Josiah Road

Roughin It For Jesus

posted by Jonathan Frank 13Oct

For years now, our church has taken a crew of people to a very rustic campground in northern Saskatchewan to do a wilderness camp and Vacation Bible School program with children from the First Nations’ communities nearby. For five years now, I’ve been blessed to go with the church and do this. We all camp in tents, bathe in the lake, and spend the week just trying to show love and explain this concept of Jesus to these children, many of whom come from the most dysfunctional, broken homes you could imagine. In fact, only a few days into camp a van pulled into the campground to collect two of the kids that had come to camp. It was Children’s Services coming to collect two brothers whose mom had been deemed unfit to keep them. It was a devastating reminder of what these kids go through every day.

All of the youth from our church that attended the camp are assigned “Tent Buddies” that we get to know and watch over throughout the week. I was assigned to the oldest boys that came to camp that year. They were all twelve years old, but hearing the conversations they had when they didn’t know we were listening, or even some of the stories that they willingly shared with us- you would’ve thought they were much older. They all came wearing a tough front, using language that would make any sailor blush, thinking they were too cool for school. But it was amazing to see how during the course of the week, God chipped away at their facade little by little until they really were themselves. And Wednesday night in tent devotions, our whole tent group prayed to receive Christ!

I couldn’t stop the tears from falling as one by one the kids left on Friday to go back to their lives. Part of it was sadness because I knew that so many of these children would be returning to such undesirable circumstances, but the other part of it was tears of joy and awe over what God had done that week at camp. I used to wake up in the middle of the night to hear our kids in their tent having these coarse conversations. On the last night of camp, they stayed up late in their tents again, only this time they were all reading their Bibles that they had just been given. I’m not naive enough to believe that they won’t struggle- we all do-but I believe the decision they made was a genuine one and I have a hope for them and their futures I didn’t have before. It was the most amazing picture of life-change you could ever see, and I thank God for my front row seat to it all.

Today I’m back at home still scratching mosquito bites. But a piece of my heart remains in Saskatchewan with all of those precious children. Their faces are etched in my mind and their names are always in my prayers. I am changed because of that week, and I know they were as well!