The last day of Intense started just as the Back Packers leaders said their ‘good bye’s’ and tidied up their stuff.
Jenny C got our session off to a flying start with an icebreaker about help. In teams, everybody had to carry a blind folded person around the campsite to pick up socks and return to the main stage area. Coz the Holy Spirit is a Helper huh. You like? Good little link huh?
The next game took things to a new level of surreal jocularity;
to illustrate that the Holy Spirit transforms us on the inside,
one person had to transform the outward appearance of the rest of their team with what ever they could find
+ some hair spray, face paints, kids sun glasses and other sundry items that just happened to be lying around.
The transformations were staggering.
One team had lighting bolts on their faces (sadly this was accredit to Harry Potter and not David Bowie).
Another team had what appeared to be newspaper manes (like a lion might wear where it made of local free sheet ‘the Star’). One guy had a giant newspaper magnifying glass. Several boys sported bunches. And somebody had goggles around their ankle, stylish yet practical.
It was all either wonderfully diverse or horribly wrong, but I couldn’t figure out which.
It then fell to me to stand up and give a serious talk about the Holy Spirit whilst looking out at a crowd of freakishness. This was no easy task.
I spoke about how the Holy Spirit is the key to our understanding who we are as followers of Jesus Christ and living out our true identities in Him.
We had a brief look at who the Holy Spirit is and what he does. Then we went into our small groups to think about where we need the Holy Spirit’s help at the moment. I think this is an essential question for the last day of something like Intense or Back Packers. Weeks like this really raise your faith and encourage you and it’s easy to hit rock bottom again when you go back to your every day normal life. It’s hard living as a Christian every day, and God’s Holy Spirit is the one who can help us to do it.
Incidentally, if you have struggled with feeling deflated after an extreme Christian experience like Intense or a youth camp I really recommend a short book called Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud by Philip Yancey (ISN: 031021436X). It takes sense about how God can use those times of feeling distant from Him or let down, it only about £4 and it’s not that long either.
After the group times Ben Riley shared his story of how he had come to know God and how he made the decision to became a Christian (actually at a previous Intense, cool huh). It was great to hear what he had to say and he was the only speaker all week who got a round of applause!
At this point I got everybody to ask themselves an important question:
after everything they'd heard this week, did they believe that God loves them?
We encouraged those people who answered that question with a yes for the first time to make a decision to follow Jesus, and to say a prayer with the rest of us dedicationg ourselves to love and serve Jesus Christ.
As I stood on the stage praying and hearing people say 'amen' ("I agree") I got a sense of the significance of that moment.
It reminded me of two things that I hold true:
That when we worship God we are not starting something but joining in with the angels who do it all the time,
That every person who makes a decision of follow Jesus sparks a celebration in heaven.
There was a time when I thought that sort of thing was just sacarine sentimentality, but now I see them as in keeping with the character of the God I've been getting to know over the last 11 years.
I’m planning to post my notes and slides from the talk in the next couple of days so check back if you want to a look at those. If any other Intense speakers are up for having their notes posted here please email me.
I’ll blog about the bbq and sleep over some other time so check back for that too.
If you were part of Intense please sign up to blogger.com and leave your comments here. Or if you’ve been doing your own blog or similair please send me a link so I can post it here.
Cheerio
Ben
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