Camps Farthest Out Messages on the subject of Integrity
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Barbara Ann Chase preaches on the secret place from Matthew 6, teaching that giving, prayer, and fasting belong before God alone and not before an audience. At a Glasgow rag market she once found a silver chalice buried under a heap of wet clothes, and told the woman selling it that she was more valuable to God than the treasure hidden beneath her rags. The message comes from the 2000 Arizona CFO.
At the California Ocean Pines CFO in 1985, John David Webster describes himself as a bridge between generations, cultures, and denominations. His own choice to keep wearing a coat and tie at camp makes a light opening. From there he talks about staying reconciled to God, to others, and to yourself.
Cliff Richmond confesses that his own years of eczema turned out to be an inner irritation, and it healed only once he named it as sin. He preaches that lesson to the North Florida CFO in 1963 through Jacob wrestling at the Jabbok and through Nathan’s parable to David.
At the 2003 Florida Family CFO, John Hobbs opens with a lighthearted mix-up over two campers who showed up to breakfast still in their pajamas. He then turns to repentance and integrity, contrasting David’s affair with Bathsheba with Joseph fleeing Potiphar’s wife rather than sin. He urges listeners to choose obedience now rather than learn the hard way.
Starr Daily remembers a prison chaplain who preached on sin for nine years. The chaplain came back after his daughter’s name hit the crime headlines, told the men “I have nothing to say,” and laid a hand on each kneeling convict instead. Campers at the 1965 Minnesota Koronis CFO hear that God honors plain honesty as he honored Thomas, and that “the center of character is integrity.”
Gertrude Dekock Keehn preaches from 2 Corinthians 6 on being “workers together with him.” She offers a South African pastor who denounced her in print, then unknowingly asked her to help heal his wife, as proof that unanswered criticism does no harm. The talk closes with the call to be “unknown, yet well known,” and she delivered it to the Indiana CFO in 1955.
Speaking to the Minnesota Koronis CFO in 1950, Frank Laubach delivers a searching account of unconfessed national sin. He names greed, distorted freedom, and neglected missions as the very things Americans are proudest of.
Agnes Sanford leads the Minnesota Koronis CFO of 1949 through a hard self-examination against the Ten Commandments. She names putting a job or social standing before God, and she tells of a man who, convicted years later, mailed a coal company the three dollars he had once cheated it of.
Mary Webster tells the Kentucky CFO in 1966 of a carpenter who quietly cut corners while building a rich man’s house. At the end he learned that the house was being built for himself all along. She applies the same warning to the character believers build day by day.
Gertrude Dekock Keehn tells the camps how, as a child, she prayed, “I want to be like Jesus.” Years later she refused to lie on a customs form just to get back two seized lamps, telling the clerk that her mother did not really send them. She also describes sitting with a dying judge who found peace at what he called “the mercy seat of God.”