What a weekend!

So there is this new song on the radio that pretty much describes my life right now. It's "This is the Stuff" by Francesca Battistelli.

I lost my keys in the great unknown
And call me please
Cause I can't find my phone

(CHORUS)This is the stuff
That drives me crazy
This is the stuff
That's getting to me lately
In the middle of my little mess
I forget how big I'm blessed
This is the stuff
That gets under my skin
But I've gotta trust
You know exactly what Your doing
Might not be what I would choose
But this is the stuff You use

45 in a 35
Sirens and fines
While I'm running behind
(CHORUS)To break me of impatience
Conquer my frustrations
I've got a new appreciation
It's not the end of the world...

This is the stuff
That drives me crazy
This is the stuff
Someone save me
In the middle of my little mess
I forget how big I'm blessed
This is the stuff
That gets under my skin
But I've gotta trust
You know exactly what Your doing
Might not be what I would choose
But this is the stuff You use

yes God has definitely been working on teaching me patience, conquering my frustrations, and yes the one we all love best, humility. :) Suddenly i seem to attract slow drivers, crazy drivers, long long long slow slow slow trains (no exaggeration!) and a host of other random little every-day things that He loves to use for lessons. :) Then to top it off i had a crazy day yesterday.
I had just spent and awesome weekend at camp and was on my way home. However i had decided to go to evening church up there and not want to to back-track to my usual route home asked for the quickest route home from church. well I'm not 5 minutes on the road when suspecting that i missed one of my turns in the dark i decide to turn around. We i swear it looked like a parking lot!!! It was an open space in front of a building lit up with lights and fun of tracks (which i am later to discover were numerous, crisscrossed snowmobile tracks). Any way, i started to pull in when suddenly my whole front end drops down about 6 to 12 inches and I'm stuck. Like not moving at all in forward or reverse! The roads were dry as a bone with no ice in sight! I now had nothing to do but swallow my pride and embarrassment and call my friends who at this point were about 5 minutes away. The outfitters Stephen, Mindy and Carissa graciously came to my rescue and we started digging out my car with snow scrappers in the 14 degree weather! That failing we eventually came up with the bright idea of praying! lol Within about 1 or 2 minutes a car comes up and the guys says he would go get his truck and pull me out!!! :) While he was getting his truck another guy that Stephen actually knew happens to show up and also happens to know a lot about cars! he helps us hook up the guys truck to my car correctly and that truck pulls me out like a loose tooth! :D Thank you God! Why do i always wait so long to ask you for help instead of just going to you in the first place!
It was very embarrassing and humbling! But i am sooooo thankful for my friends and my God That saved me from the ditch!
Of course i got lost 2 times this same night before finally making it home about 2 hours after i wanted to be! What a night!!!
There is another song that came on the radio on my way home after this mess that i thought was cool. Some of the lyrics are this...
If there is any peace
If there is any war
We must all believe
Our lives are not our own
We all belong
God has given us each other
And we will never walk alone
In the shelter of each other
We will live
We will live (We will never walk alone)
In the shelter of each other
We will live
We will live (In the shelter)
It made me think how God has given us each other to help one another! Brothers and Sisters in Christ! I am so thankful for the Brothers and Sisters that God has blessed me with!!! Thank you Lord!!!

boring waste of time?.... only maybe

in my daily job as a lifegaurd i get the unique opportunity to sit for roughly four straight hours and simply watch people and think. its quite easy to get bored out of my mind and feel trapped in this 86 degree windowless room while i tap my toes waiting for the next lifeguard to releave me. The only thing i am aloud to do besides sit or pace is think. so i think. endlessly, randomly, quickly, slowly. I stuggle to pull some thoughts together to complete one whole picture, while other thoughts i ignore, avoid or throw out. Sometimes i find myself thinking about what to think about! yes, the fact is i think, a LOT! The real point i think is that God has finally put me in a place where i cant escape so to speak. The first month i found enough to think about on my own to distract myself. But now i am finally running out of ammo. I cant distract myself, "get busy", run away, avoid, or anything else! God has me right where He wants me and i am finally starting to listen. Yes, believe it or not lifegaurding is slowly becoming a time of sweet communion with God! How great is my God that He can so perfectly orchestrate my life to exactly what i need?! While i may not be able to delve into reading the scriptures or praying on my knees with my eyes shut or running up and down the streets proclaiming His name i can dwell on lessons He is teaching me, pray for those around me, work on devotions in my head that i am preparing to share, ect. ect. ect. My God is great indeed!!!!

Its been a while!

