Winter Retreat Recap

Dear Friends and Family,

Last weekend hundreds of youth from urban, inner-city communities around Southern and Central California descended upon The Oaks Christian Camp and Conference Center. World Impact, an inner-city Christian church planting organization, hosted its annual Winter Teen retreat. Our youth ministry met at 8 am last Saturday to make the hour and a half drive to camp. It was the first time we have attended and boy was it a great time (even with the crazy wind and rain)!

By and large the retreat was planned and organized by World Impact staff – everything from activities, to food, to accommodations, to the speaker. This enabled our youth ministry staff and me to focus our energies entirely on relational time with our youth. What a blessing! Whether it was time spent eating delicious dining hall food, enjoying daring activities like paintball and the high ropes course, or hanging out in our cabins late at night, the adult staff were around our youth 24 hours a day for the entire weekend. It’s definitely a frenetic pace that can’t be sustained for very long, but for a weekend it felt like such a rich gift and opportunity to partner with God in loving our youth.

With our abundance of relational time and the calm of being in a place far from the inner-city, God created space for the youth to share painful experiences where God has felt distant. One youth shared of his recent suicidal thoughts. Another shared the feeling of fear that overwhelmed him when his loving father was arrested by the police, seemingly out of the blue. Another shared of the hopelessness she felt at school, of being a good student and getting good grades. Several others resonated with these stories and shared similar stories of their own.

It became clear that school and home, typically places of nurture, love and development, are instead places of darkness, pain and insecurity. In these places we challenged and encouraged our youth to know that God is present, as it says in the Psalm 139:11-12 “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for the darkness is as light with you.” Several prayed for faith to believe that God is present in their ups and downs. As we return to Los Angeles, I hope that we will continue walking with our youth and God through these difficult places.

Another highlight of the weekend is difficult to quantify so I’ll just describe it the best I can. Prior to the retreat, we were a youth group. We’d hit a good rhythm with our Wed night and Sunday morning gatherings. People knew each other, were friendly and generally enjoyed being together. After retreat it felt more like family. We’ve become a youth group family, brothers and sisters in Christ across race, gender and geography! We hung out together in the dining hall playing silly games enjoying each others’ presence. We sung loudly and proudly for our friend Ingrid who celebrated her birthday at camp. We saved seats for each other in the auditorium. We stuck together and played honestly as a team in the camp scavenger hunt. We shared our stories and testimonies while listening to others. God knit us together like a family.

I find the timing of all this to be a really exciting development. In February we’re planning our third annual “REEL Joy,” an arts-based, film-making, evangelistic outreach event that culminates with a screening of the youths’ films in early March. My hope and prayer is that many new youth in our neighborhood will come for the opportunity to act in and make a short film, and then stay in our youth group because they’ve been touched by the love of Christ. In the past REEL Joy has been a volatile mix of youth from different parts of the neighborhood who are taught to not get along. Please pray for our youth and adult staff to demonstrate Christ in word and deed as we invite others to join our fellowship. Pray that God would do mighty things in the lives of all who come.

Peace and Grace,
Elliot Ling