Sioux Lookout,
Ontario Canada
God Brings Hope at a Winter Camp
by Linda Martin
As I was preparing for the upcoming youth retreat, I was thinking that there would be about ten to twenty students attending. So I was taken aback when we arrived at the camp for our first session to find that over 50 young people had signed up for the weekend retreat. Rick and I had been invited to be the speakers and lead music for this annual youth event at this camp. The annual retreat is an outreach to the native students who are out for high school in urban settings away from their home communities.
As native people, as native families, and as a native young person of fourteen or fifteen years old, it is part of our painful life experience where the young people have to leave their families and their communities if they want to get an education beyond the grade eight level. Most of the twenty-five or so isolated native communities in our area have only up to a grade eight level education offered in their communities, with the exception of a few that do have up to grades nine and ten.
As we began our first session and I saw all those faces of the young people, I was
reminded of my own experience when, as a teenager, I had to leave my family and my community for high school. It is one of the painful life experiences that I’ve had. As I look back to that experience with a counselor’s perspective, I can say that it was a traumatic one. It was traumatic as a sixteen-year-old because, all of a sudden, I found myself hundreds of miles away from my home, in a world of hundreds of non-native students who seemed to just swirl around me in how they moved and spoke. The student population of this high school alone, that I had been sent to, was double the population of my little home village that I came from. I found this to be very frightening. I was not used to being around so many people who looked different and spoke in a different language. I was in culture shock that first month. It was an experience that immobilized me and caused me to want to withdraw from the world around me. At the same time, there was such an overwhelming sense of loneliness and homesickness. I wanted to go home!
This particular weekend brought memories of being away from my home at a young age and how hard it had been for me. I could just imagine how hard it must be to be away at school for these students. The statistics in our area still show that not many of our young people graduate from high school with a grade twelve education. It is still a big struggle for us as a people group. My heart just went out to the students who were there.
In my first session, I focused on the places where they could be in their hearts. My purpose in doing this was to validate what they may be going through at the present time. I mentioned how there could be places of stress that come from unfinished homework and the deadline of assignments. There could be just plain homesickness of being away from home, and add with that, the pain from relationship conflicts with their peer groups. I then spoke of how God may seem far if they are carrying all of this stuff in their hearts. I also mentioned how we as parents, caregivers, and church leaders can often make them feel so disconnected and alone. Yet, I shared that God knows and sees them exactly where they are and has “not forgotten them”.
I ended the session with the story of David the shepherd boy who became a king for a nation. He was a young shepherd boy who was left alone way out in the fields to look after the sheep. The older brothers were the ones who were called when the prophet Samuel came to Jesse to look for a king from among his sons. The father, Jesse, did not even think to call David to be one of his sons that Samuel might choose from. But God had not forgotten David. He actually had David in mind when He sent the prophet to Jesse. He wanted David, the shepherd boy, to be the next king for the people of Israel.
The next two sessions that Rick and I did, the fifty or more students were attentive and listening. For the second session, I felt the urgency to tell them about Jesus. I felt urgency to tell them that Jesus was real. I contrasted to them how they 
live in world of i-pods, i-phones, texting, television, magazines, etc. where there is very little or no room for them to hear about Jesus. By the end of the second session, they were starting to respond to the teaching. One young woman came to speak to me after the session. She shared that she had been assaulted. She was still experiencing the trauma from that experience. I met and counseled with her until she calmed down and she was able to begin to talk about her pain.
Toward the end of our time together, she shared how her grandma who died since then, used to sing a song to her in our Cree language. This song meant a lot to her! I encouraged her to sing it and told her that I might know it and if I did, I would sing with her. Sure enough as she began singing, hesitantly at first, I knew the song. I quietly joined her in her song and oh, did she ever love that! When we were done, she could not stop chuckling. She changed from this young woman who was filled with fear, literally shaking, to a young woman who was singing and chuckling.
I never ceased to be amazed how God touches and changes the hearts of people right in front of our eyes. I see this over and over again in our ministry as people are being touched in their pain. It also confirms to me again how counseling needs to be creative, in how we touch the hearts of the hurting people, and how we bring Jesus to them. It was truly a blessing to be with this young woman that night. It was also a blessing to see how God used His message of hope in the lives of many of the fifty other young people that cold weekend in February. We give praise to God.