For three years of college, I was on the school’s drama
team. Six to eight students would learn a drama in the fall semester then
travel to churches and schools in the spring presenting the play. Each drama
taught a lesson about God, faith, and life. One year I took the opportunity to
help our coach write and revise our drama. Just like any other writing, the
story took different shapes and angles as it was crafted into its final form.
It was exciting to get to share creative input that would later be presented to
hundreds of people in our ministry.
Just like any unfinished script, it seems like our lives are
in a constant state of revision. The direction we are taking one moment is not
the direction we end up going. Ideas we hold strongly in one season may change
in the next as we learn more about God and life.
In December I finished the work for my bachelor’s degree in
youth and family ministry with an emphasis in biblical counseling. (Side note:
I can’t help cringing when anyone asks me what my major was. First, because the
name is soooooo looooooong. Second, because no one seems to know what on earth
it means once I’ve finished saying it.) Basically I’m trained to work with
youth at church, and I’ve taken extra classes on counseling people from the
Bible.
The counseling aspect of the program held the most interest
for me, and as I pushed towards graduation I couldn’t help tiredly thinking of
the graduate work I’d need to do to be a professional counselor. I love helping
people, but more years of studying and papers and reading and sleep deprivation
didn’t sound attractive, and I knew I had no money to pay for more education.
Beyond all that, the thought of a job in counseling felt
more like a burden than a joy. I am honored to help carry the burdens of my
friends and family and others who need me, but imagining myself in an office
day after day opening my heart deeply to the pain of person after person scared
me. I didn’t doubt that I could do
it.
But I feared it would destroy me.
As I charged toward what felt like a sentence of
destruction, missions conference at college put an abrupt halt to everything.
Missions conference at college is wonderful and draining all
at once. We get great preaching and incredible access to missionaries and
mission agencies. We are also required to spend large amounts of time
socializing with the missionaries. This is great. It is also a bit awkward for
the non-missions students, as it’s easy to feel like we’re disappointing
missionary recruiters. This year, however, I had an interesting encounter with
a missionary couple. Rather than trying to pitch their mission group to me,
instead they asked me what I was interested in. At the time I was open to
basically anything, but especially counseling. My camp involvement also came
up, and the man enthusiastically latched onto that idea.
This complete stranger—instead of looking at my plans or his
own hopes for his mission group—looked at the gifts and opportunities God had
put in my life and recommended a camp internship to me. He gave me a contact
and the name of a program, penned on the back of one of his missionary cards,
and recommended I look into it. He and his wife also gave me some great advice
on counseling ministry, which despite my lack of desire to do professionally I
still would love to use in ministry.
I went back to my dorm room that day and immediately found
the internship he had recommended. Within a couple hours I had filled out the
application and called my parents. The idea of full-time camp ministry—one I
had shrugged off in years past—now seemed incredibly right. Camp held the
perfect blend of my skills and desires, and in some ways even an unexpected
angle of both my youth and counseling training.
That day changed the course of what I had thought would be
my future. I again have goals and dreams for ministry, and steps to get there.
I’m excited about the future and have
a growing sense of being willing to sacrifice anything—the sins and weights
that so easily entangle me—for the chance to give my all in this ministry for
Christ.
A ministry that combines both my joy and my greatest
usefulness. What a blessing, indeed.
This is almost surely not the last revision of the script. I
may never have a camp internship (though I’m currently in the process of
applying for several—would you pray for me?). I may never get the extra
adventure experience and camp training that I’m hoping and praying and striving
for. But at the moment this is the goal before me, my means of serving my
Maker, and it is my joy to recite these new lines as long as He allows.
