Camps Farthest Out Messages on the subject of Joy
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For the camps, Roland Brown pairs each troublesome emotion with its scriptural cure. He quotes that “perfect love casteth out fear,” and he recalls a Dutch physician who admitted he had no pills for worry and resentment. Joy, he says, is the antidote to fatigue.
Genevieve Parkhurst describes an old, shut-in woman whose window prism scatters rainbow light across a dim room. The movement, she says, is made of people meant to do the same, breaking up God’s light into joy others can see. She closes with the story of David Livingstone, who was recognized in Africa by his likeness to Christ though the villagers never knew his name.
Joy, not willpower, is what heals the body, Reg Goff preaches to the camps. He traces sickness instead to guilt, resentment, and the fear of what others think. One government orange inspector saw his ulcers vanish only once he stopped dreading his bosses’ opinion.
After his plane loses a door in flight, Bill Reed arrives late to the 1962 Oklahoma Ardmore CFO. He preaches on joy as the fruit of the Holy Spirit and ties it to Isaiah 61 and John 16. He describes an arthritic woman who shakes under a prayer table and rises healed.
Genevieve Parkhurst recalls how Glenn Clark once blessed her and a friend. His prayer was, “bless these two birds and let them fly high, and don’t let them lose any of their feathers.” She then turns to reflect on Jesus as the movement’s unchanging center, in a talk to the Annual CFO in 1963.
Francis Cole works through prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication, telling the movement that imagination belongs in prayer as much as need does. He recounts how a friend’s chronic facial pain vanished the instant the man cried, “Oh, Jesus! Jesus!”
Tick Watson builds a morning talk on happiness for the Ohio CFO in 1968. He draws on Emerson, and on a doctor who tells a nervous patient he needs “a shot in the spirit” rather than a shot in the arm. He closes by dedicating a baby camper, Todd, to Jesus.
At Brother Mandus’s urging, a young woman prays for her atheist fiance, who is dying of tuberculosis. He recovers physically within weeks, and months later says, unprompted, “Well, of course. What else do you expect when you pray?” Mandus adds that laughter belongs in the movement’s spiritual life too, recalling a mechanical clown whose recorded laugh drew crowds at an amusement park.
Kermit Olsen preaches on joy and humor as marks of real faith in the closing address of the Minnesota Koronis CFO in 1965. He retells Jesus’ parable of straining a gnat from a cup while swallowing a camel. He also tells of a professor’s letter of surrender, “Dear God, I hereby resign as general manager of the universe.”
Tick Watson names his mood creative enthusiasm, from the Greek “enthos,” meaning filled with God. He then tells the 1971 Nova Scotia CFO of a boy with a withered leg who is healed at a cathedral altar. Of the walk back down the aisle the boy says, “it doesn’t matter anymore,” once Jesus has touched him.