No Greater Love

Hey gang:  There are times in our lives when we are truly blessed with an experience that can literally change our life.  I had one of those experiences early in the development of the Village.  I thought I was a giving person, up to that point in my life. But a group of wonderfully dedicated young people mentored me to an entirely new 

level of sacrificial giving.

Project survive was a seventeen day wilderness experience that changed the lives of many young men who had made some very bad decisions in their young lives.  The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a unique battle ground when fighting for the very lives of trouble youngsters. 

The new recruits had arrived on campus with their normal salty attitudes. Staff were equipping them for an experience they really did not want to experience, when I received a phone call from the State Police that one of the team had been killed in a motorcycle accident. 

I drove up to the camp site, where each staff was in the midst of dealing with a verbally abusive youngster, and called the five men and one woman counselor aside. I told them that Jim would not be making this trip; he made another trip earlier in the day.  I gave them the option that I would notify the agencies  to come and get the kids and we would scrub this trip, but they would have no part of it.  

I stood there watching them, tears in their eyes they complete the orientation in preparation for getting in a bus and trucking sixteen hours to the Porcupine Mountains. There theywould begin their seventeen day reclamation process with a bunch of kids that did not want to be there and would do all in their power to send 

staff that message as clearly possible.

When I run into kids and staff from that group of warriors who endured that seventeen days, fighting everything from bears in camp to horrendous black flies, all are quick to tell me they would never do it again -but they would not trade the experience for anything. 

We learned that when we are willing to lay down our lives and give sacrificially, God gives us His very special blessing.  The lesson: there is no greater love than to deny self, take up your cross and give of yourself to God to be used as He sees fit!!

Blessings,

Gramps