Ok so I left the house on the way to hub camp randomly around 11:00 am on Saturday. Was going to leave later but I felt like that would make for a leisherly drive. I wanted to have 3 hours of driving just percolating on the things of God and see what came of that. As I drove I remembered through Hub Camp 2013 and at one point it hit me…. Just fell into my head…. Hub Camp is several days of giving a bunch of kids an opportunity to continuously eat from the Tree of Life. A feast if you will and yes some gorge on it. Some barely taste of it but that is where the change comes from… Eating from the Tree of Life.
I began to think on this, thinking through all the Freedom Ministry concepts I have been exposed to in relation to the struggle of life of always faced with the choice to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil or this other wonderful tree…and just percolated on this all afternoon. I arrived at Hub Camp, went around looking for my two girls taking selfies with as many friends as I could run into. Sat with Brian Thompson for a couple of hours in the shade talking, mostly listening to him, but the earlier afternoons revelation just would not leave my mind. We did not discuss this.
That evening as the worship played through, rather than get all bouncy into the music like the kids do I just closed my eyes at the back of the venue, talked to God, mostly spoke in tongues to myself, sometimes sang some of the words, hands clasped together, so into my moment, letting my mind wander through whatever thoughts wanted to flow through it. I had begun to think on adults at VCC and them not having a couple of days where they could eat at the tree of life, feast. I thought through all of the energy and efforts our church puts forth to do this for our kids but…. Our adults don’t have this choice unless they go somewhere else… I thought through the beyond things we do, the potential of having nights of receiving and then I thought, our kids get this every Wednesday then we also give them this big feast also we call hub camp. It takes more for them than these awesome nights even once a week how much more so for our adults who deal constantly with well adult stuff ?????
Then it hit me, a lot of these kids go home to something far less than this feast. Some come to hub, camp wine and dine on the tree of life then go home to awful homes…. Leisha Claire and I have tried to work with some of these types of kids, we know some things about this. Then it hit me even more, most of the kids go home to something less than this even the ones with good homes because very few parents that I know of put themselves into a situation to dine like this.
I thought on a lot of things but my overall vision was the core of what Kairos and any other immersion type experience is just that…eating from the tree of life in an environment where you for the most part just do not have the opportunity to eat from the other tree….. and you do this for at least a couple of days.
And just maybe that is what we need to aim for. We don’t aim for a Kairos we don’t aim for anything other than asking ourselves, what does God want our table to eat at look like. Maybe we do something for the adults in May or June so that when they send their kids off in July those kids have more opportunities to come home to something that is more than now, where families get a boost from the first experience then another boost from Hub in a different way than can be done now….
Of course this will take another army, a different army of volunteers and different set of staff…. It doesn’t have to include busses and traveling somewhere… It just needs to be built by looking at the question to God, what kind of table do you want us to build for our adults to feast at.
I never let go of these thoughts even well into the next day all the way to Anna Maria Island.
So anyway that is my thoughts on this for now.