Super Summer Oklahoma

I tried to keep a kind of journal throughout Super Summer, but I didn’t do a very good job. I’m not sure how much of it I will be able to transfer here. I was pretty busy throughout each day.

I roomed alone on the same hall as the guys from FBC Tulsa (the church I came with) and some other guys. I had a roommate, but he never showed up.

Our speaker was an Iranian-born man named Afshin Ziafat. His father and all of his family is Muslim, and that is how he was raised. He was a Muslim until he turned about sixteen or seventeen years old, at which point he became a Christian. Two or three of his siblings have since become Christians and he is praying for his father to become a Christian as well. I bought a DVD of his testimony it is a powerful story. He is a very biblical, expositional preacher. He is passionate and insightful.

As it turns out, Super Summer is not a leadership training camp but rather a youth camp for strong(er) Christians. There was some leadership training (Afshin taught a break-out session about David), but for the most part the focus was more on spiritual development and things like that. The schedule was fairly intense. We had a thirty minute break sometime between breakfast and lunch, and about a two-hour break around dinner time, but the rest of the day was packed full of stuff for us to do. We had multiple classroom sessions every day with our “school;” the schools divided by grade, I was in Silver School, for graduated seniors.

The first night, Afshin talked about being content in what God has for us. I realized that night that I have stopped being content with my singleness. It’s something I’m working on. I think I made good progress over the course of the week.

Also on the second day I heard Afshin’s testimony during a break-out session. After sharing his testimony, Afshin filled the second break-out session slot with a talk about the differences between Islam and Christianity. Morally, Islam and Christianity are aligned with each other (that didn’t surprise me), but Islam believes you are saved by works while Christians believe we are saved by God’s grace. Basically, Islam believes that all the deeds of your life are put on a scale and if it tips in favor of the good things, you go to heaven (if you’re a Muslim), and if in favor of the bad, you go to hell. They believe in five pillars of faith: Creed (declaring you’re a Muslim “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet”), Prayer (five times a day, in Arabic, facing Mecca), Fasting (during Ramadan, no food, drink, sex, etc.), Alms, and Pilgrimage (if it’s within your means, visit Mecca; this is very subjective). As has been pointed out, Islam is ultimately a fear-based religion because it is works-based rather than grace-based. Interestingly, Muslims believe that Jesus was a sinless prophet, and that he was born of a virgin. However, there is a controversy amongst them as to whether or not Jesus actually died on the cross. I would tell you a little more about this, but I don’t remember the specifics.

During our evening classroom session (the time of day spent with the other High School graduates in our own room, we had our own speaker and worship leader, and we met there twice a day) on the second day we discussed spiritual gifts. I discovered that my three main spiritual gifts are Hospitality, Exhortation, and Leadership. None of those surprised me (I’d taken a similar, longer test before and had similar results).

On the evening of the second night, Afshin talked about being discontent with where we are in our relationship with God. One of the things he said that stood out to me was that sometimes God gives us what we think we want to show us that it’s not what we really want.

It was on this day that I felt really convicted about my scriptural knowledge; my weak scripture memory and lack of deep study.

On the third day, Afshin spoke about leadership during his break-out session. He used King David as a model for leadership. He spoke of how David’s heart was humble, servile, and faithful, and of how David acted with integrity. It was a good session. Afshin is visibly more relaxed in the afternoon break-out sessions. In the afternoons you feel more like he’s hanging out in your living room or teaching a small group, but in the evenings he’s more like an impassioned camp speaker.

Afshin’s second break-out session was the same as the first, so I went with three girls (Leah Palmer and Sarah Peters will be OBU Freshman this fall, and Kyleigh Colclasure came with FBC Tulsa and is going to OU this fall, they’re all really nice, sweet girls) to a break-out session about Global Missions. It was good, though it would have been a little more applicable to me if I was called to full-time international missions, instead of American missions. Mainly, they spoke on being prepared to go whenever God calls you to go. Their advice was something like this:
• Know your calling “Satan would be happy if we focused on the good things and not the best things.” “We are not called to rock babies. We are called to share Jesus with people. If you need to rock babies to share Jesus, that’s fine.”
• Be an expert student in the Word of God “Always be prepared to give an answer… ” “Never stop learning.”
• Learn to pray “Develop a conversational relationship with God. Pray without ceasing.”
• Start making international friends now.
• Avoid debt & credit cards.
• Get a passport now.
All of which is good advice, regardless of whether you’re going overseas or not. Also, they highly recommended taking a specific History of Christianity college course called Perspectives (www.perspectives.org) and graduating from College with a practical degree (Business, Journalism, etc.) before going overseas indefinitely. Not only does college life prepare you for being in the world as an individual (they said high schoolers aren’t prepared to live alone overseas), but having a degree gives you an excuse to go in to closed countries (like China and even Italy).

On the third night the Silver School (high school graduates) and Purple School (a separate school for any students called to vocational ministry) got to pray over kids from the Red School (the 7th-graders). We each took one aside and prayed over them and shared with them the things we wished we’d known when we were their age. They gave us five or ten minutes to do it right in the middle of the worship service, with the band on stage. It was cool. We were told that it was all that Red School talked about the following day.

On the evening of the third night, Afshin spoke about Integrity. This is a paraphrase of something he quoted (he didn’t name his source) “Character is the ability to follow through with a decision long after the emotion for the decision has passed.” I like that quote a lot. He talked about how:
• Integrity honors God when no one else is looking – we make decisions in life and those decisions make us. We live in four worlds, our private world (us and God), our personal world (our closest, most intimate friends), our professional world (our co-workers and fellow students), and our public world (strangers with an opinion of us based on our reputation). Character is rooted in our private world, and it shows itself in our other worlds. Proverbs 4:23, 1 John 1:9.
• Integrity honors God when things go bad – David waited for God’s timing to become King, even though he had opportunities to kill or dethrone Saul before then. Hebrews 11:6, Daniel 6:5, Daniel 6:10, 1 Thessalonians 5:17-18.
• Integrity honors God when no one around us wants to.
Of course, he had scripture woven throughout all his lessons, but I’m only including a few of the references I wrote down, and I missed some of them when he was speaking.

