Camps Farthest Out Messages on the subject of peace.
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Gertrude Dekock Keehn tells of an airman whose downed plane left him in the jungle overnight. A leopard rested its head on his knee after he told it, “the life in you is God, the life in me is God.” She calls the campers at the North Florida CFO in 1964 to the same practiced stillness.
John Hobbs tells campers that their weariness often comes from acting like the vineyard’s pruner, or even its trunk. Jesus actually calls them something else, “you da branch,” whose only two jobs are to abide in him and bear what the Spirit produces. He works through this from John 14 and 15 at the Florida Family CFO in 1998.
A friend once found Francis of Assisi praying nothing but “my God” through an entire night. Roland Brown makes that his picture of the gratitude that casts out anxiety. He works the same list through for the camps: perfect love for fear, and joy for fatigue.
Mary Light tells how a distant friend prayed the Lord’s Prayer over a girl before surgery, putting her name into every line. At that same moment the doctor’s flashlight found the leaking vein, which was mended that same hour. She teaches campers across the movement to make every request known to God with thanksgiving.
Home from nine months in South Africa and England, Gertrude Dekock Keehn tells the camps how a hurricane she once weathered tested who had truly let go of fear within. She also recounts a near miss on a collapsing mountain road and a small girl’s confession over a spoiled jersey.
Gertrude Dekock Keehn describes teaching boys at a reformatory school. She taught them to break down the prison bars around their souls rather than the ones on their cells. She closes on the value of quiet stillness after the boisterous joy that first draws people to the camps.
Starr Daily recalls a prison that gave him solid housing, a job no one could fire him from, and food he did not pay for. Still nobody there was happy, which he takes as proof that security without God first is no security. In his closing talk to the New Hampshire Winni CFO in 1960, he tells campers they came as prodigals and go home as sons of God.
A woman in Seattle once picked Starr Daily’s topic for him: “what to do with blue moods.” The five steps he wrote in his journal that night become this evening message to the 1961 Indiana CFO. They run from love thyself and know thyself to give thyself. Along the way come a parolee sure he was a compulsive criminal and a desert prospector who fed a coyote from his hand.
At the Indiana CFO in 1960, Roland Brown offers plain antidotes to the emotions that undercut a Christian life: fear, worry, anger and fatigue. He closes with two peaceful cows who watch a milk truck pass and admit it “makes one feel kind of inadequate.”
At the 1975 North Florida CFO camp, Jerry B. Walker preaches on fear, quoting Psalm 27’s “perfect love casteth out all fear.” He tells how a man forced his way into his car at a red light, held a blade to his throat, and ordered him to drive, until uncontrollable laughter overtook Walker and the attacker demanded to be let out.