The Shout of a Heart You Set Free: Freeze Out

For the first Friday night in a long, long time, I've spent the whole evening in my room relaxing and cleaning. Now my room is clean, and I've got a stack of blank cards sitting next to me, waiting for me to write encouraging words on them and send them out tomorrow. This whole entire week has been stuffed full of blessings, and there's no way I could give justice to all of them in one blog! So I'll focus on last weekend, when our team made the 8-hour drive up to Lake Ann Camp for Freeze Out 2012. One phrase that could describe the whole trip:
BEST WEEKEND OF THE SEMESTER!! And Freeze Out always is.

It all started like it normally does: at 5am Friday morning! Here we are, ready to pack into the van for a nice nap on the way up. But, Jim was coming up, too, and asked me to ride part of the way with him so we could work on building the set lists with Isaac and Grant (who spent last summer with me at Lake Ann and was tagging along from Orange Team for the weekend). As much as I love Jim, it's hard to get any sleep when he's in the car. But it worked out fine; I was so excited that I had plenty of energy anyway! Halfway through we switched around so Jim could talk to Colin, Abby, and Ashtyn, and I sat in the van behind Caleb asking "Are we there yet??" every 5 minutes! Finally, we pulled in!! I'm not used to seeing everything covered in snow, but there's no way of mistaking Lake Ann for anything else. Dane and I could barely sit still!

Before long it was time to set up! My systematic setting-up of the keyboards was interrupted several times by Colin's requests to help set up the screen and trussing. Normally, that would have been a pain. But I told Colin later that there was no other place or thing I'd rather be stressing out about than setting sound and trussing at Lake Ann. And pretty soon I had a swarm of 3 teammates all helping me run chords to my keyboard! It was a miracle I could keep them all straight. :)

Then came dinner, and then the start of the first session! I ran into SO many people I knew from the summer!! I got to see Anjela, the wonderful high school senior that worked with me in the snack shack all summer, and met almost her entire youth group. And during the mixer game, I met so many other girls and ran into a bunch more people that I knew from last year's Freeze Out! This, is why I love Freeze Out so much: we connect with junior high and high school students in an incredibly unique way. Musically, the first session was AMAZING! Then, when the music part was over, I had another surprise: Ken Rudolph, the regular speaker at Lake Ann, was walking up to the stage. I knew I'd see him eventually, but this was the first time he saw me, and he was so excited that he gave me a huge hug right there on the stage in front of everybody! It was super awkward, but really cool at the same time.

Later that night, two unusual things happened: first, Jim decided that he wanted to join the slide-across-the-ice-with-your-boots game that the rest of my team was playing, and wiped out in front of all of us! Then, he picked himself up, and insisted that he compete with Ashtyn to see who could slide the farthest... long story short, both of them ended up in the snow, and Ashtyn ended up losing a boot. I have quite an interesting boss, to say the least. The second thing that happened is a lot more profound. For the past couple of weeks, I have been searching online for overseas missions opportunities for musicians, to see if being a missionary might be in God's plan for my life. Friday night when the 3 of us girls were talking in the cabin, I mentioned this to them, and they both reacted the same way. It's hard to describe; it was sort of an approving moan, like an "mmhmm," only with a more surprised or inspired tone to it. I'll never forget it, because that sound struck a chord in my heart, and suddenly I had an intense desire to go overseas and serve God as a musician over there, in one way or another.

The next morning during my God-and-I time, I was refreshed and pumped for the day ahead! The morning session went really well; I sat with Anjela and her youth group again during the message and also sat with them at lunch. With the afternoon came the Yeti games! The Yeti games are pretty much an organized way of running and falling in the snow and throwing snowballs at each other (for some reason this is always Dane's favorite part of the weekend). At the very end, the intern had the great idea of turning HeartSong into the target for the camp-wide snowball-firing contest. I was so proud of my team for being such good sports (even if I wasn't).

I had dinner with the LA staff before the evening session, which was a great flashback to the summer and anticipation for this next summer. This session was Ken's salvation message, which is always so good and moves kids to want to know Christ or to know Him more. There was a bit of time between the message and the HeartSong concert, so I took advantage of that time to talk to Ken and his wife Jinner about Europe. Oh, I forgot to mention that Ken and Jinner are starting a camp ministry over in Kusel, Germany! I had been wanting to talk to them all day about their work over there, when they felt called to go, and what kind of things I could do over there as a musician. That talk was very encouraging! Turns out there are so many more opportunities than I thought! It definitely gave me something to keep praying about.

The concert went really well; we introduced a few new songs and also played some classics from the summer (we didn't play Romans 16:19, but don't worry; Anjela and I got a bunch of her friends to sing it with us before the evening session started!). But the most amazing part was after the concert, when Anjela came running over to me with her friend in tow, telling me her friend had something to tell me. When I asked her what it was, her friend said, "I got saved tonight." YES!! THIS is what HeartSong and Lake Ann are all about; introducing Christ to the campers and seeing them choose to serve Him with their lives. I was so excited and grabbed every team member I could find to tell them the awesome news!

