It's Camp Time...er, Service Project Time

As we in Westfield are gearing up for the busy season leading up to Young Life camp in June, the Costa Rica staff is preparing to take high school kids on the equivalent of camp there--the Service Project.  Here in Westfield we are promoting camp as "the best week of your life" (which it is!), signing kids up, getting them started on fundraising and hoping to pack out TWO buses this year.  In Costa Rica, the scene isn't that different, but there the team is asking kids to forfeit Semana Santa at the beach (equivalent of Spring Break) to travel to a remote island in Costa Rica to serve getting their hands dirty doing the work of Christ who calls us to serve the least of these.

And why would kids in Costa Rica pass up a holiday with friends and family to volunteer you might ask?  Well, because they get to do it with all their friends from school and Young Life, with the leaders who have poured countless hours into their lives this school year, and because they're promised a life changing experience--and that's certainly what it is.

Will you read the following email from one of my soon-to-be teammates in Costa Rica?  I would love you to partner with me and them in prayer this month!

"This is the first day of the rest of my life and I'll never be the same."  That is what we are longing to hear from high school students' lips after they have experienced the love of Christ during the Service Project (March 27 - April 3).  Would you join me this month, in praying each day for God to strengthen me and the rest of the Young Life team?  If we are filled with God's love, aware of who we are in Him, and confident in His love - we will watch kids respond to God's love.  Thanks for being our prayer warriors! 

"We pray that out of Jesus' glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints [all Jesus followers], to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations [in my neighborhood, in my city, and everywhere in the world], for ever and ever! Amen."

- Ephesians 3:16-21

Jessie and the Young Life team in Costa Rica