Wingapo Friends!
Praise God from whom all blessings flow! I’ve just had a wonderful week with some wonderful campers, living in community with the Lord.
Here at Glisson we do this thing called Camp Out. It’s great. We hike out to a camp site carrying our bug-spray, food, and sleeping bags. We teach campers how to build a fire, cut food, and cook their food on the fire coals. Additionally, we help teach campers that the outdoors is not the scary place that we sometimes make it out to be. This week, we hiked up to our camp site, collected our fire wood, and got the fire pit prepped to teach our campers.
And then the sky opened up. Zero to One Hundred in a minute.
Let me preface this by saying I had the best campers. They tried to hold rain gear over me as I struggled to light the fire. They encouraged me and each other. It did not even occur to them to complain about the rain.
After about 15 minutes, I sent them to the shelters (so they would not be soaked all night). An hour later, the lighter flooded. It was completely shot. We tried weather proof matches (turns out the strike paper is not so weather proof). So we get lighter number two up and going. By this point, our fire pit has about three inches of water in it; I’ve covered our wet wood with bigger (also soaked) wood to keep more water from getting on the fire as I start it. Nothing caught. After two hours or so, the rain slacked off, only the wood was so wet any time we got a flame, it promptly fizzled out. Then the second lighter ran out of fluid.
At this point, my kids were way too encouraging. They were cheering me and the broken lighter on, playing despite the rain, and being so positive about the very real possibility of eating cold (but safe) food. As they ran off to play with another living group while I gave the fire one last shot (pray for a miracle), I sat next to the failed fire and played with the failed lighter. I prayed for about an hour, over the fire, camp out, and our campers. Then lighter number three arrived with a hand full of semi soggy drier lent.
This fire should not have lit. The wood was so wet, it was crumbling in my hand. The drier lent was soggy, and our wood was too large to catch quickly (the small stuff drown in the flood), yet as soon as I put the lighter to the wood, fire was there. I’ve never had to work less for a fire. I just put stuff on it and it burned. It caught as if it had been sitting out in the dry heat all summer.
The best part was, while talking to my campers about it, one of my girls compared our fire to the story of Elijah building the alter for the Lord, inviting those who doubted the Lord to cover it in water, then praying and watching as it went up in flames. Not only was I impressed with this girl’s knowledge of Old Testament prophets but I was struck by how right she was. We came to God with wet wood, sub-par kindling, and a poor lighter record. He used what we had as gave us warmth, light, comfort, and a glimpse of his glory.
