LIVE Camp 06

Well I've just come home from Whitehill's first LIVE Young Adults Camp. What a fantastic weekend. I think there were about 39 of us, and we spent the whole weekend at Luther Heights Campsite at Coolum Beach. It was a beautiful location, overlooking the beach, close enough to walk down, and a short drive from patrolled beaches.

The trip up was a touch stressful, with traffic a nightmare in Brisbane, and then a friend was unlucky enough to be behind a truck when its tyre blew and ran over the steel rim. So we spent quite a while on the side of the highway, making sure the car was drivable and getting all the details off this truckie.

Once we finally got to Luther Heights we realised one other thing... it was extremely hot... and unbearably humid. I haven't felt humidity like that since I was in The Gambia! The whole weekend was an effort to stay out of the heat.

The speaker for the weekend was Scott Vawser from WA. I met Scott on the Youth Vision Melbourne Ministry Tour last year, and he's a fantastic bloke. Scott is also the reason I got more serious about blogging and I regulary check out his blog here.

Scott spoke on the Kingdom of God. He used the "Truman Show" as an example of what Christians can create which he dubbed the 'King-Dome of God'. For those who have seen The Truman Show will know the movie follows the story of a man who has lived his entire life inside a huge dome, being filmed and unknown to himself, become this star of a hit TV show. In so many ways Christians have created their own dome. We have our own world where everything 'bad' and 'ugly' is kept outside our dome, and we never venture outside ourselves.

Scott has some amazing ideas on the Church - not in the sense of the little white building on a hill, but as the body of Christ - and he was able to share and really challenge all of us to live Biblical lives, not just religious lives.

One thing that really hit me was the importance of the truth behind John 13:34 and 35. " A new commandment I give you, love one another, as I have loved you. In this way all men will know that you are my disciples."

We looked at what Jesus' love is all about, things like endless, sacrificial, empowering, life giving, unconditional and non deserving. And in that passage Jesus tells us to love one another just as Jesus loves us. So as Christians we need to love one another just like all the things we listed about Jesus' love. Jesus didn't command us to go out and preach to people, he didn't tell us to run huge outreach events, he told us to love one another. So through un-Believers seeing the way we love one another, this is the greatest witness of all.

It was a new and fresh way to look at the Christian life, and Scotts stories of how he is living in his neighbourhood and creating friendships/relationships and networks of believers and non-believers were an up lifting idea for how we should spend our time instead of sitting inside a religious dome.

I came away challenged, but also refreshed. The camp gave me an opportunity to have some quality alone time with God, and really take stock of where my life is at the moment. The biggest thing for me to realise was that I don't really know where I am at the moment, and I have to spend a lot more time searching God before I can figure that out.

I guess I can use this blog to continue to search myself and express what I'm feeling at times. And hopefully your feedback can help me to continue to search God, and stretch my own faith.

Our praise times on camp also allowed us to truely worship God, and Elise was able to be tender to God's will and lead us in woshiping him honestly and humbly.

So overall it was a special weekend. Full of good fellowship, teaching, challenges and praise and worship.