When I was asked to lead our second-ever Young Adult Camp at Moose Lake Pentecostal Camp at the end of June 2023, I had a lot of optimism. God had revealed to me that He wanted to set young adults free of the things holding them back. I pictured God setting people free from heart issues like feelings of insecurity and insignificance, and given that I continually see how prevalent these issues are in young adults, I was looking forward to an impactful camp.

However, when I began heading out on the “campaign trail,” trying to “woo” young adults to make the drive out to Moose Lake, my optimism began to fade. For five and a half months, I spread the word about the camp everywhere I could think of, and I just kept getting rejections or indifference. Three weeks before the camp was to begin, I was lying in bed, sick to my stomach, wrought with worry, as I looked at a registration list of a mere six people. I was crying out to God in the middle of my feelings of deep angst when, all of a sudden, I just felt God reassure me that He was moving and I just needed to put my trust in Him.

Within the next couple of days, a deluge of registrations came in from all sorts of places that I didn’t even advertise to, easily surpassing last year’s registration numbers. Had someone told me that was going to happen a few days prior, I wouldn’t have believed them. The most surprising registrations to come in were a few dozen young adult Ukrainian refugees that had been sent to Edmonton within the past couple of months.

When camp began, God began healing people far beyond what I expected. God had much bigger plans than I did, and He began to minister to the hearts of the attendees in absolutely stunning ways. Some had gone through severely traumatic and abusive childhoods, and they encountered a supernatural touch of the love of God that broke down walls in their hearts that had been there for many years. One girl got radically set free from feelings of self-hatred, and she came up to me and said with tears of joy in her eyes, “I don’t even recognize myself; everything is different now.”

God also did some major heart surgery on the Ukrainian refugees in attendance to the point that the church leader who brought them came up to me and said, “The camp has been beyond my wildest dreams.” This group of Ukrainian refugees really touched my heart because they

were supremely thankful for every aspect of the camp. I felt so immensely privileged that God would entrust such precious souls into my care that of all the places He could’ve sent them to receive a touch from Him, they ended up at Moose Lake’s Young Adult Camp with me.

Like so many others, I left that camp with a profound emotional healing and a deeper trust in God. It was such a tremendous experience to be able to have a front-row seat to see God move in a way that is far beyond anything I could ever ask or imagine.

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