The Summer I Fell in Love

The summer I fell in love was one of the best summers of my life. It wasn’t love at first sight, and it most certainly didn’t conjure up a swarm of butterflies in my stomach. But it didn’t take me long to realize it was the kind of love that was going to last a lifetime.

This time last year I was serving as a high school counselor at a Christian summer camp. For the past couple weeks I’ve been reflecting on my time there. I’ll catch myself smiling while cooking dinner cause I’m reminiscing . I look back on this time with such fondness, that every time I see a camp picture, I tear up. But I’ve realized I don’t tear up just because I miss the team, or I miss serving high schoolers, or even because I miss the camp traditions. I tear up because of the beauty of the love story I found myself in. The love story I continue to find myself in.

Now if you were expecting the juicy details of how two summer camp counselors fell in love, I’m sorry to disappoint, but that’s not the story I’m about to share. This is the story of how I fell in love with sixty-six books breathed across the pages of history and bound between two lavender colored, faux-leather flaps. AKA, my Bible.

At summer camp I wasn’t allowed to have my phone during the week when the campers were there. Each Sunday we checked them in and each Saturday we got them back. So I packed a book that I’d been wanting to read for when I had off-time throughout the week. My first free time my first week was challenging. I couldn’t pull out my phone and I didn’t quite have the energy to invest in a new book. But I didn’t want to lay around either. So I decided to read the Bible passage for our next cabin devotional and start coming up with some questions for my campers. I found that the planning really helped strengthen the discussion during devotions that night. So I did the same thing the next day, and the next day, and the next day. The other female counselors and I also started getting up an hour or so before the campers and sitting together while we had our quiet time with God. Before I knew it I was spending 2-3 hours a day in God’s Word, not including chapel twice a day.

I don’t know about ya’ll, but I’ve always felt super frustrated when Christians would say, “Oh, I just can’t get enough of God’s Word”, or, “You just need to take delight in what God says”, or even, “I can’t imagine only spending ten minutes with God, I need like five hours.” Like what? Five hours? I’d be lucky if I got through one chapter and said a quick “help this be a good day” prayer. But even then, reading the Psalms confused me when David would say how much He loved God’s laws, His statutes. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t know how to get it. So I settled.

And that’s exactly what not reading the Bible is. It’s settling for a mediocre understanding of who God is, what He’s done, and what He’s continuing to do.

I’m not here to try to tell you exactly how to take delight in God’s Word or your quiet time with Him. But I do want to encourage you to pursue that delight, to pursue falling in love with what He has to say.

The more I read my Bible last summer, the more I started to see it as the truth we are taught it is. Not only that, but I had the privilege of seeing how it drastically impacted the lives of these high schoolers. I got to see a young man who just the summer before had been full of rage, hate and pain, come back as a completely different person. He went up to his counselor from the year prior and apologized for how he had acted and said that he had been reading his Bible and attending youth group and was learning how to manage his anger. WOW! I also started to see that the believers from two thousand years ago weren’t all that different from me. As I neared the end of the summer and feared leaving my fellow staff I read a passage from the New Testament (silly me forgot to highlight it) where Paul talked about how much he was missing his church family. It helped me see that how I was feeling about leaving the sweet fellowship of camp was okay, that it was normal, and in a way...healthy. My desire for fellowship with other believers was good. It was in my time pouring over my Bible that I read Psalm 27:13-14. This verse has ministered to my heart over the past year in ways I never could’ve imagined or expected. I didn’t need it then, but I firmly believe God knew I was going to need it and helped impress it upon my heart.

I don’t know how you feel about the Bible. I don’t know what your Bible time looks like. Maybe you get frustrated like I did/sometimes still do, or maybe you don’t. But here are some of my biggest takeaways/observations from my learning to love God’s Word:

-You don’t NEED a fancy Bible study. Don’t get me wrong, I love studies and they can be extremely helpful, but God’s Word is powerful enough on its own.

-A passage may make no sense to you now, but you never know how God might use it later. His Word is alive and active.

-Just start. You don’t need to block out hours a day for Bible reading. You don’t need to have a plan or start a Pinterest board on Bible journaling. Seriously, just read it, even if it’s one verse. We are promised that God’s Word will never be fruitless or void.

-The more you read it, the more you start to see it line up with what we observe in our lives, others lives and in the world.

-Having people around me who loved God’s Word and regularly pursued what it has to say was inspiring. They are people I strive to be more like in their wisdom and love of the Lord. They exude pure light. I wanted what they had, and they had that from their pursuit of God’s Word.

-Prayer plays a huge part in our reading of the Bible. We are told to ask for wisdom if we lack it. We are told to come to God with everything--our questions, doubts, confusions, fears and even boredom because you’ve been stuck in Numbers for the last week ;) .

-Finally, reading the Bible, leads to loving the Bible, which in turn leads to living out the Bible. Let me say it again...

READING the Bible, leads to LOVING the Bible, which in turn leads to LIVING out the Bible.

Dear friend, I fell in love with the Bible last summer. But it wasn’t because I made a resolution to read it everyday, or had a sudden unquenchable thirst for it. I fell in love with it because I had nothing better to do and didn’t want to be bored during my two hours of free-time. How’s that for a love story? Haha! But honestly, it came alive because God worked through my boredom. He knew I would have rather scrolled through my phone or watched a movie. It took me getting to a physical place where I didn't have many other options of entertainment, to begin to see how wonderful God’s Word truly is. Now THAT is a love story. Why? Because HE was pursuing ME the whole time.

Sincerely,

"M"