Messages given at the Kansas Camps Farthest Out
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At the 1958 Kansas CFO, Frank Laubach walks through the Lord’s Prayer clause by clause. Well-fed Americans, he argues, should not pray for daily bread for themselves. They should pray instead, “give us the courage to push away from the table soon enough,” so the hungry half of the world can be fed.
Louise Eggleston lays out the foundations of effective prayer for the Kansas CFO: a surrendered life, Christ within, humility and love. She then points to a woman whose hospital records documented a cancer doctors had called inoperable, before her unshaken faith brought a full recovery.
J. Rufus Moseley traces the stages of union with Christ he taught at the 1950 Kansas CFO. He recalls how persecutors once “took his hide off” hunting for a martyr’s joy. They cut into his heart looking for it, but it was never there to find.
Louise Eggleston confessed to skipping the previous night’s meeting because she had not yet taken her own quiet hour with God. No answer, she told the Kansas CFO in 1957, is worth more than time alone with him.
At the Kansas CFO in 1957, Louise Eggleston walked campers through the wilderness temptations, treating them as attacks aimed at killing Jesus’s dream of the kingdom. She urged them to keep a Bible and notebook in their quiet time until they learn to catch what Paul called the perfume of his presence.
Louise Eggleston tells of praying over a dying youth director, who rose and declared, “I’m healed, I’m completely well.” The recovery was so lasting that her doctors’ own test instruments kept malfunctioning whenever they tried to disprove it. She told the story at the 1957 Kansas CFO.
Ruth Robison chalks the Christian life as a road on the blackboard at the 1971 Kansas CFO. She names the hazards that pull a person off it: doubt, running ahead of God, and reading our own wishes into the Holy Spirit’s words. Before cancer surgery she heard “Everything’s all right,” and then learned that God had given her the outcome, not the method.
An 86 year old woman in a nursing home gave Ruth Robison the line that redirected a whole prayer effort: “Good people are afraid to show love.” In her evening talk at the Kansas CFO in 1977, she asks campers to shed the old shell as a crab does. She also asks them to be careful what they let harden into the new pattern of life.
At the 1981 Kansas CFO, someone brought Tommy Tyson a line: giving yourself to God would leave you “like a turtle trying to cross an interstate highway.” He answers it with the claim at the center of his week, that in Jesus God has brought forth a new humanity, a marriage of heaven and earth. He follows it to the tomb, where death swallowed what it took to be one more man and found it had swallowed its own death.
Tommy Tyson reads Ephesians 2 and sets the resurrection above the immortality of the soul he once admired in Socrates. A little girl he teased in the car kept smiling and saying “twas you.” That becomes his refrain at the 1981 Kansas CFO: Jesus was born, died, rose and ascended as us. So “it is by his grace you are saved,” and we already belong rather than standing on probation.