Brett and Bronwyn

Every student I’ve ever worked with if you asked them “what has Mr. Brett taught you” I would hope they would say that “God Loves Me”. I say it almost everyday as a Camp Director, I remind my teen group constantly and tell them to do things to remind themselves. Write “God Loves You” on your toothbrush so you can remember, put it in big letters on your mirror or on the dashboard of your car. Whatever you need to do so you can remember that the Creator of the universe, the Master of all things loves you. So what does that have to do with ladybugs you might be asking yourself. A long time ago when I was working at Camp Lake Stephens a camper told me that every time she saw a butterfly it reminded her that God loves her. I liked it so like any good Youth Minister I stole the idea, changed it slightly and made it my own. Thus the “God reminding me He loved me” whenever I saw a ladybug story began.

Like a lot of things in my Christian life it had a humble beginning, for some very 90’s reason I wore this weird fishing hat sometimes and it had a ladybug earing attached to it, thanks by the way Katie Boren, and whenever I saw a ladybug I would be reminded that “God Loves Me”. Awesome and cute right, well there is more. I was a Youth Pastor for many years at an inner city church here in Memphis. It was an old beautiful church in a neighborhood that had changed dramatically. There was a pretty much unused prayer room I used to go up to and have quiet times. Being that it was an old beautiful church the room had old stained glass windows that were starting to mildew at the bottom and the air from outside could come through. It was a cold room to pray in in winter and hot and humid in the summer but it was a place I could go and meet with God undisturbed. I was so undisturbed that had I died up there my body would probably still be there and everyone would wonder what happened to me. Anyway one spring I walked over to the stain glass window and under it in the walls and all inside the frame were hundreds of ladybugs. It was amazing, I just watched them scurry around. However for some reason just after that my prayer life fizzled a little. I wasn’t doing the one thing I knew I needed to do to be successful.  When God got a hold of me and I climbed the stairs to spend time with Him, the room looked like a ladybug massacre had taken place. All of these beautiful bright red beetles had turned brown and were on their backs dead. Now I don’t think God had struck them down to prove a point it was probably the exterminator but it was a stark reminder that if you really believe that God Loves You why would you ever go a single day without getting in His presence.

Now I could tell you tons of ladybug stories but most of them are just simple. One landed on me, I smiled and was reminded that God loves me. I could also tell you that I had a rubber ladybug on my dashboard one summer to remind me that God Loves Me and I live in the South so now I have a melted rubber stain on my dashboard to remind me that God Loves Me, but I do have one pretty amazing story. I was telling the ladybug story at camp during Spring Break at Cherokee Baptist Church and doing my whole “who has two thumbs and is loved by God” routine. Then just as I was wrapping up down flew a ladybug right into the middle of a gym floor full of campers. Whenever I talk to any of the people that were there that day it inevitably comes up. It was an amazing moment.

I don’t know if ladybugs are a thing in Africa, but when Bronwyn and I were walking around Camp BlueSky thinking and praying there on the ground just walking around next to one of the high ropes towers was a little ladybug. It was the only one I saw while I was there but it was beautiful and I smiled and was reminded that God really and truly loves me.

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This is where I spent my day yesterday, and not just at this beautiful camp but literally on this lake in a kayak. I want you to guess which of the following reasons I was there:

• Paddling around leisurely waiting to hear from God as I prepare for Africa.
• Using it as a vigorous workout so I am in tip top shape as I prepare for Africa.
• Helping 7th graders learn to use the boats and pulling their swamped canoes to shore when they overturned them.

Do I even need to tell you which one it is? The Grove at Red Oak Lake is a beautiful camp just outside of Memphis, some of you may remember it as Camp Cordova. If you have not been there in the last few years you really need to go check it out. It’s like a whole new world, the Director there Matt Coussan has done and is doing a fabulous job making it quite possibly the best venue in the city for church youth groups, conferences, or pretty much anything. So, that’s where I was yesterday, in a Kayak helping 7th graders from Briarcrest get out on the water and enjoy their fall retreat. I am sore and sunburned  and I was somewhat forgetful that I have terrible equilibrium so I’m still a little “wha wha” today.

