Running With a Purpose

26 Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. 27 No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize. (1 Corinthians 9)

This post was inspired by Mrs. Heck. She may not know it, but she is making a huge impact in at least my life, from feeding me with delicious food to being sacrificial and willing to teach in my ignorance. She is willing to serve us even when we are the ones invading her house, but she is also prone to ask us to serve alongside her by drying the dishes or something along those lines. One of the coolest things that I saw Tuesday night with the Hecks, is that they got a call at around 10 pm from some college students that are friends with their son. They needed a place to crash for the night and Mrs. Heck was off to pick them up while Mr. Heck grabbed us to help him tidy up the house. It was a beautiful example of flexible hospitality, and we got to be a part of it. Now that is just some examples of what our household life is like, where we are learning lessons to grow in our faith and to be better men of God.

I didn't know I was going to say all that above, but now to the reason I sat down to write. Within the first week we were here, we learned that Mrs. Heck ran a marathon and that she ran with a group called Team World Vision. Now if you don’t know much about World Vision, it is a Christian organization that reaches third world people groups by providing humanitarian needs. But Team World Vision is a branch of World Vision that runs marathons or other shorter races in support of third world countries, supplying them with clean water. Providing clean water is the easiest prevention of so many deaths within this world.

So I have been contemplating over this idea of running a marathon with a purpose. Now I really don’t like running, especially long distance (26.2 miles!!!). I was almost brought to tears thinking of crossing the finish line and the result would be saved lives! Now tell me that isn’t a reason to run. Each mile is another mile to saving another child. What a great purpose to run the race! Should we not be doing the same in our own lives? Every day is a day to run the race. Every day is a day a day to save someone from the grip of Hell. We should be running daily, not for our own spiritual health, but for the sake of others salvation. We need to beat our body and make it our slave to Christ, running the race He has blessed upon us.

Run in such a way as to win the prize, not running around aimlessly without any purpose to your faith. We have faith so that we may share it with others. So let us stop being so selfish and lay down our lives for the sake of the cross, that others may live because of our sacrifice (just as Christ sacrificed everything for us).

Because of Him,

Chad

Basketball Camp: Day 2

Well, we got 4 kids today.  It definitely made camp different than we were expecting, but we got to teach basketball and share the Gospel, so I think we did what God had for us to do.  We learned some finishing, handling, and defensive fundamentals today.  More to learn tomorrow, and we look forward to it.

We also finalized our counselor squad for Kids' Camp with Mrs. Sanders, how neat is that?!  I'd say that's pretty neat.

(I forgot to take pictures, so this is all I could think of to make this post more entertaining...)

Short one today; love you all, thank you for your support.

-The Boys

First Day of Bball Camp!!

Was not quite what we expected.  Nobody showed.  We stood at our table, thrilled to not be wearing ties, for an hour, and actually gave away infinitely more applications than we received (Which is just simple, clever mathematics: 4/0 = infinity).  How do you rebound from that?  What does that mean?  Are we doing something wrong?

Backtrack to yesterday.  Something that I'm pretty sure none of us have thought about yet (including myself until now), or at least haven't vocalized yet.  The Heck's church, which we've been attending, had a guest speaker for their Sunday morning.  His name: Phil Vischer.  I'll let you google that and be thrilled for all of us.  If laziness is settled deep in your core and you didn't do that, I'm sorry but I'm gonna push you to do that.  I wouldn't do him and his story justice here.  His life lesson was for us.  Upon coming to the brink of making the Christian Disney, Phil was wrongly sued and lost, ending his dreams of using the often abused American media as an avenue to teach the Bible to children.  I can't speak for who Phil Vischer was before that corporate meltdown, but while speaking to us, he was definitely sincere, and thus I believe that Veggietales was exactly that; a Christ-focused calling, not a money making scheme.  Which therefore marked the reason for his confusion at its collapse.  "God, this was a good thing.  Why would you let this fail, maybe even make it fail?  My dream was Your dream!" was the gist of his inner chaos.  And after fighting depression for several years he came to a marvelous conclusion: "God doesn't want my dream, He wants my soul."  His finest example was Noah.  Noah built the ark at the tender age of 500.  He was NOT planning to make the first animal cruise ship and save the world for those 499 years prior, he was waiting on the Lord.  It was not his dream that made him special to God, but his obedience (John 14:15).  The Bible is not a story of people saying "God can't steer a parked car, I gotta DO something so God acknowledges me and can make much of me!"  It sounds silly in that light, doesn't it, and I know it to be true of me.  The Bible is a story of steadfast and devout people who were patient and humble until God told them to rise.

