Marcia Brown draws on decades spent preparing microscope slides. Being filled with Christ, she tells the Montana CFO in 1970, is like paraffin soaking into every cell of a specimen, “so close that you can’t tell where you stop and He begins.”
Messages given at various Camps Farthest Out by Marcia Brown
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Marcia Brown draws on decades spent preparing microscope slides. Being filled with Christ, she tells the Montana CFO in 1970, is like paraffin soaking into every cell of a specimen, “so close that you can’t tell where you stop and He begins.”
Marcia Brown was then a university botanist and a declared atheist. She describes the Sunday morning when a Chicago congregation’s preaching fell away and the sanctuary seemed to fill with light where the people had been. That morning convinced her at last that “God so loved the world,” and she was baptized within days.
Marcia Brown describes how to build a prayer group inside the camps. She tells of a stranger who stood behind a blind man in prayer and then watched him walk away seeing. That is proof, she says, that the Lord’s presence matters far more than any method.
Marcia Brown builds a talk around the hymn “Take Time to Be Holy” and a song she first heard on a Sydney radio broadcast, urging time taken to behold, to seek, to rest and to attend to one another. She reads the poem “Persons Are Gifts” and closes on Lazarus, asking the 1981 Minnesota Koronis CFO whether we have tied his hands.
Marcia Brown recalls sitting at Glenn Clark’s bedside through his final eleven days. He told a young nurse, “just one thing, just love me.” The founder of the movement went on praying for others even as his own strength failed.
The island the 1981 Minnesota Koronis CFO can see from the shore becomes Marcia Brown’s picture of three levels of spiritual growth, matched to the camp’s own climb from the picnic to the youth sharing to the sunset prayer. She ends on the prayer for oneness in John 17 and the question of how close is closer.
A four-year-old once told Glenn Clark that grown people are like giants whose faces go unseen, and only their legs and feet show. Marcia Brown brings that story to the Minnesota Koronis CFO. She also recounts reading Clark his own words on the blood of Christ in the hospital, days before he died.
Marcia Brown recalls a Ceylon service on Christian unity where a cow wandered onto the platform in the middle of the message. She closes for the Minnesota Koronis CFO with J.B. Phillips’ young angel, who is shown “the visited planet.” That planet is earth, singled out because the Prince of Glory once walked it.
Marcia Brown recalls arriving at her first Minnesota Koronis CFO as a frightened young preacher’s wife. She closes her account with a poem on prayer, one line of which she made her own: “my whole being becomes a church.”
At the 1986 Minnesota Koronis CFO, Marcia Brown runs through a personal list of scriptural laws of prayer. She then turns to camp memories: a cottage kitchen fire beaten out with a single bucket, and the moment word of Japan’s surrender reached an all-night vigil in the chapel.