Day 2 at Living Waters

I have just wrapped up my second full day at Living Waters Bible Camp in Danforth, Maine. The name is well-chosen because the camp is located on the shores of a lake that defines the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. On this side, you are in the U.S. On the other side, Canada. This morning when I asked how many Canadians were at the conference, I would estimate that 1/3rd of the audience raised their hands. All of them come from nearby New Brunswick. I commented that I had been listening to weather reports from the Maritime provinces on Canadian radio, and evidently it’s winter on the other side of the lake because the high today in New Brunswick was 24 and the low 15. “It’s snowing,” a man said. Someone tried to claim it was the metric system, but like a typical American I refused to hear anything about it. Give me inches and feet and pounds and ounces any day. I know what a half-pound of salami is. Is a half-kilogram larger or smaller? I don’t know and it hurts my brain to think about it. And don’t even start with me about Centigrade. I’m a Fahrenheit man all the way. 

Meanwhile we’re having a great time. Because it’s the final week of summer camp, everyone seems in a festive mood. Noted evangelist Wendall Calder founded the camp in 1970 as as way of reaching young people in northern New England and eastern Canada. Lehman Strauss spoke at Living Waters many times and even built a speaker’s cottage that we stayed in the first time I spoke here. Now the speakers stay at the First Setter’s Lodge several miles away. The accommodations are exceedingly nice, very new and spacious, and beautifully appointed. 

I’ve enjoyed getting to know Bob and Darleen Puffer, our guest musicians. He comes out of a nightclub background, she comes from a church background, and together they make quite a pair. They both love people and have big hearts for ministry. He’s amazingly gifted on a wide variety of guitars and mandolins and other string instruments while she does a wonderful job playing the synthesizer and singing. Plus he is sort of a stand-up comedian with a great sense of humor. Tonight Bob sang the “Frog Song” and had us all singing along with him on the chorus. Actually, I’ve never teamed up with anyone quite like the Puffers, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it, in part because you literally have no idea what Bob is going to say or do. You would think it would be a hard act to follow, but I’ve found it easy to preach when they finish singing.

This week I’m doing a series of message from the book of Daniel. I’m taking one message on each of the first six chapters and then doing a message on prayer and spiritual warfare from Daniel 10 and a message on “Who is the Antichrist?” from Daniel 11. With the Beijing Olympics, the sudden warfare in Georgia, the economic uncertainties, and Time magazine talking about the Antichrist and political ads, there is no shortage of contemporary illustrations.

Tomorrow morning we’ll look at Daniel 3, the heroic story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the three Hebrew teenagers who survived the fiery furnace. They would not bow, they would not bend, they would not burn. Lots of great lessons from that passage.