I loved it, I really did. It was a day that reminded me exactly why I believe in camping ministry and why I am so lucky to have been able to make a life out of it. However, there was that tiny voice in my head that kept saying, these teachers are totally judging you. They are trying to figure out why this 40 year old man is doing the job a 20 year old should be doing. At any opportunity I tried to slip in that until very recently I was a Regional Director in Childcare with the YMCA or that my wife and I were about to go on the mission field in Africa but I still felt like all they would think is that if I was there doing that job on a Monday I had either made some terrible life choices or worse. I was so happy when I heard a teacher say she had been to Kenya while she was in the  middle of the lake while tons of 7th graders boats where parked around her, she was obviously the “cool teacher”. I was able to start some dialogue that hopefully got around to other teachers that I wasn’t some freak or loser. It didn’t help that I went to Briarcrest and when I said that I felt like they had to be thinking, “wow, he had a great education but now he’s a total burnout who kayaks around on random Mondays”. Now it’s possible they weren’t thinking any of these things and it was just me projecting it. But I also know people and often times we are the worst.

Pride is an interesting thing, I know it’s a sin I have always had to deal with and God has often had to knock me off my horse to remind me who’s really in charge. But ultimately yesterday doesn’t seem like it was about that. I think it had more to do with God asking me, really asking me if I was willing to do whatever He wanted whenever He wanted. It’s not about me, it’s about responding to the Holy Spirit and being wherever He leads me to be so I can be most affective for the Kingdom of Heaven. Pride also gets in the way of my support raisings sometimes, even though I believe 100% in what we are doing and truly believe others will be blessed by supporting us and becoming part of our team. That being said I want you to prayerfully consider joining in with us. Bronwyn and I are happy to answer any questions you might have or even meet with you and discuss becoming a monthly partner. Camp Ministry is a place for people to come meet with Jesus and whether you are the Director or just the guy in a kayak, or in some cases both, it’s something I truly believe is worth investing in.

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The year is 1996 and it’s been just a little over a year since God called me out of my old life and into this new world of living for Him. I was dating a great Christian girl at the time, I was seeing Steve May most weeks for discipleship, and I was reading and keeping a prayer journal. But Now it’s summer and I’m in Oxford, Mississippi for the first day of counselor training. I have no idea what to expect, I had not been there before that day, I hadn’t met anyone I would be working with and I had never seen a single day of any kind of summer camp ever. But what God was about to do that summer was unbelievable and so intensely powerful there is no way to share it all in one post. But I never could have imagined sitting on that porch in Mississippi the plan that was in front of me, a plan that was set in motion by submitting to His will and a plan that would eventually take me across the country and now all the way to Africa.

I truly think I could fill a book with things that happened that crazy season of camp but probably the most important thing was the people God put in my life at Camp Lake Stephens. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t talk, text, message or in some way communicate with one of the outstanding men of God I met there. When I got married to my amazing wife who I met shorty after my second summer at CLS it was these men who I spent time with the night before. When my mother died it was these men that drove to Memphis and helped me through it, the same thing years later when my father died. When Bronwyn and I hiked the Appalachian Trail one of them started with us. When I first started praying about Africa it was these men that I called and texted to join me in prayer.

I called these posts Vision I & II and the reason is that for me that summer I had a pull on my life and this world of Camping Ministry because God did call me all the way back then to this very thing. It was a clear vision that I thought would happen immediately but that’s not how God works sometimes. He called me and then spent 22 years preparing me. I thought I was ready in 1995 on a summer night sitting and praying with one of these men on hill we called Vesper, but I wasn’t. The Lord put it on me and even though I haven’t always lived a life worthy of His call he just kept pursuing me, preparing me, knowing that someday His perfect plan for my life and now my beautiful wife’s life would come to fruition.

