Opening Ceremonies Part 1

Sunday morning started with all of us meeting on the beach.  The first goal was to break the ice with some of the other condos of students that we are together with by having a few...contests. Some ate sardines, some swam for a pole in the ocean, some memorized names of their other team members, some jumped hurdles and spun hula hoops, and some got stuffed in bins and carried across the beach.

So naturally, the ice was broken! Afterwards, we had our first pow wow. We were told a story. The moral of the story was showing how every good storyteller needs to have a good story.  God is the ULTIMATE storyteller, and he is narrating our every page by writing down the path of our lives that he has formed even before we were born.  It's a crazy overwhelming thought, but the beauty of God's story in our lives is that we have the opportunity to see God's narration play out exactly the way it was intended.

That story is Jesus.  From cover to cover, the Bible has very implicitly mentioned (yes, from the very beginning!) that Jesus would one day come and redeem the world that fell at the very beginning of Creation.  He has been travelling through each page of every story, and because of Him every person that has decided to come to this place this summer has arrived with a very different story of how Jesus has touched and changed our lives.  God's using those experiences to very slowly bring the world back to the very beginning, one testimony at a time. And to be quite honest, it's a pretty amazing story to tell!

And the coolest part of it all? For the next ten weeks, all of our stories (the ups and the downs) are now entwined with each other. God is going to create an amazing book with the time we have together and this is only the beginning!

And the hope of the summer is this:

"Let the REDEEMED of the Lord tell their story." -Psalm 107:2