation for the future exists in tension with the guilt and shame that they also feel about their past. Mistakes made some time ago can still hold a firm grip on a student’s life so that they feel trapped, unworthy and unable to live in the freedom that God has promised them through Jesus Christ. Both the trappings of the past and the pressures of the future often render our students paralyzed.
   
In actuality, once they gain a proper understanding of their identity in Christ, they realize that God is at work right now and is calling them to live a life in relationship and on mission with Him right here and right now. This isn’t practice. This isn’t rehearsal. This is it.


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