Camps Farthest Out Messages on the subject of Praise and Thanksgiving
Home » The Library » Subject » Praise & Thanksgiving
Barbara Ann Chase teaches Dick Eastman’s five-minute prayer clock for daily devotions. She leads campers in thanking God out loud for ordinary conveniences, from a flight attendant’s suitcase wheels to telephone lines. Spoken gratitude, she says, is the discipline behind hearing God clearly. The teaching comes from the Florida Family CFO in 1984.
John Hobbs Jr. describes worship as pressing through a crowd to touch Jesus, the way the woman with a twelve-year hemorrhage did in Luke 8. He tells how his wife’s severe pregnancy panic attacks broke only when she worshiped alone, in a talk to the Florida Family CFO in 2002.
Opening the Texas CFO in 1957 with a meditation on Psalm 46, Gertrude Dekock Keehn reads “God is our refuge and strength” as a call to stillness. She then traces how her prayers grew from anxious pleading into simply saying “oh, I love you, God” many times a day, even in torrents of rain.
John Hobbs distinguishes praise from worship at the Florida Family CFO in 1998. He points to the tribe of Judah camped nearest the tabernacle, and to King David dancing half dressed before the ark while his wife Michal despised him for it from a window. He then invites campers to communion as an act of costly worship rather than routine service.
At the 1964 Minnesota Koronis CFO, Genevieve Parkhurst reads Psalm 116 and walks through the five senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, as things to thank God for. She then names worship itself as a sixth sense built into every person. She recalls her own childhood, learning the psalms as her father read from the Bible each evening. She closes by inviting campers into that same gratitude.
Mary Light recalls turning her own self-pity over to God after a friend twisted a loving letter against her. A line from the ninety-second Psalm restored her to joy. She quotes a fellow believer’s description of God as “the world’s greatest un-messer,” a lesson she carries to the movement.
Genevieve Parkhurst opens a session at the camps with Psalm 116’s question, “what shall I render unto the Lord.” She counts blessings from sight to home to family, and tells of her father, who sold land at a loss rather than break his word. She closes by urging campers to give thanks for the health they already have as a healing practice.
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.
A grieving man dreams his way into a heavenly house and finds the chair the collectors had taken back. His wife tells him to sit down, because it is paid for. Our inheritance is Jesus himself, Tommy Tyson says at the West Virginia Capon Springs CFO in 1967, and we claim it the way a child holds out a plate and says thank you before the food comes.
At the 1971 Nova Scotia CFO, Tick Watson leads the singing of “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” He then illustrates gratitude and humor with a windshield note reading “expect a miracle.” He also tells of a woman, paralyzed eleven years, who blesses passersby she sees only in a mirror.