We are quickly approaching summer, which means it’s time for camps at our Oklahoma Baptists’ Conference Centers! We’ve been busy hiring summer staff and getting everything ready at Falls Creek and CrossTimbers for tens of thousands of campers over the next few months. Those coming to Falls Creek will get to experience the new ropes course adventure park located near the sand volleyball courts. This is an amazing new feature that all campers will enjoy. We are very grateful for the generosity of a donor who completely funded this new and fun element at Falls Creek.
Most important of all, the camps at Falls Creek and CrossTimbers over the summer are unprecedented opportunities for young people to hear and respond to the Gospel—over 3,500 students and children committed their lives to follow Christ last year! I am always amazed at the spiritual warfare that ramps up just before and during camp season. Satan absolutely hates a place where the Lord is being worshiped, His Word is being taught and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is being boldly and clearly proclaimed.
In light of that, I cannot express how important it is that we pray for our Conference Centers this summer. Oklahoma Baptists all across our state should make a commitment to earnestly pray for our camps. Pray for speakers, worship leaders, camp leaders and staff, sponsors/cooks and especially for the hearts of young people to be open to the Gospel and be transformed by its power.
I recently read an article about the Very Large Array located in New Mexico. This is the largest radio receiver array in the world. The “VLA” is a series of 27 radio telescopes that are each 82 feet in diameter that roll along 38 miles of railway. Together, the dishes essentially function as a single antenna, or telescope, the size of Manhattan to gather data about natural phenomena deep in space. The reason the array is so large is to detect radio waves from sources many light years away that are incredibly faint. These radio waves are often compared to having the same amount of force as a single snowflake hitting the ground!
What strikes me about the VLA is the immense preparation, effort, and cost that goes into an attempt to study things incredibly far away when many times we give almost no effort to pray and talk to our Lord who is readily available and present. We have such amazing things like Falls Creek and CrossTimbers—will we make praying for camps a matter of priority and intentionality? Will we go to the effort to ask God to move and work in the lives of students and children? Will we ask God to protect our camps from the desires of the enemy? Something so special as our camps deserve our best efforts in asking God to bless and move among them.
I can remember homes built in the 70s and 80s that had intercoms in all the main rooms so you could have the convenience of not having to walk to the front door to answer it. May we never see our prayer lives in terms of how to make it convenient. Let’s plan and make a commitment to pray for our camps this summer!
