Dear CCPC Family,

As they were going along the road, someone said to Jesus,
"I will follow You wherever You go." And Jesus said to him,
"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests;
but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head."
-Luke 9:57-58

The first two summers of my college years were spent working as a camp counselor at Ferncliff Camp in Little Rock, Arkansas. Ferncliff was the state's Presbyterian camp. Throughout the summer, camps were held for children of all ages... kids right out of kindergarten all the way through high school. College students, such as myself, would spend the entire summer working with the different camps as they came and went from week to week. It was a wonderful experience for me as I was contemplating whether or not to enter the ministry.

While the experience as a whole was wonderful, there were times when I wished I was somewhere else, anywhere but there. One day of a particular week, campers were out in the playing field for group games. I was tired. It was hot. And I had been dealing with homesick little campers all week long. I was not in a game-playing mood. For the campers, the games we were playing were new... for the counselors, they were the same games we had been playing all summer. "If I have to play that game one more time..." I thought to myself. Needless to say, I was ready for a day off.

Despite my thoughts, I was their counselor and I had to play, so play I did. While we were playing, one of the third grade campers got my attention to look up at the sky. It was a relatively cloudy day, but something was different about the clouds. As I looked, I noticed a hole in the clouds. This was no ordinary cloud hole... the hole was a perfect circle. It was as if someone had carved a circle in the clouds or used a biscuit cutter and took the cloud out. As my camper and I were staring at this seemingly perfect hole in the clouds, he said, "Looks like God cut a hole in the clouds so that He could keep watching us." I nodded in agreement. The camper bounded off to rejoin the others in the game. But I kept staring up at those clouds, thinking. I thought how awesome it was that the little boy noticed the sky and thought what he thought. The more I thought about what he had said, I realized that as much as I had wanted to take a break, God never takes a break from us. It set in pretty deep with me at that moment. And it changed my outlook on the rest of that week and the rest of the summer.

If God can watch over every single person on this earth and love us with unconditional love -- despite the cloudiness, the heat and the homesickness -- then at least I could spend that summer doing all I could do to make sure the campers had an enthusiastic and loving camp counselor.

This memory pops up in my head quite often... especially when I start feeling weighed down and tired. And while I know there are going to be times when I just want to stop and get away, I also know that we have a God who always watches over us, Who never takes a break and is always there, ready to transform our lives and give us faith to keep going -- exactly the kind of faith that the young camper showed me on that cloudy day. And that is the GOOD NEWS!

-Jeremy Cain Wilhelmi
Associate Pastor of Youth and Family Ministry