BRIAN: It was almost like a great cloud of witnesses cheering me on! “Go for it!” And now just something breaks deep in my heart that I think really kept me going to press into Jesus!

DONNA: Wow! And you know I think it’s great that you had an opportunity as soon as that wonderful thing happened in your life you had an opportunity to give testimony.

BRIAN: Yes!

DONNA: Which I think is a great thing for advice for anybody. Anytime something happens, God does something wonderful in your life, it’s so important to give testimony.

BRIAN: Right.

DONNA: So you went back home now a born again believer. Years passed. You were serving. You’re a Christian. You were wanting to do as much as you could do.

BRIAN: Yeah.

DONNA: And you got invited back to, of all places, a youth camp!

BRIAN: I did! And you know I had been serving at some different youth camps and I was excited to come. And this is a little interesting. Before I actually went to the camp, probably a week before, I literally found myself in the middle of the night waking up and I was just crying and travailing and speaking in tongues which I never had done something like that before. And I kept hearing this thing. “Oh, but the love of God for camp! Oh, but the love of God for camp!”

DONNA: Mmm!

BRIAN: And I didn’t know how critical that thing was going to be until later. So we show up at the camp and you know it was just a regular camp. In fact, honestly it was my buddy and I were, the only ones, that were, doing a Bible study in a Christian camp. And we did a thing called “The Cross and the Flame.”  

DONNA: Yes. So it’s like a class. 

BRIAN: It was a class we were doing. Yeah.

DONNA: A class you offered. 

BRIAN: And we had about 7 people show up out of 300 so it wasn’t really that great, right?

DONNA: It wasn’t that popular! [Laughs]

BRIAN: So we just taught a little bit about what we knew about Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Well, something incredible happened that evening that was remarkable. All of a sudden these kids just start to worship! And as they’re worshipping God I mean just the presence gets really, really thick! And I hadn’t seen these kids at all do this. They hadn’t been in an environment for that. They had never been taught that. 

DONNA: Uh-huh.

BRIAN: And they were praying prayers like, “Lord, let Your kingdom come!” And all of a sudden – it made some of the leaders there a little bit nervous. [Laughs] And they stopped it and said, “Okay, we’re going to move on.” And so we move on and we go outside and they were going to have this little thing where they actually wrote their sins on a card and threw it in the fire and you know just one of those camp things. 

DONNA: Yeah. Yeah.

BRIAN: And all of a sudden again they start worshipping, these kids! And again a nervousness comes to the leaders and they go up and they say “Hey, it’s time to stop. It’s time to go eat some s’mores.

DONNA: [Laughs]

BRIAN: Right? I mean literally just stops the thing. Right? We’re in the presence of God.

DONNA: When you don’t know what to do, just go eat s’mores! Right?

BRIAN: Exactly right! And so this 7th-grade boy comes up to me and tugs me on the shirt and says, “Brian.” He said, “How come every time the Holy Spirit comes, these pastors tell Him to go away?”  You know my mouth just dropped. I’m like, “I don’t know.” At that moment this girl comes running up and says to the young man is there something wrong with your sister? You know I thought maybe she had a heat stroke? She had an asthma attack? Whatever. Anyway, I walked over and she’s shaking on the ground speaking in tongues!   

DONNA: Whoa! [Laughs]