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It’s quite astonishing how closely my Christian walk has been tied to camp starting from when God really got a hold of my life in April of 1995 when I was in my early 20’s. I was traveling with a girl I liked to the Mule Days Festival in Columbia, TN. It’s pretty much what you are imagining in your head right now only with many many more mules. On the way there she and I stopped at a summer camp she had worked at the previous season to show me around. It was what you would expect from any camp I suppose but I had never been to a anything like that before so I thought it was absolutely magical. However, if my memory serves me, I was wearing Teva’s with socks which is absolutely not magical. Anyway we were walking around the camp and we came upon a small structure that had two pieces of wood underneath it. I wasn’t the most astute in those days but I could see it was a broken cross. I picked it up and slammed the two parts together making the cross whole again and hung it in the structure back where it belonged. Slamming the pieces together hurt, I acted like it did not but it was really quite painful. So there I am trying to impress this girl with my ability to do stupid things but I’m staring up at this cross. In that moment God invaded my life and even though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, God was calling me to three things. First to follow Him, second to surrender to ministry, and third to become part of this special kind of ministry we call Summer Camp.

After the Mule Days Festival I returned home, but God still had a hold of me. At the time, I had some very public lifestyle sins that although I had no intention of letting go of God freed me of, quite miraculously. But what now, I wasn’t in church I didn’t really have any strong Christian friends, I had no idea what to do. So I turned to what I did know, theater and music. I knew my theater teacher at Briarcrest, Loretta Stancil was a Christian so I went to her and she turned me over to Steve May who had been my choir teacher my freshman year in high school. I told both of them what had happened and that I wanted to work at a camp and be a camp counselor. They both recommended I grow in my faith some first and that’s when Steve May started discipling me. I’ll have more on this later I am sure.

It wasn’t long before God was calling me to serve, I started going to Leawood Baptist Church were Steve and Loretta both went and helped with the teen ministry there. Teens  is something that became half of my calling and passion in ministry. But I also started volunteering at the Ronald McDonald House. That is where I met someone who guess what, had worked at a summer camp in Oxford, MS called Camp Lake Stephens. I’ll continue to share about what an impact that place had in part II of Vision.

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When it became clear that Bronwyn and I were indeed supposed to be seriously praying about a change in our lives I chose Isaiah 43 to be the chapter we would read through every day during quiet times. To be honest  I picked it quite arbitrary, there was a song with the words from that chapter I used to sing very loudly back in my Camp Lake Stephens days when I was a camp counselor in Mississippi. So we started praying through it, sometimes together and other times separate. This was still kind of the beginning of all this and we had no idea what God had in store for us but we just kept praying. Isaiah 43 has some amazing verses in it if you haven’t read it. “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name you are mine”, are right there in verse 1. All the next stuff about God being with you when you pass through the water and fire is also pretty amazing. However the verses that were really playing in my head were 19 & 20.

“Behold I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild beast will honor me, and the jackals and the ostriches, for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people.”.

Now keep in mind this is before we had ever even heard of BlueSky or thought at all about moving to Africa but it’s all there beautifully written. God laying out His plan for us, doing a new thing where wild beast roam, bringing water to the desert. On March 29th when Bronwyn first sent me the text “wanna move to Kenya” I didn’t immediately have these verses pop into my head but on March 30th I did write “I’ve gone in 24 hours from being willing to go to Kenya to wanting to go”.  I went back to the verses in Isaiah 43 and God put the picture together. He was calling us out of Memphis and to Nairobi to serve him in a new and awesome way. We were to bring the good news of living water to Africa. But the story of Isaiah 43 doesn’t end there. I mean sure I could talk about how Cush is essentially East Africa or dwell on verse 25 where the author talks about God blotting out sins for his own sake, something Bronwyn and I knew we needed to be reminded of. But the big part of the story was April 30th when our Church, Fellowship Memphis, was teaching on Global Missions of all things and what chapter should Jason Cook teach from but Isaiah 43. I literally shut my bible and just sat there in awe knowing full well we were moving to Africa.

One final bit to the story, the day we got on a plane and flew to Nairobi for the first time was also the day of my fathers funeral. We literally left the cemetery, came home and scarfed down a hamburger, took quick showers because it was July and our AC had gone out the night before and then jumped on a flight. But at his funeral I played and sang the song I had learned at camp so long ago, Isaiah 43. I’m not a very good guitar player and my voice has been described as loud and also very loud but I sang to honor my father and my Heavenly Father. The words pulled straight from the verses we had been praying through for months. “Do not fear, for I am redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.”

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