Testimony of Healing September 2, 2002 Issue

Kids you can love

Jenny Sawyer

Being a counselor at a neighborhood day camp the summer after my freshman year in college was not what I wanted. The pay was bad, the hours long, the responsibilities draining. But it was the only job I could find, and I knew I brought one invaluable quality to it: my deep love for children.

After spending just a week with these boys—who tried my patience almost hourly with everything from fighting to biting—I was ready to give up. I was exasperated, discouraged, even a little angry that my campers seemed to have no respect for authority. While there were a few kids in the group who were easy to love, the rest seemed like lost causes.

When my frustration reached its peak with one child in particular, I realized I needed to pray. Order, control—these seemed almost too much to hope for. But I realized there was one thing I could do, and that was to love these kids more spiritually. Drawing on my personal reserves of love had left me exhausted and emotionally drained. I knew that to be an effective counselor—to bring healing to the situation—I'd need to rely on a much more dependable source of love, an infinite source. That source was God.

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