Could I be too anxious to do a good thing, and not content resting in the arms of my Father?  Have I been chasing a resume builder for here or heaven, instead of realizing that God prizes simple pure things over things that look extravagant but are empty, or even mostly full?  Have I been trying to show God how He could bring some good instead of asking how He makes all things work together for our good.

We'll keep you posted on the rest of the week.  Thank you for your prayers, please continue to do that simply and purely.  Please pray:

• First, praise and honor your King.  He is good to you and good to us, and we would hate to have you forget that in the midst of earthly disappointments
• That God makes sense of this latest letdown
• That we continue to be unified to and considerate of each other as a team
• That we optimize the situations God puts us in, especially if they are not what we anticipate
• Taking responsibility and not shifting blame for our camp’s shortcomings
• Our future (hopefully?) campers’ hearts to be ready for Biblical teaching
• For our hearts, minds, and selves to have prepared worthwhile Biblical teaching for these future standard bearers
• That God & Souls (especially our own) would be a far more important relationship than God and our dreams
• For my competitive pride to surrender

Still finding things that we didn't know we didn't know,

Tim, Gabe, Chad, and Spince

P.S. I posted this soon after Spencer posted one of his own, so make sure you don't miss that.  Also, I think this is the most recent picture of all of us for all you worried mothers out there:

Enjoying a Tigers Game with Rob (Grove City Athletics Department) & his friend Emily

DETROIT: THE BASICS

Hey Folks! This is Spencer making my blogging debut, and I thought a nice thing to do would be to explain in simple terms what on earth we are trying to accomplish in Detroit right now.  We have not explained our summer project in detail because we have not had the details until now, and actually we still do not have all of them. I suppose one way to look at our general lack of information is that it will make things that much more exciting when we finally figure them out. It also adds this cool layer of suspense to everything we do, as in “will anyone show up to our camp, I really hope this works out”. Fun, right?

 I was a late addition to the team, only signing on to the project in May, a little more than a month ago. Gabe and Chad had asked me if I wanted to work with primarily black children in Detroit at “a camp”. I have worked at summer camp before, I enjoy working with children (especially primarily black ones), and quite frankly I need to make some money because I graduate in December. So I said yes, not knowing that “a camp” was something that we would be starting from scratch between the four of us.

            So what exactly have we done? And what are we trying to do? We are working tirelessly (except before meals; working on an empty stomach is a no-go) to create a full day-camp curriculum and schedule that will give our campers an experience they have not had before. We are running our camp at an incredible school called Cornerstone Schools Association that we have already referred to in our blog several times. Here is a link to the school that will tell you a lot more about it than I can.The summer camp was school President/CEO Ms. Ernestine Sanders’ idea, and we have the privilege of using school grounds and resources to make the camp as incredible as possible. 

            Thus far we have created an entire curriculum for our summer day camp and for a weeklong basketball camp as well.  We have been doing things that we have never done before, like making budget reports, meeting agendas, and even legal tender for our applications. Our self-sufficiency, as well as the chance of being sued, has never been higher.  We have been advertising throughout the greater Detroit area to recruit elementary and middle school campers, and we even have radio ads playing in the area.

Look at this meeting agenda, this is the most professional thing I have ever done. Somebody show my mother so she can see how grown up I am.

