The Best of My Life
I recently stated in one of my previous blog, Perspective Part II, that the best moment of my life was a point in which I had the great oppurtunity of traveling to New York City to sing with the University of Tennessee choirs at Carnegie Hall.
Well, as of this summer, that has all changed.
What? Something tops Carnegie Hall?
Yep.
My summer started off rather up-in-the-air, so to say. I was supposed to take voice lessons, but unfortunately was the only person to sign up for said voice lessons, and the class was cancelled. One person didn’t make sense economically, I guess. Oh well, that’ll just prolong my college career further than it will already be prolonged. No problem, right?
So, midway through June I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, with a former pastor of the church I attend to work with Baptist Press at the annual Southern Baptist Convention. The rest of June was laid back and lazy.
July rolled around and I was preparing to leave for a small town in Missouri to work with my church at a missions camp. The missions camp was called 3MT, for Mid-Missour-Mission Team. My church had went two times previously, and I had never bothered to go. But my aunt was overseeing the entire trip and she asked if I would like and be able to go. Thankfully, my July was gonig to be about like June was, laid back and lazy. So I went.
We had approximately 30 people from our church attend the trip as well. We traveled to Missouri in our new church bus, which looks more like a prison bus on the outside, but has the nice, yet not-so-comfortable-to-sleep-in bucket chairs inside.
We arrived in Missouri and although I had heard stories from past trips, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. We stayed in the local elementary/high school. All the men and teenage boys from our church stayed along with another group of men from a different church in a first grade classroom. I slept on a nice, comfy air matress that actually got more comfortable as the week progressed. It slowly deflated so the somewhat hard feel it had when I first inflated it, became a nice, soft, comfy feel by the weeks end. It was nice to get stay in a big room like that with all the guys from the church. It provided for a nice time to have fun and get to know each other better. However, I won’t miss the ever-growing stench that progressively got worse as the week went on from sweaty, dirty clothes from about twenty males and the fact that some people just smelled worse than others.
I had to get myself out of the trend of going to bed late and waking up late, as well. Each day started around six o’clock in the morning and you barely got a break until eleven o’clock that night. Showering was always an experience in itself as well. Outside of the school was a six-shower SBC Disaster Relief shower trailer, powered by a generator with pressure tanks and small hot water tanks. Of all the showers I took on the trip, I think one of them had hot water. The rest of the time the water was ice-cold; a good way to wake you up of the morning.
Breakfast was always a nice treat. It usually contained good, Southern biscuits and gravy, thank God they believe in that sort of thing in the Midwest. After breakfast, we headed out for a long day’s work.
Everyone was on a crew. My crew was made up of myself, one other male, and seven other females. The other guy on my crew was a teenager from my church, and one of the females was our pastor’s wife, Sharon. The rest of the crew was all girls, except for the other female crew leader Keri. They were the nicest, coolest, sweetest girls I’ve ever met. The oldest one was fifteen and the youngest was maybe eleven or twelve. And although the were young, they could work circles around girls that I know in their twenties. They were all extremely hard-working and very diligent. They would gladly do anything asked of them without hesitation or question.
One of the girls, Kersten, was like the little sister I never had. She was twelve going on thirty. She was so mature for her age and worked harder than just about any twelve year old I have ever met. Later I learned that she lives on a farm. Maybe that’s what it is. If that’s the case, I think everybody should have to grow up on a farm. You could tell from her attitude the entire time that she was an honest worker, and really appreciated life. One time, I was up in a tree sawing away on a tree branch, and she came over and started clearing away branches that I had already cut down, and I didn’t even ask her to do that. She was one of a kind.
We worked on a retired school teacher’s house. She was in the nursing home at the time, so we never actually got to meet her, but working for someone like that without anything in return can make you look at life differently. And although we weren’t around anyone while we worked, we never really had the oppurtunity to share our faith with anyone; however maybe the people driving by or the family of the lady we worked for can be touched by what we did.
We scraped windows, painted the windows, painted the entire house where there was asbestos siding, pressured washed the vinyl siding, cleaned the gutters, painted a fence, painted just about everything else on the house that could be painted, and we did some landscape work. It was an eventful week.
Working for others like that did a lot more for me than I could ever do for myself. During the week, I was reading the book of James, and in James 2:26 it says,
“Even as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be dead in my faith. As a born-again Christian, I don’t want to sit around any longer and not do anything meaningful for Christ and His Kingdom.
Even as the music director of my church, I realized that I had become complacent with my spiritual life. I don’t think that was why Christ died on the cross for me: to be complacent.
The worship and messages preached each night after working all day touched my heart in these ways. My heart became heavy at times and my eyes wet with tears as God used his Word to break my heart.
So, if you are reading this as a fellow believer, I pray that you will earnestly fall on your knees and seek the desires of God. Our earthly desires will only fall short in the end, and no material posessions we have on this earth will last: wood, hay, and stubble.
And as I start this coming year of college, I ask for prayers from my fellow Christians, as well. Pray that I will stay on God’s path and not stray out on my own. Pray that I will seek out and surround myself with wholesome Christians that will strengthen my relationship with God so I can do His work, and while this may seem “of the flesh”, pray that God will put a Godly Christian woman in my life to fill this void I have felt for this past year.
So there you have it, the best summer of my life.
