Sharptop

So, this weekend, about 400 of my closest friends and I embarked on a journey by the name of Sharptop Cove. Sharptop is a weekend-long YoungLife camp. The headline to Sharptop is that it is "the best weekend of your life" which is an extremely bold statement that is completely ridiculous, but what is even more ridiculous is the fact that it is true. Sharptop is an unforgettable experience that everyone should have - an experience everyone needs to have. 

I'm sure most of you, as well as myself, have experienced a sadness and longing to go back just hours after being home. Instead of sadness I think the question we need to ask is: how do we bring Sharptop back home? To answer this, we must first figure out what exactly made Sharptop so great. It's really not complicated. Sharptop just gives you this feeling. A feeling that says it's okay to be yourself. A feeling that brings out the best in us. A feeling that the place you are in right now feels like home. 

The thing is, when you're on top of a mountain isolated from society, you kind of don't care about anything besides what is currently going on. Everyone is fully engaged in the present moment and can't think about anything but each other. We become a community. We become a family. We learn to lean on each other and we learn how to bring the best out in each other. And when we do this, we open up this void. A void only God can fill. You see, when it's just us and God we don't have to worry about anything else. Sharptop lets us be ourselves, naturally. We don't have to depend on other things to have a good time. Drinking, smoking, and drugs become a thing of the past. We get to make our own fun with each other, not worrying about anything else. Life becomes simpler. Life becomes easier. And love becomes apparent, everywhere.

Now, how do we recreate this? Well, first we embrace the moment. We appreciate the people we are with and focus on them. We pretend our phones don't exist and block out distractions. We become open to talking about what is on our hearts, not what we think is appropriate to talk about. In fact, we learn to only talk about what is on our hearts. We give hugs. We treat each other like family, because we are family. We don't leave anybody out because the feeling at Sharptop is not something that can be contained, it's infectious - it has to spread. We see ourselves and each other as new creations. We focus on the here and now and not the past. We don't judge because we are all family. We learn to be our goofy selves and not worry about judgment. We forget about hatred. We become slaves to love. And finally, we let this great power of love overcome all the brokenness in our lives. We let ourselves be transformed by this love that has brought us all together. We let in Jesus and let out everything else. We make every day the best day of our lives.

We keep calm and Sharptop.