Wow! so its been a while, OK a long long time since i have written to you all (whoever you all are). My apologies. So much has changed in my life(if you are not up to date on the major stuff just ask me and it will be easier for me to update you verbally). In short i live at home now instead of Bair Lake Bible Camp and i now work part-time at Menards and part-time at the YMCA. (yes the YMCA song does frequent my brain rather often and yes after a month or so i have finally been able to tune out the Menards commercials that they play every 10 minutes. :) God is indeed good and has blessed me far beyond my hopes and dreams! Within a two or so month period God took away everything familiar from me, my job, future plans, friends, my own place to live, easy daily interactions with close and loved mentors, my sponsorship, and so much more. He allowed the devil to lie to me about what was happening and why, to hurt me emotionally, to confuse the life out of me, and hurt me emotionally! BUT!!! threw it all the entire time MY Heavenly Father who loves me beyond my imagination stood by me, encouraged me, answered my prayers, increased my faith, provided for me, loved me, was patient with me, put me in situations that would cause me to grow in him, kept me safe, continued to show me how wise and loving my parents really are, provided a new place for me to live(back home), provided me with three jobs so that i could actually pick which two i wanted to work!, my dream car!(a VW Jetta), opportunities to stay in touch and see my good friends and mentors, And oh sooooo much more!!!!!! MY God is Great! Awesome in Power! and Holy beyond all measure! He loves me and knows me intimately! I am in increasing awe of Him daily!
One of my great fears in moving home from an intense discipleship program was that i would lose my fervor for the Lord and not grow in the same way spiritually, that i would not be fed as well as lack personal discipline regarding spiritual matters! A legitimate fear. However i seem to be growing in the same leaps and bounds as before. Through letters from friends and mentors, personal quiet times, books i have been challenged to read, growing relationship with my parents and siblings, and time with my home church! Yes, it is a shockingly different atmosphere, but God is still using it!
It's true that life is no picnic however, i find many things daily to complain about and often to fall to this temptation, however with your and my prayers and God's grace i am determined to tackle this temptation to complain. Please pray for me is this regard as well that i would take perfect joy from where God has me now and not try to rush to the next step in life before i have made it through the current one. Thank you for your prayers! Please let me know if there is something i can pray for you about! :) Iron sharpens iron according to scripture, and brothers are to encourage one another in the Lord! How may i encourage you today?
Thank you for taking time to read this, i hope you were encouraged by a testimony of God's great goodness! :) God bless!

Good Bye Summer

Where does time really go? It's a question we all ask and then getr cought up in the fast pace of life before we ever really answer it. I don't know that i have an answer to that question, but i definatly ask that question to myself frequently. For example, this summer only seemed to be three or four weeks long, which brings me to the thought: the busier you are, the faster times flies. In that case what did I do this summer tht made time fly? Well...... there is no short answer to this question. My main jobs were programming assistent and part lifegaurd. Since lifegaurding is rather self-explanetory, I will explain the role of programming assistant. Basically I was thr right-hand woman to several of the directors this summer. I helped set up and tear down games and activities, find whatever they needed, run errands in town for camp, ect. The list goes on. However, at camp when thre's a need its all hands on deck, despite your official job description. Therefore it was not unusual for me to help out with kitchen, housekeeping, or a host of other odd jobs including counseling. I enjoyed my jobs very much; it was often fast-paced and anything but monotinous. The small amounts of freetime i was blessed to have quickly filled with hanging out with friends, sleeping, reading and swimming. I made new friends, caught up with old friends and stayed connected with old friends. I laughed. I sweated. I cried and tasted true sorrow. I was taught lessons. I was repeatedly humbled. But most of all, I grew this summer. The laughter came from the simple pleasures of life; the sweat came from hard work. The tears and sorrow came from the unexpected loss of a friend from camp, Terry Eaton. With his wife he prayed for, encouraged and displayed the love of Christ to me and my fellow outfitters. He will be missed.
The lessons God taught me, including humility, were hard and I am still a work in progress. Some things He is working on in me (that I would appreciate prayer for) are: patience, self control and not complaining. These are lessons I am sure I will be learning my whole life.
Overall it has been a hectic summer and I am quite ready for fall. I know I haven't included specific stories, but hopefully I will type a couple up soon. Thank you to those covering me in prayer. We all need the Fathers help so desperately! God Bless, Hannah.

Where did June go???

