Second Time Around

My eleven-year-old nephew is spending a week at summer camp for the second year in a row. He’s now the seasoned veteran, leading a crew of his friends who are first-time campers.

The day before he left, I asked him if his bag was packed. He said yep, he had the Vaseline all ready to go. 

Vaseline? 

“For pranks,” he said. “I didn’t know about them last year but this year I’ll be ready.”

It seems that along with tubing on the lake and building watercraft out of cardboard boxes, he discovered that the boys grease the doorknobs and handles of their cabins with Vaseline to play pranks on their counselors.

It made me think that the second time around makes all the difference. 

It’s where hesitation turns into confidence and experience ushers in wisdom. 

Not only at summer camp but it's true in my life too. {And yours?}

When the route I’m traveling in my life starts to look vaguely familiar, I realize that I’ve been here before. 

Instead of letting my discouraging thoughts work me into a worrying knot {like I usually do} I ask myself the question, am I offered a second chance to practice what I’ve learned since I’ve passed this way before?

Sometimes you have to build a history with God to harbor hope for your future.

When I choose to see every disappointment and difficulty, every delay and hope deferred as a faith-encounter to craft a living chronicle of confidence in him, it strengthens the strands of trust stretched around my heart. 

It’s this practice of changing the angle, looking at it from a new slant that can remake the old. 

My self-centric prayers have been turned inside out when my heart heard the words, “Will you pray for another to find me first? Before you pray for yourself?”

So I do it. Because I think it's the last thing God told me to do.

I keep praying. Even if I can’t see a difference. Even though I don’t think it makes any sense. Because just maybe, what if?

What if God is working behind the scenes and I don’t know it? 

What if, through these mysterious and powerful prayers, I can see the crest of his holy hill and sense the close-enough-to-touch wonder of God?

That’s where I found myself once again confronting my thoughts about what I really wanted in life long after I’d left them behind on the journey. 

I started unpacking those old dusty desires from the trunk they were buried in, shaking them out, seeing what still fit and what didn’t. 

A funny thing happened when I started poking around those old memories and dreams and hopes. 

I discovered that after all that time my desires were still alive, with a faintly beating heart.

I was so callous with them through the years as I packed them away like souvenirs from a long-ago trip. I wondered why God wanted me to consider them again.

Was he testing me? Taunting me? Why when I opened my heart to what he was showing me and I told him yes I was ready to embrace these old desires, did everything come to a dead-end stop and I found myself right back in a place I'd never wanted to revisit?  

Because God wanted me to consider him. Through the lens of my desires. 

And the only way to revive them was to start praying them back to life and trust their awakening to him.

Many are the plans in a person's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails. -Prov. 19:21

My sister sent me a photo of my nephew and his friends boarding the bus for camp. It was completely different from last year’s. 

Then he had sat on his duffel bag with a slightly worried expression on his face. But in this year’s photo he sat grinning, baseball cap on backwards, Vaseline safely tucked away in his bag.

I think the second time around makes all the difference. 

For middle-school campers playing pranks and for all of us who pray and desire and believe and hope.

What are you praying for?

I'm linking up with my friends at Holley Gerth's place at Coffee for Your Heart. Click the image for more posts from my blogger friends!