Written by: Pastor Doug Cassel | Bethel Baptist Church | Linton, IN | Coach since 2010

I did not have the privilege of attending many camps growing up. Football Camp started after I graduated high school, and I doubt I would have known about it in the pre-internet/social media era. However, since 2010, I have attended Football Camp as a coach and have taken young people to junior and senior camps for over 25 years. The hardest part about camp is keeping the decisions you make once you return home.

I remember the first year I attended a camp in the summer of 1992. Following the invitation at the last service on a Thursday night, every camper was invited to come forward and take a small block of wood, just over one square inch in size. Young men, seated on the tabernacle’s left side, and young ladies, seated on the right, walked the aisle, picked up a block, and exited their respective sides of the building. We then walked down a torch-lit gravel lane toward a large bonfire. There, we cast our blocks of wood into the fire, symbolizing our decisions to purge and cleanse our attitudes, affections, and actions. As the fire consumed those things we desired to be banished from our lives, we sang and prayed, hoping that the spark God had lit in our hearts would continue to burn in the days to come.

The following year, I returned to camp, and what unfolded was an unusual week of revival in the hearts of nearly three hundred young people—unlike anything I had experienced before or since. On the closing night, a great storm rained down and thundered over the camp, almost as if the Devil wanted to quench the fire in our hearts. That year, there would be no torch-lit path to the bonfire. But I remember how the camp director refused to let the Devil extinguish the fire. Satan might have prevented a bonfire, but he could never quench the fire in our hearts.

Instead, each of us came forward, picked up a block of wood, and did something different. We wrote the date and the decision we had made on our blocks and took them home, placing them somewhere we would see them often and remember our commitments. That was over thirty years ago, and that block of wood still sits in my office. I learned a great lesson about keeping decisions: the best way to keep a decision is to keep it before you.