{"id":195,"date":"2011-08-02T12:31:46","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T16:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/?p=195"},"modified":"2011-08-03T16:00:38","modified_gmt":"2011-08-03T20:00:38","slug":"carolyn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/2011\/08\/02\/carolyn\/","title":{"rendered":"Carolyn"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Chris was the Missionary Speaker at Raccoon River Bible Camp in central Iowa during senior high week at the end of July.\u00a0 Carolyn was one of the campers.<\/p>\n

I (Chris) never spoke with Carolyn during the week.\u00a0 I’m not sure I could pick her out of a crowd and I’m not even sure of her name.\u00a0 What am I sure of?\u00a0 She has endured things I’ve never experienced and God was at work in her heart during camp.<\/p>\n

Every morning I spoke for 45 minutes touching on a variety of topics from God’s desire for us to know Him and make Him known to God’s will for our lives to relationships and forgiveness.\u00a0 The last night of the week, at 10 o clock at night, everyone gathered around a campfire to share about how God’s been working in them during the week.\u00a0 This is when Carolyn entered my life, and my prayers.<\/p>\n

The campfire had been going on for over an hour and we’d heard stories from many different campers about life’s struggles and how God was working in them.\u00a0 It was after 11pm when a young lady stood up with tears in her eyes and began her story.<\/p>\n

She shared that her parents divorced when she was child and her father had remarried.\u00a0 She lived with her father and her step-mother and everyday her father would go to work leaving her home alone with her step-mother.\u00a0 She shared that for seven years she endured emotional abuse from her step-mother, but this week at Bible Camp, God was beginning to work forgiveness in her life.\u00a0 Filled with tears she could say no more and she sat back down.<\/p>\n

Her story, and others that shared struggles with family, sex, drugs, and suicide, tore at my heart.\u00a0 I was reminded from Hebrews 4 that the world is ruined by sin and I was left wondering how God could allow these young people to go through so much.\u00a0 And then I realized that despite what each one of them had been through, here they were, around a campfire in the dead of night, meeting with God and praising His holy name.<\/p>\n

Please pray for Carolyn and the other high-schoolers.\u00a0 Pray that God would pour out healing and grace into their lives.\u00a0 Pray that they would be lights for Him in this dark world.