I know this post is getting long, but there are so many stories! Here's the next one: you may remember the girl I met last year who I latched onto for the weekend. Well, she was there this year, too, and somehow I passed by her several times and didn't even see her! Finally, when I did see her on Saturday night, I felt so bad for missing her that I committed to eating breakfast with her and sitting by her for the final session Sunday morning. And I did just that. If there's one thing I regret from this weekend, it was that I somehow missed this wonderful girl who was just a little to shy to say anything to me about last year. But I was glad for the time I could have with her; as small as it was, it was a meaningful part of the weekend for me.

After the last session, we reluctantly tore down our sound equipment and piled into the fan to leave. We said farewell to Lake Ann, but only for a few months! On the way home, we went around the van and shared our roses and thorns (one great thing and one not-so-great thing from the weekend). For most of us, the thorn was having to leave!

Looking back now, I'm remembering standing on the stage at Lake Ann. It was the place I stood all summer playing the keyboard, and this time I was back, surrounded by 6 new on-stage team members. It was a little weird at first, but it was so good to be back, and I felt so warm inside and so thankful every single minute I was standing on that stage. Literally, every minute, I could not stop thanking God. From stressing about trussing to getting pelted with snowballs, from hearing the Rudolphs talk about Europe to hearing a girl say she got saved, I could not stop thanking God. He gives me the indescribable and unexplainable grace that I need to live every day, and to lift up the shout of a heart He set free.

Grace, Grace, God's Grace

"I was talking to a friend the other day about you. We were amazed at how you manage to juggle everything you do! From being a music major to accompanying and HeartSong, how do you do it?" This is what a friend of mine said to me sometime early December, when I was my busiest. Never before in my life has someone said this about me; I have always been the one amazed at other people for being involved in so much and managing to keep their heads above water. Looking back at this semester, I am amazed at myself! How in the world did I do it?

There are two ways to answer this. One is positive: because of the grace of God, because He provided me with so many things I did not deserve and the energy and strength to conquer all the things that in my human folly I committed to doing, I was able to emerge at the end of the semester with a successful junior recital and a 3.7 GPA. Because of the mercy of other people, of my professors and my friends, I was able to get by.

The other way to answer this question has a negative spin, and it's the way I answered my friend when she asked. I survived this semester by putting only a mediocre effort into everything I did, by barely getting by with my HeartSong and accompanying responsibilities, by sacrificing my time of rest and my time with God. As I talked with my friend, I began to realize that spiritually, I was in the worst place I had ever been. I felt far from God and far from His pleasure, knowing that He had faded into the background of my life. All the "selfless" things I did were driven by selfish motives, not motivated by the grace God had given me at all. And I was fooling so many people! It became so easy for me to put on a front, although I am sure more of my true emotions were coming out than I was realizing.

One afternoon I was walking back to my dorm, reflecting on some situations that had happened in my life over the summer and the past semester that I had never recovered from. I came to the humble realization as I was walking that the reason I was still suffering from this was because I was bitter, not willing to forgive some people for things they had done. I pushed that realization aside as I came to my dorm and prepared to work on homework. As usual, I checked my Facebook quick before starting my homework, and saw a video that my friend and former teammate Will had made with his friend for a school project. It was called Trainwrecks, and here is the link to it on Vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/33381715

In summary, Will compares the human race to a train, and in sinning we have fallen off the tracks and have become a wreck. God is the only one strong enough to put us back on track and redeem us from our sin. As I watched the 5-minute video, my heart slowly broke, going from being bitter and hard to being soft and receiving of Will's message. The climax of the video for me was a quote that I will always remember, that says:

"We've all wrecked our trains. We are responsible for the messes that we're in, the relationships we've broken, the people that we refuse to forgive."

On the edge of tears, my heart melted to the message God was delivering! I knew I had become a horrible train wreck this semester, if not on the outside definitely on the inside. I was the only one responsible for the mess that was this semester; my sin was standing in the way of my willingness to forgive.

The quote continues:

"But God, because He is both loving and just, takes our blame, and our shame, and our guilt, and He takes us from a point of being dead, unable to move, and puts us back on the right track."

I begged God for the grace to keep moving. I begged Him to take away my guilt and to put me back on track. I begged Him to draw me close to Him once again.

When I was in high school, I shared some wisdom with a friend who was feeling far from God. I knew that wisdom had to be from God, because the next hour I had completely forgotten what I said and felt like I had nothing to offer her. A few months later, she told me that what I had said to her that day had changed her life, so I asked her what I had said! The wisdom that had bypassed my mind and gone directly into my mouth was this: You're not far from God. He's been following you the whole time; you just haven't looked back in a while. I reflected on this bit of wisdom in that moment. I felt so far from God, so out of His will and separated from Him. But my loving and just God saw me through the eyes of Christ, loving me not for what I did, but because of who He is.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no way I could do anything, much less do anything well, without the grace of God to constantly take me from "unable to move" to "back on the right track." This semester's successful moments only existed by God's grace, and this next semester's successes will only come from His grace as well. I pray that I will never again lose sight of that and become so self-absorbed that I miss the chance to thank Him for all the grace He gives in every moment. I hope to have more time to reflect and to share what God will do this semester. May my life be only by His grace and for His glory. May I have a love that only comes from Him.

Grace, grace, God's grace
Grace that will pardon and cleanse within
Grace, grace, God's grace
Grace that is greater than all my sin