We got back from Falls Creek yesterday. Wow. For those that don't know, Falls Creek is the largest youth camp in the world. Falls Creek is located in Davis, Oklahoma, and runs for eight weeks, and has an average attendance of five thousand children per week. Last year, over forty-four thousand children visited Falls Creek, and over five thousand made public decisions for Jesus Christ.

What an amazing experience to be fully immersed in God for a week... I feel so privileged to have been chosen to go with the youth from our Church. We took 44 children and 11 adults. We were lucky enough to stay in the cabin owned by Healdton First (cabin 601 on the map), which is right next to the tabernacle. This is a good thing, because as you can see from the map, some cabins are quite far away from the tabernacle... so it can be quite a hike and hard to get seats close to the front.

I had seven children that I was responsible for leading through bible study every day. We had written material to prepare from each day, and a video that went with each to help us prepare. Even still with all this help, I was still nervous. I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility in what I was preparing for ... but in the end, everything went very well. We rarely got through more than half of the lesson, but we always hit the important points and sometimes a few additional important issues too.

One of the children was not saved, and at the beginning of the week brought a lot of "discussion" to the study. I tried everything that I could to reach through to them, and try to argue for Christ, but nothing would work. After the first lesson I went to our youth minister and explained the situation. The child had told me that they wanted "proof" that Jesus existed. Our youth minister put everything so simply... he asked me what proof the child wanted. I hadn't asked yet. Such a simple oversight, but it made the helping the child so much simpler.

Teaching is such a new thing to me, and I feel like I have so little to offer these kids. People tell me that I'm really connecting with the kids and to be honest I do feel that... it's just hard to know whether or not the kids are got anything useful out of the lessons I gave. I sincerely hope so. So back to the child that wasn't saved... the absolute coolest part of the week was seeing them respond to an alter call in the middle of the week! And when they came back to the cabin later ... they told us that they had accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior. The feeling is indescribable... I am so happy that they were saved at Falls Creek.

So I have a little faith in being able to respond to God's direction. I really hope to one day be as sensitive to His will as Rodney and John. They're both so in tune with God, and they both give such powerful messages. I know that we all have our own individual callings, and I don't believe mine will ever be to preach. Still, I know in the past week that I have been convicted of not having as close a walk with God as I should. Specifically, with regards to The Great Commission... I haven't shared His word and plan for salvation, and that is really eating at me.

In light of that conviction, I am trying to put together a way for our youth to have an online community. They currently hang out on MySpace, or LiveJournal, and they upload their pictures to flickr, and who knows where they all are participating in online forums. J.L. does a great job keeping up with our kids accounts on MySpace, but they're all separated there... some of them are linked, but not all of them. I'd really like to create a "safe" place for them to grow and hold each other accountable in their daily lives online.

One of the Lutheran churches in Tulsa is doing a similar thing and being constrained by upstream bandwidth, and I am trying to find out if they are interested in doing this as a joint (although not necessarily associated) venture. If it works out successful, then I see this growing on a regional scale. Who knows, it could even catch on at a state-wide or nation wide level. Don't get me wrong, I know that I'm hardly an early mover for this, but I am becoming more convinced that this is a direction the church must move in if we want to retain, and retrain our students to live a Christ-like life.

So that's a little bit about my week. It was amazing, and I saw our students grow so much. Oh, and our cooks were the best! No words can describe the servant hood they exhibited... it was truly inspiring.