Prayer Answered?

Back in 2008, I was in my first year of counseling at Center Lake Bible Camp. It was a great summer, and I was grateful for the healing I badly needed after a rough semester of student teaching.

One of the good experiences I had was counseling my cabin of junior high guys. I had a lot of good times and some crazy, not always good times with them. Based on my experiences at camp (and now teaching school), I relate to middle school and senior high age students just fine. More importantly, I relished sitting down with these guys and talking with them about important things-about the Bible and about God! Not only have it make sense, but they seemed to actually WANTED to talk about it while they were at Center Lake; it MATTERED to the cabin I was working with that week. I also had some good one-on-one talks with my campers, which was encouraging as well.

Two of the boys I had were these guys from across the state that came with their church's youth pastor. They had been at camp a couple times before, so they were familiar with it. Duane told me a little about their church and how it rents camp for a weekend in the winter time. I remember talking to them about the SMT program and they seemed really excited about the chance to be a part of camp's work one day and we even prayed together about it. I had no idea if they would apply or if I would see them as SMTs or not (I discover a number of campers see SMTs and ask about being a part of the program). But, sadly, I didn't see these guys again as high school campers in the years following when I came back as a counselor. So I wasn't exactly sure what to think. I honestly thought they probably wouldn't be back in the summertime. Maybe God's answer to our prayer of them serving at camp was, "No." I felt a bit discouraged when I would think about it, but I was okay.

But maybe it was, "No... not yet." I heard from both of them around Christmas and they were both excited about applying to work at camp as SMTs, just as we had prayed together. And recently, I had from both of them again. My off-the-wall junior high boys (who are now several years into high school and likely considerably taller than I am!) are set to come back to serve at camp this summer after not being around in about three years.

I learned that just because we pray for something that has all the best intentions (the chance to serve at camp IS good!) and it doesn't come to pass right away, doesn't mean that it can't or won't come much later, but perhaps the right time to serve IS in fact later. This instance with these two campers has reminded me that, and how great God's omniscience truly is, not to mention that He DOES in fact hear our prayers and not only that, doesn't forget them. Even years later.