Laughing at God's Promises

When I was growing up, every summer we had a week-long camp meeting, a revival of sorts. Picture an outdoor covered pavilion, open on the sides, on the Nazarene Acres campgrounds in central Illinois. During camp, that same structure doubled as our chapel, our tabernacle. Camp itself was always fun, but camp meeting was next level. It coincided with family camp, so hundreds of families packed up their lives to call Nazarene Acres home for a week, and every night at 7 pm, we had church. We held a revival.

As a kid, camp meeting was magical. The days were full of games and activities, and then at night we got to hear the best music and the guest preachers. I never once wanted it to end. I would have moved into that pavilion permanently, cornfields and hard benches and all, if anyone had let me.

When I think back on that time now, I can see how special it truly was. Generations of people packed together on hard benches with hand fans in the middle of an Illinois August, and the Spirit moved through that place every night of camp meeting, every year. Something fundamental about that time shaped my faith in ways I’m still trying to find words for. Even now, writing this, I can hear the chatter before the service starts. I can feel the anticipation of what the night has in store. I can smell the cornfields an arm’s length away.

I wish for moments like that in today’s world. A chance to step away from the noise and gather with people of faith across every generation, to sing “I’ll Fly Away,” to hear a preacher who challenges me to grow and calls me to actually share the ways God is working in my life.

Part of what made camp meeting work was knowing I was making myself vulnerable to whatever God was saying to my heart, and wherever he was calling me to go. Most nights, the weight of that lasted long after the service ended. Revival meant I needed to sit in prayer, to wait, to hold what God had put on my heart without rushing past it. There was no instant answer. I couldn’t consult Google or ask an AI what it meant. I had to wrestle with questions, with doubt, with discernment, sometimes even with grief.

But it was in that wrestling that my faith grew.

I think people still crave revival today. I think every generation is asking real questions about their future, about their fears, and about faith. The hunger is good, and it is real. But the tools people are reaching for to satisfy it are frictionless in a way faith was never supposed to be.

Real faith gets grown in real community, with other people, over time; you can’t rush. It isn’t going to be found in a search bar. Revival used to mean something happened to you in front of other people. A testimony. A changed life someone else could watch unfold and hold you to. If people are having their spiritual moments alone with a chatbot at midnight, I have to ask: who’s witnessing it? Who’s discipling them afterward? How is faith actually getting passed down if no one else is in the room?

I want to be honest here. I use technology, and some days I use it for things I probably should have brought to God first and didn’t, because God doesn’t answer in three seconds and Google does. What I’m wrestling with is the role it sometimes plays in my own life, and I’m guessing yours too. How many times have we Googled or asked AI something God really meant for us to bring to him directly, because we wanted a quick answer instead of seeking his hand?

I’m forever grateful for camp meeting. For the people in my life, older than me, younger than me, and everywhere in between, who invested in me and showed me, in person, what faith looks like lived out. My faith did not arrive whole. It got handed to me, piece by piece, by people who were willing to let me watch them believe up close. I’m grateful I was, and still am, forced to sit with the frustration of trying to discern where God is leading me and how he’s shaping me, because that sitting is where the growth actually happens.

I think people across every generation are longing for revival, even if they’d never use that word for it. I think younger generations especially are curious about faith, but that curiosity is tangled up with politics and disillusionment and whatever theology shows up on their For You page, in ways that don’t fit neatly into what we’ve always called revival. Maybe it isn’t supposed to look the way it looked at Nazarene Acres. But somebody still has to sit in the row ahead of them. Somebody still has to let them watch what believing looks like up close, the same way somebody’s grandmother did for me without ever knowing it mattered.

May you remember that you did not come to whatever faith you have all on your own. Somebody sat beside you first, on a bench or in a kitchen or in a pew, and let you watch what believing looked like up close, even if neither of you would have called it that at the time. May you become that person for someone else, even on the days it costs you more patience than you have, even when you cannot tell yet if any of it is taking root. May the generations before you and the generations coming up behind you actually meet, face to face, in a place with no walls to hide behind, so that nobody has to wrestle with their doubts and their questions alone. And may you trust that whatever gets built between those generations, slowly, in person, without a shortcut, is what actually carries faith from one of you to the next.