I call, you answer...

The Lord is good to me and so I thank the Lord....

Jumping Jehoshaphat Yeehaw! My life is forever changed by the weekend I just had, and not changed like the times before where things went well for a day or two and then flopped back down in to deep dark lameness but they will actually never be the same.

At the retreat I got to share a dorm with 4 amazing girls, three of which I already knew quite well and now I have a new girl to mentor and guide. So choice!

Our speaker blew me away with how open and genuine he was about things that had gone on it his past, I have never seen someone so willing to share deep secrets such as these that the average person wouldn't even admit to themselves, let alone a room of 140 teenagers. I now hold this man at such high esteem and am genuinely flabbergasted by his heart.

Saturday night after he spoke we were offered the chance to stay back and pray if we felt the need, I had been bawling as per usual and decided I needed to face what I was going through and turn to God instead of ignoring him like I have been for the past month and a half.

The issue was that after I got baptized I expected some life altering miracle to happen, I assumed that when I got home from Camp everything would be different, my relationship with my Mom would flourish, all the people around me were going to be changed and love me for who I truly was. Obviously this was not the situation and I fell back in to that slump of familiarity and stopped earnestly seeking God like I had been before.

To be honest I went to the retreat for all the wrong reasons, I was going to see people that I missed, to hopefully spend some time with an awesome Christ loving guy and to bond and feel popular again. Spending time with God was on the bottom of the list.

But God is good and he searched me out, tapped me on my shoulder and asked me what the heck I was doing.

So sitting there with my girls, this wonderful woman who I will be forever grateful to camp up and prayed with us. Back at senior co-ed, when we arrived on the mountain for chapel Evan was speaking about how life can't always be a Mountaintop experience and sometimes we hang around in the valley for a while and that we need to know that God is with us in those times too. While praying, this woman, who had not even been at Senior mentioned this and prayed that I would remember this as I left camp. WOWZA! I just started laughing because it was solely from God.

The next morning as I sat in Chapel, I found out my pal Cassia had hurt her back, and although I really wanted to stay to hear the sermon me and the girls decided we should ask this woman to come with us to pray for her, we went back to our room and boldly prayed for healing and Cassia was able to come back into chapel. Unbeknownst to her we had asked the speaker who had the gift of healing to come but he couldn't because of his prior commitments, but as we walked in he yelled back to us WE PRAYED FOR YOU! Cassia was so embarrassed but equally grateful.

We sat down in our chairs and tuned in to the second half of the sermon. God placed our arrival at the perfect time and Kevin was speaking on exactly what I had earnestly prayed about last night. Joyce was right beside me (the woman I just remembered her name haha) and she just kept whispering about how cool this was, and I just started crying again for God was there with me in that moment.

She also brought something else up that has been on my heart for a while, she mentioned my relationship with these girls and how I am such a mentor for them, and although she didn't know me that I should really pursue that in some way. I've been wanting to do that for a while, and have always wanted to be a youth pastor or be involved in youth groups someway and I feel convicted to start something in the high school to get more people involved with YoungLife and things like that.

As we were debriefing after the kids had left Joyce brought this moment up to share with everyone, not knowing I was there, she said "I just want to speak about Amy" I let out an "Oh goodness" and she laughed forgetting I was on staff. But as she shared this moment I felt so overwhelmed with how great God is and how he never stops pursuing us and never turns away from us even if we constantly turn away from him.

I have so much hope for the future and am filled with unspeakable joy and peace and am just simply happy. I am just so genuinely happy.

Much love and hope restored- Amy