Messages given at the Illinois Camps Farthest Out.
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At the 1952 Illinois CFO, Louise Eggleston told about a judge whose wife lay in a coma with inoperable cancer. He gathered a retired minister and a home missionary into a day of fasting and prayer. Then he came home from church without once telephoning the hospital, and found her sitting up.
Gertrude Dekock Keehn preaches from John 6 that the kingdom of heaven is found within, not in any place. In her talk to the Illinois CFO in 1954, she recalls her grandson’s delight at a “wonderful ballet in the trees” as proof that seeking it first changes how campers see the world.
Arab chiefs once unscrewed London hotel faucets to carry running water back to Arabia. Anna Mow uses them to warn the 1950 Illinois CFO that a camp experience cannot be carried home that way. The Spirit himself must remain, and growth is walking, not flying.
Mechanics in Japan found sand and dirt clogging the fuel line of Roland Brown’s car. He gives the 1966 Illinois CFO that image for the small unconfessed sins that had clogged his own power in prayer. Confessing them, he says, restored it within minutes.
Roland Brown counts his one true failure in fifty countries of travel. A train wreck in Ceylon forced him and his wife back without ever reaching the meeting. He offers the story to the Illinois CFO in 1966 as proof that the Spirit still guides when plans fall apart.
At the 1966 Illinois CFO, Roland Brown runs through an itinerary across the Orient and the Pacific. He turns serious over a chaplain at an air base in Udorn, Thailand, who prays with him for airmen flying missions toward the Laos border.
Roland Brown draws on George Washington Carver’s line that “cotton and silk are two incompatible fabrics.” Worldly habits, he argues, cannot mix with life in Christ. To the Illinois CFO in 1966 he teaches diet, rest and gratitude as disciplines of creative living.