Standin' in the Need of Prayer

Sometimes God knocks you onto your keester, and that's a good thing.

This weekend was the annual Upper Susquehanna Synod Youth Retreat at Camp Mount Luther. As has become the custom over the past few years, Breen and Patrick were the main organizers of the event, and I was in charge of planning and leading the music. Our theme this year was prayer.

I have to admit, I did not arrive yesterday afternoon in a very prayerful or retreatful mood. It had been a long week, and stressful in a variety of ways, with another long and stressful week looming on the horizon. On top of that, shortly after I set everything up, I discovered that my amp was broken. Needless to say, this only amplified my crabby mood - I was irritated both that the amp was broken and that I had now lugged it all the way out to the camp for nothing. Not a very happy camper, indeed.

But then the retreat started, and the kids were participating in the singing a lot better than they did last year, and we were having fun and learning good stuff, and by the end of the night, my spirits had lightened.

Then we had a medical emergency in the middle of the night. Truly, I am thankful that it all played out the way it did - it was someone in our cabin, Breen had all the permission slips and medical information right there, and we knew which cabin her pastor was in, which cabin Patrick was in, and which cabin had a chaperone who is a paramedic, so we went out into the night to fetch all three of them, and when we decided to call 911, the ambulance came in very quietly so it didn't wake up and freak out the rest of the camp, nor expose the sick girl to any extra humiliation. There were other kids in our cabin, but they all stayed calm and don't seem too traumatized by the experience, probably in part because all of the adults stayed calm as we were dealing with it. The girl did go the hospital, and was ultimately fine, and the incident opened our eyes to some things that need to be addressed for the future, like, for an event this size we should always try to have a nurse or paramedic as part of the retreat staff, and from now on we should make sure all the adult chaperones know in which cabins the leaders and medical help are sleeping, in case something like this happens to one of their cabins next time. So, good will come out of this.

And none of this in itself had much an influence on my mood - but it did mean I was even more sleep deprived than usual for day two of this retreat.

So, I was pretty tired all day, and trying to stay high energy for the music and workshops I was leading, regardless. But some of the kids were testing the limits of our authority today - especially some of mine and Breen's kids (who, as previously noted on this blog, tend to get really squirrelly when they get together), and I was starting to get a little crabby again.

And then this afternoon, right before final worship was to begin, I finally snapped at some of them. We were doing a variation of prayer around the cross as part of closing worship, and I had spent the better part of an hour during "free time" setting up the prayer stations. And here we were, just a few minutes before worship, candles at the prayer stations already lit, and the kids come in and start moving stuff around and picking up the lit candles and walking around with them. I saw it happen and yelled at them from across the room to put everything back and leave it alone, and as soon as I said it, I regretted how I had said it, because it came out unduly angry.

And then a couple minutes later I was singing our opening song "It's Me, O Lord, Standin' in the Need of Prayer," and by the end of the first verse it occurred to me that it really was me standing in the need of prayer, that here I'd been feeling really stressed out and in this bad mood off and on for the past couple days, and I had just taken it out unfairly on somebody else, and it wasn't so much their need to shape up as my own need to be set aright that's at issue.

Then later in the service Patrick preached an awesome sermon that not only tied together so much of what we'd been learning and talking and singing about the past 24 hours, but also spoke right to some of my own fears, worries, and stresses of the past few weeks. It was freeing and humbling all at the same time.

Yup, sometimes God knocks you right onto your keester, and that's the very best thing God could do.

Happy Transfiguration. Sing your heart out on those Alleluias tomorrow!

C.