Camps Farthest Out Messages on the subject of Spiritual Growth
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Speaking to campers at the 1990 Southern California CFO, Bert Kerley continues the recovery testimony he began in the previous session. Books such as “God Calling” kept turning up just when he needed them, he says; one appeared on a shelf while he waited out a friend’s phone call. He credits Norman Vincent Peale with teaching him to relax, think positively, and say no kindly.
Anne Pierson continues her Lord’s Prayer series with “thy kingdom come” at the Florida Family CFO in 1995. She recalls Ruth Robertson, a CFO speaker in her nineties, who once blessed her with hands laid on her head. Ruth Robertson later died quietly in the front row of another camp talk.
In the fourth talk of her series on the spiritual way, Ruth Robison takes campers through Jesus as son of man, teacher, healer and revealer of the Father. She describes the shepherd who checks each sheep for thorn scratches at the narrow gate. She also describes the three-hour Easter Monday service her prayer group began, so that Christians would dwell in the resurrection rather than the cross. The series ran at the Nebraska CFO in 1960.
On a Sunday morning in the camps, Ruth Robison picks up an empty sewing spool. She asks campers to unwind their lives onto it so God can wind a new film. Her three-year-old granddaughter, asked to pray over a crushed foot, refused to ask Jesus and offered to ask God instead. That answer opens her case for knowing the Father and not only the Son.
Gertrude Dekock Keehn unpacks Jesus’ words “I am the way, the truth, and the life” for the camps. They were spoken from an overcoming spirit, she argues, not from ego. A man in a coffee shop once sat so absorbed in his book that his breakfast went stone cold, a moment she says taught her to judge rightly rather than by appearances. Finding that same inner way, rather than chasing psychic proofs or past life claims, is what lets anyone say those words for themselves.
Quoting Glenn Clark’s counsel that hurt feelings are only a telephone call from heaven, Roland Brown closes the Arkansas CFO in 1959. The call is a nudge that a sliver of the old self still needs surrendering, and he urges campers toward daily rather than one-time self-denial.
Rebecca Beard describes losing her voice in a Philadelphia pulpit, until prayer lifted it back for a forty minute talk to the movement. She then likens surrendering the ego to a copper wire cooled toward absolute zero, where resistance drops and the current keeps flowing even after the plug is pulled.
Rebecca Beard recounts a mission tour through New York, Kansas, and California. She retells how a Canadian kindergartner sang “the land of our pills and pride” instead of “pilgrims pride.” She closes by urging the camps to drop old prejudice, using the Syrophoenician woman’s plea for crumbs under the table.
Jim Christian asks campers what they truly heard when a voice from heaven answered Jesus, since some in the crowd heard only thunder. Speaking at the 1967 Annual CFO, he recalls his Presbyterian search for God through theology, and how he traded it for the nearness of God he felt in the love of people at a camp in Mississippi.
Gertrude Dekock Keehn tells the camps how her mother warned her that a dark cupboard held Satan. The warning left her afraid of pitch dark rooms well into adulthood, until she finally named the buried belief and laughed it loose. She urges listeners to hunt down their own unexamined childhood beliefs the same way.