SHSUEH

Empty Me

After coming back from the ACC Lighthouse youth retreat, I had a mix of emotions that I didn’t know how to explain. I still don’t know what I feel really. 

It was really cool seeing all the kids - it reminded me so much of my own youth experience, and for the first time, I started to feel a part of ACC. I know I’ve been involved with ACC and even been working there for the past summer, but to be honest, there wasn’t an emotional connection for me. I wasn’t really looking for an emotional connection either, but it sort of came anyway. Sort of like watching your favorite childhood movie after you haven’t seen it in years-or more fitting, watching an episode of Pokemon for the first time since childhood (I’m surprised how many kids still like Pokemon). I can finally connect a lot of names with their faces, and I don’t feel like a stranger as much as I did before. After the retreat, there was a potluck dinner at ACC for the youth counselors, held by the youth parents. It was so encouraging to see the parents there, and I even met the parents of one of my kids. It felt nice, like stepping into a warm ocean on the beach just staring upwards. 

However, like I said, I had a mixture of emotions, and it wouldn’t be a mix if that was all I felt. Unexpectedly, I felt like I had failed to arrive to something. It was a mixture of both the situation I was put in, and also my shortcomings as a counselor-and I wondered what I should have done differently. Everybody says that middle-schoolers are the hardest, and there’s no doubt about that. Well, for sure, every counselor must have had their share of difficulty, but I felt like I was thrown under a bus. I had a total of 6 kids, including one visiting from China. I wasn’t sure how to handle it at all, and I often felt like I had failed to drive our discussions to an “A-ha” moment or a heart-wrenching conviction. I was later excited to find out that my Chinese-speaking student wanted to receive Jesus into his heart after I shared the Gospel with him in English, but disappointed to find out that he really just didn’t understand what I was saying. I returned from retreat with a massive headache and an overwhelming feeling that I was a hindrance to my boys spiritual “experience”, rather than a facilitator. 

I searched hard to find where this feeling of failure came from. Perhaps it was my built up expectation from six years of D-camp and Impact, or maybe it was just because I’m getting older and having a harder time relating to younger kids (That actually makes me really sad, because if the latter is true, then I can only imagine how hard it will be for me to connect in 5 years or so. Wow, I will most likely feel like a dinosaur compared to middle schoolers). 

One thing I am for sure of is the prayer I prayed prior to retreat. I asked God to empty me. Empty me of my pride and trust in my ability rather than God’s. He couldn’t have answered that more clearly. I have never felt more emptied or powerless.

He emptied me of my prideful thoughts built from other camps, such as, “I know how the whole retreat scene works, I’ll just do what I’ve done,” and He replied to me with, “My thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are higher than yours.“ 

He emptied me of my prideful attitude of “I just need to ask the right questions and then I can really get my boys to start thinking” and said to me, “For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill His good purpose.” 

He showed me tangibly that I was there to plant a seed in my Chinese-speaking student, and He does the watering. In fact, if all my kid got out of the whole retreat was an exposure to the gospel, then I can rejoice that God is at work in his life. Praise God that I can’t get in his way because only God does the watering.

Praise God that he gracefully and gently moves us aside when we ask him, and still allows us to see the fruit of his power. Praise God that he empties us of our pride so that we can be filled with his humility.