A Weekend of Fusion

We spent the weekend in Traverse City at Lake Ann Camp at a high school retreat called Fusion- and it even snowed!!!!

A group of students and leaders from our church and several other churches went to learn more about what it means to be a follower of Christ, especially as it relates to loving God with your mind.

The speaker was a smart dude who challenged and helped us understand what we believe, how to defend it, and how it should affect our behavior if we really live out what we believe.

I left more confident that Christianity is a reasonable belief system. While it requires faith it isn’t a blind faith. When you consider the options of how we got here and what life is about, our speaker shared three options...

1. Naturally by evolution and chance and there is no god and therefore no basis for right and wrong


2. There are many gods, just choose one and right and wrong can be different for various groups
   
3. The God of the Bible who is our creator and there is a solid standard for right and wrong and he is a person! So not only should we have beliefs, but we need to know what we believe it and be able to defend it!

I also appreciated his emphasis that our belief system should cause us to love people more because it leads us to love God more. I was reminded of that old saying, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” If the Bible is true and Jesus has come into our life and changed us from the inside out, then we should live by God’s values not the world's. I was especially challenged as he presented the needs of orphans and people in poverty all around the world. Too often I think that I don’t have enough materially…and yet the real question is, “how am I using what God has given me to practice pure religion that cares for widows and orphans as I keep myself from being corrupted from the world (James 1:27). My family has begun talking about spending half as much on each other for Christmas and giving the other half to Shohanna’s Hope, an organization that helps fund the adoption of orphans around the world. I’m not sure yet how to go about it, but I want to start somewhere!

Of course we had fun hanging out and Saturday was filled with tournaments…basketball, dodge ball, volleyball, octaball (a Lake Ann thing), hockey (which our guys won!) and ping pong.

And the coolest thing that happened was that one of the guys from our group gave his life to Christ on Saturday night. There was a party in heaven (Luke 15:10) as our friend joined the family of God and began a new life in Christ. And that is what real life is all about!

Well, overall it was a great weekend and I thank God that we could see Him at work in our lives.