Messages given at the Alabama Camps Farthest Out
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Gertrude Dekock Keehn shares a Sunday school story about a small boy playing with marbles, who suddenly blurted out “why don’t you tell them how God made light,” the very answer she had silently prayed for. She challenges her listeners at the Alabama CFO to truly mean it when they sing an old hymn’s pledge of “my life, my soul, my all,” rather than just enjoying the tune.
Gertrude Dekock Keehn urges listeners at an Alabama CFO gathering to bring every hidden grudge or lie to God to be dissolved, calling such a thing a “false creation.” She illustrates it with a doctor whose rage at an abusive father broke only once he chose to forgive him.
Closing out her week of teaching at the Alabama CFO in 1972, Carolyn Rice reviews two visualization exercises. She compares an open, expectant heart to a ballplayer in “the receiving position,” who catches what is thrown because he is watching for it.
At the 1972 Alabama CFO, Carolyn Rice recalls guiding a young man to picture himself holding Christmas packages labeled “filth,” “anxiety,” “insecurity,” and “doubt.” The young man then dropped them at the feet of Jesus. Rice leads the campers through the same exercise.
Carolyn Rice teaches visual meditation, picturing Jesus and walking a person by the hand to him. She then tells how she once stood on the promise “I know my Redeemer liveth” through a two a.m. family crisis. The session comes from the Alabama CFO in 1972.
Continuing the theme from the night before, Norman Elliott retells how Jacob wrestled with a stranger until daybreak. Jacob was renamed Israel, and he went alone to face the brother he had wronged. Elliott preached it to the Alabama CFO in 1958 as forgiveness restored, not a rule kept.
Norman Elliott preached on the night Jesus washed Peter’s feet, in a talk to the 1958 Alabama CFO. It is a fresh reading of the moment Peter answered, “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.” Elliott built the talk around an old scholar’s translation of faith as a title deed.
Norman Elliott preached on the God of the impossible. He retold how Gideon’s army was cut to three hundred men, and how a king was told, “the battle is not yours, but God’s.” He then recounted, for the 1958 Alabama CFO, his own prayer for rain to stop at a flooded camp.
How a person sees Jesus determines what they can receive from him. That was Norman Elliott’s teaching at the Alabama CFO in 1958. He told of his own day with a stranger he failed to recognize as a millionaire, an empty freight car he could have filled.
In this talk to the Alabama CFO in 1958, Norman Elliott built his message on a mother and her frightened boy. She told him that nobody would ever take away his little red wagon. Elliott used the story to show that love, like God’s, never forces or coerces.