Gabe made this whole budget report himself. Raise your hand if you are impressed!

            We have science lessons (to blow stuff up), art and music lessons (to make the kids do Jewish circle dances), and yard games (to make the kids too tired to get into mischief). We are even taking the kids to the Wright African American History Museum and the Detroit Science Center.  Heck, some people might even suggest that we are including legitimate education in our camp. Our day camp will start on July 14^th and will run in weeklong segments until August 8^th, which is 4 weeks for those of you at home who are too lazy to do the math (shame on you). We are also starting our after school basketball camp today, June 23^rd.

Above: Cornerstone Camp Directors Timothy Shackleton and Chad Knox enjoy a beautiful view of Downtown Detroit.

            How many kids will show for camp? We can tell you when they get here. How will our counselors (we are not the counselors, we are the DIRECTORS, largely due to our maturity and responsibility) fare with all the children? We do not know because they have not been hired yet. Long story short, we have a lot of questions, important questions, waiting to be answered. So we ask you, our delightful audience, to continually pray for us as we do the work set before us each day in faith. The questions we have, God holds the answer to. It is not our job to worry about what God controls and we do not. Therefore pray for us to keep our faith in God’s plan for this camp. We are working hard and giving our time and energy into this camp, and yet our vision for the camp may never come to be. Our camp may be the coolest, fastest growing thing in Detroit, and that would be great. But it could also only bring in 20 unenthusiastic children who are only there because their mothers dragged them to camp. We only desire a Godly perspective to see the success of our camp, not a monetary or worldly one. Whatever happens this camp is in God’s hands, not ours, and I find that inexpressibly comforting.

Spencer Dupee

Director, Basketball Camp Coordinator, and Chief Editor at Cornerstone Camps

Be a Godsend

Hey all,

As we said earlier about our workload piling on, our productivity has also become much higher. It is a huge blessing to continue to get more direction in how to make this camp, but when we are given a direction we must move in that direction. If we don’t move in that direction, we aren’t being good stewards of our gifts and abilities that God has given us. As Oswald Chambers said in My Utmost For His Highest, “God not only expects me to do His will, but He is in me to do it.” This has meant volumes to me pressing forward in creating this camp. We already know that this is God’s will and He has chosen us four college guys to make it, knowing that we aren’t making it at all but simply being used as vessels for God’s vision for this camp.

Now understanding that Christ is in us, we have seen Him go before us in this overwhelming task of constructing this camp. It has been a blessing to see how God has sent people from the school to us: Godsends. The middle school principle, Mr. Wrosch, was the first example in our line of Godsends. He really stuck out to me, being completely sacrificial of his time in his busy schedule, making us his first priority when we had a question for him. He by no means had to be so accommodating to us; he didn’t even know us! This characteristic of seeing a need and being a solution is something I found to be very desirable in my own faith. I want to be able to drop what I am doing in my so called busy life and become someone’s solution. I want to be a solution sent by God.

I can only see this Godsend character being possible if we remain in the Spirit. He wants to use us; we just need to give up our right to ourselves to Him. Chambers says, “If you give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you – and His experiments always succeed.” If we just take a quick glimpse at some big names in the Bible, we will see clear evidence of God’s people giving this right to Him and being in the Spirit.

The story of Joseph had event after event seemingly not go his way. However, he remained in God’s will, with his right to himself in God’s hands. Being thrown in jail, he remained in the Spirit. Eventually, Joseph became Egypt’s Godsend. There was no way Joseph could’ve been in the position he was, and save a nation if it wasn’t for being obedient.

Moses had a fortunate start to his life where God spared his life from the wrath of Pharaoh. Eventually coming into the presence of God at the burning bush, Moses was told to give up his right to himself and bask in His presence to release His people from the bondage of slavery. Moses’ obedience became the Godsend the Hebrews have been waiting for.