So June was gone before i hardly realized that it had come! One of my favorite times of the year and its over! sigh! However life must go on and all good things must come to an end to make room for more good things. Camp has been such a blur of activity, no exaggeration there! We had our first two weeks of camp and thus far everything is going smoothly, praise the Lord! So far this summer i have been life-guarding and programing, which is doing a lot of odd jobs around camp. It has been so great and i truly love my job this summer! God is so good to us!
Our pillars book for the summer is Perelandra by C. S. Lewis. Though i have yet to really start the book i have heard many good things and am excited to read it. There are no classes or homework for the summer which is a very welcome brake. :) We finished our Precepts class on the 15Th of June with a bang. For the last assignment we had to put together a visual and a speech for the things we had learned in the previous eighteen weeks. It was a lot of work but it summed up everything we had learned so well.
Another great fun thing in June was my 21st birthday! and it was so great thanks to all of my awesome friends and family. Thank you all it meant a lot to me! And i when i say a lot i really mean a Lot! :) On my actual birthday i was finishing lifeguard training and driving home with to fellow staffers who were wonderful and bought me an ice cream cake! My absolute favorite kind of cake! Then since training took almost the whole day my fellow outfitters took me out to Applebees and that was one of the highlights of my month!
Again i can't express how fast the summer is seeming to go by. Thank you all soooo very much for your continued prayers and support! It truly means so very much to me! God Bless!

Wow! I seriously can't believe that the month of May is gone already! It seems like just yesterday it was May 1st. As some of you may know May is my very favorite month of the year. As sad as I am to see it go though i am still thoroughly excited for June to be here as it is my second favorite month of the year. Yes summer is finally here! Campers will be arriving soon and homework and classes will be done soon for a few months.

The theme for the month of May was humility. What more can i say on this? Except that God has certainly guided the themes for the months and May has been no different. I wouldn't say that i have learned or been through anything exceptional on this subject but God has certainly been giving me many quiet reminders and subtly teaching me the ways of being humble, though i still have so far to go as humbleness is a life-long journey.

On May 16th through the 17th we(many of the staff at Bair Lake plus the outfitters) had the opportunity to travel south to visit the creation museum. We drove the six hours and spent the night at Potters Field (a local Christian camp) in a Tepee while it rained all night. That was quite the fun and memorable experience. Then the next day we got an early start and spent the whole day at the museum before returning that night to camp. It was a long day but well worth how tired it made us. At the museum we saw a planetarium that was awesome, did a walk-through a vast amount of knowledge and walked through their botanical gardens and petting zoo. My favorite part of the museum was the Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eve section. Thinking about the first marriage and family and how God had originally designed it to be. How the world began so perfect and how Heaven will be perfect as well.

Life has been busy and i fall into bed exhausted every night but life is good and i am so happy to be living and working for God every day here at Bair Lake Bible Camp. He is truly so good to me!

The theme of April was intersession, and it has been quite a month of learning. Our pillars book was, "Reese Howells, Intercessor" and it has probably been my favorite pillars book so far this year despite how convicting it has been. It is a biography of a welsh man that followed God's specific calling to the life of an intercessor and all the great things that happened in the world because he followed God. I have recently been enlightened on the difference between a prayer warrior and an intercessor. A prayer warrior can start and stop praying for things at their will, whereas an intercessor prays for what God tells them to pray for and they don't stop praying until God gives them the victory or tells them to stop. Also they often live the life of the way of the people they are interceding for. Then in a sermon i recently heard on intersession i learned how Jesus' whole life and purpose was and is interceding to the Father for us. Therefore if we are all called to live a life like Jesus then it is reasonable to say that we are all called to a life of intersession. True our life will not look like a carbon copy of Reese Howell's, but we need to be continually abiding with God and giving Him utter and complete control of our lives so that He may lead and guide us in the way He has planned for us. It is so hard to truly live like i have given God complete control of my life but it is a continual prayer of mine that i will die to self and God will live through me. This is no easy prayer as God is slowly starting to test me and teach me how to die to self.
Intersession was not the only subject in my life for the month of April though. I have also been studying a precepts course on Genesis 3-11. the last few lessons have been specifically on the serpent, sin and death, and what Jesus did to save us from the results of our sin which is death. It has been both interesting and eye-opening to match and compare scriptures all over the Bible that come together to give insight on a subject.
Also this past month i with the other outfitters had the opportunity to visit Adam Reid's (a fellow staffer and BLBC) family and the campus of CMU. We got to meet a woman that worked with campus crusade who lead a ministry that specifically reached the Greek inter-varsity groups. We went on a prayer walk down main street with all of the Greek sorority and fraternity houses. It was exciting to see and hear about a ministry that God has been working in and opening long-closed doors to.
The above has been just a small taste of my month of April. I wish i could expound more on it but that would take pages upon pages to cover. Thank you all for your prayers i have been so blessed by God in this program thus far. I am greatly looking forward to summer and am excited to see the things that God has for me in the coming months. I am praying that your summer will be as great as i am sure mine will be!