On the fourth day during the morning classroom session, our classroom speaker (who spoke mainly on Apologetics, though he told us it’s not his specialty and he usually focuses on other things) pointed out something I’d never seen before: Psalm 22 is a very accurate prophecy of Jesus’ death on the cross. I believe this was the same morning that he told us that Jesus fulfilled all sixty-eight* major biblical prophesies about the Messiah, and all three-hundred-and-one* minor biblical prophesies about the Messiah. (*I might have these numbers a little off, but I know they’re close.)

On the fourth evening, Afshin talked about living for others. He said that some people look at life as if looking at a mirror – it’s all about them – while others look at life as if it’s a window – it’s all about others. He referenced the fact that Paul delighted in the godliness and joy of others (1 Thessalonians 3:6-13, emphasis on v. 8, 1 Thessalonians 2:19). He then went on to talk about how living for others requires:
• Authentic Fellowship – 1 Thessalonians 3:10-11. Your life will not be impacted or impactful in isolation. Relationships must be authentic.
• Authentic Faith – 1 Thessalonians 3:8, 2 Corinthians 1:3-7
• Authentic Love – 1 Thessalonians 3:12, 1 John 3, and 1 John 4:7-8. We cannot keep love trapped inside us; love must come out of us if it is to be real and authentic. We must love those who wrong us, as well as those who don’t know God.
• Authentic Holiness – We must examine ourselves (which means sometimes looking in the mirror, instead of out the window) to see how we can better reflect God.
• Authentic Passion – Philippians 1:21-26.
Then he went on to talk about a kid named B.J. Higgins. This kid prayed the salvation prayer when he was six, and then came again to Christ when he was eight. He immediately became an evangelist. I don’t remember all of the story, but he shared Christ with everyone he encountered and began going on missionary journeys whenever he could. I’m leaving out parts, but ultimately he ended up dying in a foreign country at the age of fifteen. We were told that he told the nurse in the hospital about Jesus while coughing up blood and being told to stop talking for his own health. Afshin said that some people call his a wasted life because he died so young and could have done so much more, but then he told this story:
A few years later, B.J.’s dad was in Kenya on a mission trip when this kid came and sat next to him. The kid told him that he had been a Christian for two years but didn’t have a bible. God told the father that the kid was going to be Kenya’s next evangelist, and to give the kid a bible. The father didn’t want to because the only one he had was B.J.’s bible with B.J.’s notes in the back. He wrestled with God a while and finally relented. He told the kid what God said to him (the kid got excited) and then gave him the bible. The kid was fifteen years old; the same age that B.J. was when he died. B.J. kept a journal (you can actually buy it I Would Die For You, by B.J. Higgins) and Afshin quoted this “He went through the blood, the least we can do is go through the mud.”

At some point in the night, Afshin spoke of how he’s still trying to win his Muslim father to Christ. He told a story of how a crew that came to clean up his father’s yard after Hurricane Ike (Afshin and his family are from Texas) made a cross from one of the tree-stumps left after the storm. He said that he and his wife (of seven months, he’s still moonstruck) now have that cross in their house, “to present to my father, on the day that…” and his voice broke. I think he almost cried in the next minute, but he went back to speaking and got over it. It tugged at all of us. In fact, when he said that, the entire auditorium gave resounding applause. We might even have stood. It was very touching.

On the last day, Afshin spoke in the morning. His sermon was shorter, and it was about Evangelism, and how God wants all the world to know of Him and His love.

Our worship band for the week was the Chris White band. They were really good. Not just as worship leaders, but also as musicians. I bought their CD.

In the course of the week, I became richer by five t-shirts: I got one dark blue Super Summer t-shirt on the first day for free as the camp t-shirt; I bought the Silver School t-shirt for ten bucks – it’s cool-looking and super comfortable – probably my favorite; I got a green t-shirt from OBU for filling out a survey (it was meant for younger kids without a college selected yet, but they let me do it too); I bought a baby blue Super Summer t-shirt for ten bucks to help pay for a Super Summer Youth Camp in Alaska; and I got a red OBU t-shirt from the admissions office for being an enrolled student (they were giving them out to anyone who filled an admission application).

The youth with the First Baptist Church of Tulsa are pretty cool. I like the guys. One of them impressed me more than the others though. There was a sixteen-year-old homeschooled guy named Daniel. I didn’t get to know him well, but I think that every interaction I saw him in impressed me. To begin with, he’s pretty buff; he’s a football player and he plays with a homeschool team. He’s also good looking; he reminds me of the dark-haired guy from the movie Pearl Harbor. He’s very friendly and personable and reminds me of myself at sixteen, except for the fact that he’s cooler. He’s more stylish than I was at sixteen; he’s more stylish than I am right now, for that matter. I don’t think I ever saw him alone; he was always with someone, usually smiling, laughing, and talking. I wasn’t around him enough to see if he really loves people, but he definitely likes them a lot. He loves worship music. He likes other music too, but he really loves worship music. I heard him talk about worship music several times in the course of the week.

Regrettably, I didn’t get any real quality time with Daniel or any of the other guys in the group, but I like them all and I got the impression they like me as well. They adopted me as a youth group member, and I was the only guy (there was also a girl) “with” their church to be in Silver School, so I was the oldest of them.