David, a mere shepherd boy, became a Godsend for the Israelites when the Philistine giant, Goliath, challenged the nation. David had complete confidence, or faith, that God was in absolute control. He by no means kept his right to himself, nor did he go to the battlefield out of the Spirit of God.

Esther turned out to be the Godsend the Jews needed from evil plots of Haman. She was taken and made queen, for reasons she didn’t know. She later realized her purpose and gave up her right to herself and stepped boldly into the King’s presence, both king Xerxes and the King of kings’ presence. With bold, faithful obedience she saved her people.

Being a Godsend is something I truly yearn to be on a daily basis, especially as the four of us step into the children’s lives on daily basis. We must remain in the Spirit, having no grip on our right to ourselves, but being in Christ’s utter control to be His vessel so that He can fulfill His will within our lives.

-Chad

First Week Down!

What up guys!

Gabe here, and being the least literate member of the Detroit hood rats the following blog post will represent the battle between my brain and keyboard. I would like to first apologize about the tardiness of this post; it has been my job to post the past week and as you can see…I have not. So we will just pick up where Tim left off and briefly cover the events of the past week!

To start, Spencer is here!

…and has been for a week. I apologize to any of those who may have been distressed upon not hearing of his arrival. As a group we have really been making ourselves at home with the Hecks. I would like to take a moment to give a total shout-out to Manfred and Debbie Heck. Not only is Duckback (Mr. Heck’s self-given nickname) one of the chilliest bros you will ever meet, he also loves biking, ice-cream and all things hip and fashionable. 

Mr. Heck at his secret Office rocking the Headband Fashion Statement

Also, I would like to note that we celebrated his birthday this past week! 

 And for this birthday celebration Mrs. Heck made this seven layer ice-cream cake.

 And speaking of Mrs. Heck she is an absolute angel! Not only does she make food for 4 growing college boys, she takes us shopping to find outrageous deals and bargains.

 She also puts up with our relentless teasing,

sarcastic comments,

 and complete incompetence when it comes to making food for ourselves. 

 Please keep her and Mr. Heck your prayers that God will continue to give them the grace it takes to handle four crazy oversized children. But really, these two wonderful people have been and continue to be such a blessing to each of us and we could not be more grateful for the hospitality they have shown us. God has truly provided!

Moving on from one blessing to another, I am going to spend the rest of this blog post updating you all on our progress with creating Camp Cornerstone! I would be lying if I didn’t tell you all that almost all of our camp is “still in the works”.  Beginning last Friday morning at 8:00am God opened door after door for our efforts, and provided in incredible ways. We arrived as a team ready to go bright and early Friday morning. We had the opportunity to participate in Cornerstone’s “partner day”, during which we had the chance to meet students and observe a morning class. 

Spencer and J 

Each of the students we spent time with were so special and got us all hyped (slang for enthusiastic) to make the best camp this world has ever known. From there we went to meet Ms. Sanders, who is the CEO of Cornerstone Academies. Things got a little interesting, Ms. Sanders and her secretary were incredibly busy and could only give us a few tasks to finish over the weekend. These tasks Chad was to complete in about…45 minutes, and by the end of the night we found ourselves lacking direction. Returning to Cornerstone Monday morning we quickly realized that we were to create this camp almost entirely on our own, because Ms. Sanders is FAR too busy to take the reins on the specifics of the camp, and understandably so as the CEO of the school ranked as “number 1 in the city of Detroit.  This realization brought about a brief moment of panic as we looked at the scope the task that lay before us. This is where God started to do his thing and came in the clutch BIG TIME! (He’s real good at that). We started wandering the halls of the school like lost sheep, and we ended up meeting important person after important person, who each helped to the questions that we had. Our productivity was astounding from that point on, and we were able to take initiative without needing Ms. Sanders to micromanage our efforts.  Needless to say we were all pretty stoked (again, it means enthusiastic) about God’s provision.

