The moment I started letting myself feel those emotions

Summer staff at Washington Family Ranch after my sophomore year of high school helped me a whole bunch. I went for a month, and at the time I left I was really angry and just bitter and had a lot of things going on. My mom was getting remarried at the time. I was really pissed off about everything in life — things were not going how I wanted. So I thought it would be really nice to do summer staff and be gone for a month, just to get away. I go through this entire month of summer staff thinking I was engaging with people, but not really opening up. In the last weeks I was left wondering what the point of all this was. I was trying to figure out what was going on and why God wanted me at camp. I’m really good at missing the point of things and not knowing what to learn from these experiences.

The night before we went home, there was this big event they do that gets emotional. Bitter little angry me was thinking, “Why are people crying? That’s so dumb.” Note that I haven’t cried in two years and have been suppressing all these feelings. Then that night in bed, I thought about it, about the way God had been moving these people, and I started sobbing. It was a transformative moment for me — the moment I started letting myself feel those emotions. I realized how angry I had been, how I had been too bitter to turn to God. Now I look back and I see how that led to me learning how to handle emotions in a healthy way, and to let God be a part of that. My relationship with God strengthened because of that experience.