It was a wonderful weekend filled with tons of pain/laughter/worship/activities/joy minus sleeping. It was my first time as a “real” counselor, at least my first time as a summer counselor, it was definitely one of the hardest and most tiring experiences I have ever had, but in the end, was all worth it. 

From the family times we had, GO CAPTAIN CHINA!!!, to the One-on-one’s shared with my boys, and getting to know the other counselors as well, all of which have been such a blessing to me. Needless to say, in the state I was previously in, spiritually, God knew that I needed something like this to remind me that anything through and with Him is possible. 

Right now as I am typing, I have allotted about 14 hrs of sleep in the past 3 nights staying at Camp Buckner for various reasons such as listening to the 7th grade boys talking about Yu-Gi-Oh, maple story, and their daily activities to 1-2am in the morning, and me, Paul, and Jie telling them to shut up every 5 minutes, to the A.C. being 60 degress at night, or just being unable to sleep because of all the things racing through my head. But, somehow, even though my body is so tired/broken/sore, my soul is still wanting more and more of it. I would actually prefer if it was actually a week long retreat like Rec Week and such, because to me, it feels like the 4 days spent with these young boys wasn’t enough. That I still had to impart more wisdom and speak truth into their lives and that my work with them, just wasn’t quite done yet. Then, I realized that I actually wanted to work with these kids for years to come, to watch them grow up, to watch them mature both physically/spiritually/mentally, that actually being their counselor for every summer retreat till either they graduate high school or that I move somewhere far away would be amazing. Yeah, I need to pray on that more, but my heart is definitely willing to reach out to my boys: Peter, William, Nicholas, Michael, Dustin, and Andrew. All of them have taught me so much through our 1on1s, just hanging out, discussing about the sermon, or challenging each other in competitions. I was truly blessed and honored to be their counselor, and cannot wait till next year.

Finally, I would like to share some amazing news with all of you. Yesterday during dinner, I had a 1on1 with a boy named Michael Li, a 7th grader to goes to the ACC Rock plant in north Austin. We talked a bit at first getting to know each other and what our interests were, but towards the end he asked me some interesting questions about Christ, which led me to ask him whether or not he believed in Jesus yet. He then told me that he had gone to church for three years with his parents when they moved to Austin, and through that, he believed he was a Christian since he did go to church with his parents, and his parents were believers. Then I shared the gospel with him, and told him that all he needed to pray about was to realize that he was indeed, a sinner, who did deserve death, but by the grace of God, who sent his son to die for us, and who rose again, gave us eternal life, if we accepted Him as our savior. His exact words were: “It’s that easy, really?” And right then and there he asked me to recite the prayer for him to repeat. I was excited, beaming with happiness, yet trying to retain it since many other 1on1s were going on, it also happened that I ran out of juice after downing it, to keep myself from screaming out in joy, that as I went back to refill it, Michael Chen and Chris Lu saw what happened, and we both thanked God for what had happened. 

Needless to say, it was a God filled weekend. Two Three individuals that I knew, one in my small group, and one two in my family had accepted Christ the very same day, has made me forget all of the soreness and tiring parts of the retreat and has reminded me again that Christ is amazing and that we can do anything through Him!