Our new found self-direction in the camp project was encouraging, however, we realized that our recent productivity resulted multiplying our workload significantly. We had to have our entire camp curriculum to present to Ms. Sanders on Wednesday morning. So we woke up Tuesday ready to get to work only before we remembered  that we had to Skype Dr. Blackburn to adjust some of our research for the summer. It was great to hear from our team leader, and we were able to make some profound changes to the program. While this was exciting it also increased our already hefty workload (it turns out you have do a lot of work in the real world, how about that)!

Some may be daunted by the task that is set before us. However, these incredible kids of Detroit provide more than enough motivation for us to put our hearts and souls into making this camp great.  Last night we had the chance to experience Cornerstone’s Choir concert. The talent and dedication of the kids blew us away! I personally have been to a concert along these lines, but for Spencer, Chad, And Tim this was a new and revolutionary experience in the world of gospel music. 

I’ll let the music talk (or sing) for itself in through videos in the next post, But you can imagine how this experience fueled our love for the kids of Detroit. To put it simply this school that we have the privilege of partnering with has stolen our hearts! The kids and the Hecks are truly a light in our lives and simply want to share these blessing with all of you! We are so in love with God, and his love for these kids pushes us to push ourselves in serving him! And trust me, we are going be pushed….BIG TIME.

Please pray for the sleep deprivation and the split personalities that we have been developing under the stress of these real world responsibilities.

Yours In Christ, 
Tim (Deshaun), Chad (Lennie), Spencer (Randy), Gabe (Gabe).

Thug'n.
(Mrs. Heck Still wins the sweet heart award)

New Home!

Warriors of 'Troit,

3 of 4 have migrated to our new home in Canton, MI from which we'll be commuting to Detroit for camp. Spencer will be joining Chad, Gabe, and I tomorrow after returning from Oregon.  We are thrilled to be allowed to stay in the same place together.  Our host parents, Mr. and Mrs. Heck have already given us tours of the house and the town and there is an encouraging aura of community all over.  We have clicked seamlessly.  Mr. Heck has a very compatible sense of humor (and I am nearly in fear for my health preparing for the comedy act that he and Spencer will be), and Mrs. Heck is very generous and sweet.  It's easy to feel in control and optimistic about our situation now, but a great many things come to mind at this revelation:

Are we remaining humble?
As we clown around with Mr. Heck, or take advantage of the freedom from our own parents, are we doing what we are doing to inspire a Godly joy in others, or are we being fools. (Proverbs 15:21)

Are we remaining servants?
Are we seeking ease of living or our own pleasure, or simply being lazy?  This needs to be a large focus of mine. (Proverbs 6:6)  We will only be a great harm to young minds if we are imploring them to live a servant's life that we are not living.

Are we remaining Christ-focused?
As simple as everyday things can seem, they may be the battlegrounds that are most often lost out of complacency. (James 4:13-17)  There are some many things that God has enabled us to do that we get lost trying to seek the most extravagant.  I am always looking for "The New" especially in my faith.  But by sprinting to the outer reaches of the globe I've trampled some really beautiful, really delicate, virtues.  The real smart guys out there are stopping to smell the roses (or do other mundane things well)

Are we being quiet?
Fools being loudmouths has got to be one of the bigger themes in Proverbs (17:28 for one).  Quieting ourselves does a number of things for God and for us.  It cuts out the middle man of us for those who need to hear God more directly, it allows God to teach and use us more effectively, and it gives Christian-critics less to justify their God-separated lives with.  On the level of the individual, we find peace faster, get to be (or at least appear) like the mature person we'd like to see ourselves become, and we catch far more of the show that is God's Creation

Jesus was never sarcastic, his disciples weren't putting tacks on each others chairs, and Moses didn't come down from Sinai with the Ten Best Jokes tablets.  Pray for our understanding of the mission that has been entrusted to us.

That being said, this mission undeniably involves a great deal of loving and welcoming kids that may receive very little or none of such tangible Godliness.  Perhaps a strong prayer then is thanks that God's joke-book is a good one...



...a very good one.

Prone to wander,

Tim, Chad, and Gabe