Dear Partner,
Last Saturday on a whiteboard in my office I wrote the words, “He did it before, He can do it again.” I was planning for this month’s pledge partner letter, and I had a note with it “picture of Miracle Building.”
Later that day I came across a book WIN THE DAY, where Mark Batterson writes about David defeating Goliath and keeping the giant’s armor. Often when reading I forget that what takes seconds to read can take years to happen. I doubt it took David years to retrieve the giant’s armor — but when you find out it weighed 125 lbs. you realize he didn’t just throw it over his shoulder and walk it back to his tent.
Why go to the trouble? His conversation with Saul discussing his desire to battle Goliath hours before in 1 Samuel 17 may shed some light on it for us. David says, “The same God that helped me defeat the lion and the bear will do it again.” I would suggest he added the armor to his collection and now would say when facing future difficulties, “The same God that helped me defeat the lion, the bear AND the giant…will do it again.”
Somewhere in a storeroom there’s a pulpit that barely survived the Miracle Building collapsing a couple years back. It doesn’t weigh 125 lbs., but it’s close. I’m glad we kept it. Some great messages were shared from that pulpit. Not only that, but it was a great starting point for lots of future pastors and youth leaders who are in ministry today. It’s an awesome reminder that God did before, and He can do again.
The beginning of January I decided I was going to become a minimalist, at least in my office. If I had notes from a book on a shelf, I threw the book away. If I hadn’t used something in the past 6 months, I threw it away. Old files I hadn’t looked at in years, I threw away.
Yes, this minimalist mindset has already come back to bite me as I was preparing for my taxes and realized that I may have thrown out an important file I need, but I digress. In the process I reduced everything to one small cabinet and a desk with no drawers. There was a bag of old Hiawatha stuff that I didn’t want to just trash, so I put it in my sister in law’s office at the church. I played dumb as she was cleaning out her office when asked if I knew where the old bag had come from. She proceeded to give it to Billy, who true to form, looked through everything meticulously.
Billy came across a booklet from 1972 that my dad had used to help in raising funds for the Miracle Building. I didn’t bother to look at it when he originally showed it to me, but when I saw the note on my board moments later in my office that said “pic of Miracle Building” I thought maybe the original drawing of the dream would be cool to show.
As I was leaving, I told him to keep the booklet for me to look at later. Here’s where some may say “coincidence,” but I’ll let you decide. He left the booklet in my office. This morning when I opened it up and came across the opening page, in big red letters, “God of Miracles Has Done It Before.” Under that, a picture of the old dining room in 1969, that had money raised in one year with construction starting on Memorial Day and completed by July 4th of that same summer. The last sentence, “The God of Miracles has done it before!” Next to that a picture of new cabins that were built the following summer, with the help of a Kresge Foundation donation of $25,000, and the last sentence “The God of Miracles has done it before!” One final picture of the staff cabin with the caption, “This spacious, carpeted, paneled building was paid for the day camp opened.” Do you want to guess the last line??? “THE GOD OF MIRACLES HAS DONE IT BEFORE!”
Somewhere in the early 80’s the staff began to sing a song, PRESS ON. If I’m not mistaken, we sang it every Friday evening for over 20 years. As someone who was there for most of those seasons, I can say there were some summers when the staff singing would have given Brooklyn Tabernacle a run for their money and then there were some summers where we really sang with a lot of enthusiasm.
In each case, every Friday of the camping season we’d sing:
When the valley is deep
When the mountain is steep
When the body is weary
When we stumble and fall
When the choices are hard
When we’re battered and scarred
When we’ve spent our resources
When we’ve given our all
In Jesus name we press on
Dear Lord with the prize, clear before our eyes, we find the strength to press on
Whether we sang with a great deal of talent or a ton of enthusiasm, I think we would all agree we had no idea while singing in our late teens and early twenties the depths of the valley, the weariness we would have to work through or the emotional battering we would take.
It’s possible the struggles HYC has faced recently would mirror your life and what you’ve been up against. Let me suggest to you that the same God who helped David defeat a lion, a bear, and a giant Philistine, He’s done it before, and He’ll do it again. And the same God that helped HYC in the late 60’s and early 70’s raise over $500,000 and build dorms and ultimately construct a Miracle Building, the same God who used messages from a handmade white birch pulpit, He’s done it before, and He’ll do it again. The same God we committed to and pledged our lives to no matter the valley, the mountain, the hard choices, or challenges, He has come through for us in the past and He’ll do it again.
On behalf of young people who will be saved, lives that will be changed and miracles that will happen again this summer, thank you. He did it before…can’t wait to see Him do it again.
Sincerely,
Craig