July 2013 Newsletter

One of our superstar high school teens - Caleb and his mom
Roxanne as they assist handing out water at a recent
homecoming ceremony at Fort Stewart.

Summertime; it’s the part of the season for most students to be out and about, playing, horsing around the neighborhood with friends, riding bikes, water balloon fights, staying up late hours, sleeping in until after noon. However, that’s not exactly the life for the typical Fort Stewart/Hunter teenager. This year rings a different tone for many of our students. Dad, mom, brother or another loved one is coming home from another deployment. For most of our youth at these locations, they’ve experienced a number of deployments in their household and something stable has been hard to find. Our summer Club program has been phenomenally blessed and has been well above average on attendance. We provide that place where our students can be themselves and share their concerns and cares about someone who is deployed.  Their peers can understand what they are going through.

We’ve had the chance for an ongoing partnership with the Chapel Next community and the Protestant Women of the Chapel ladies of an outreach ministry opportunity on Fort Stewart to help provide water to the families who are waiting anxiously for their loved ones to arrive on the ground at the local ‘homecoming’ ceremonies. Sometimes these events are in the dead heat of the day. Just to offer that quenching water in a loving manner is enough to show how much we care. We’ve provided the water as well as the manpower to assemble the giveaways so that people have information about our Chapel communities. It’s a way our youth can be Christ’s hands and feet on the ground in a mightily impactful way that hits home ever so dear – to see a loved one back from deployment.

Chaplain (COL) Meek (left) during a recent promotion
ceremony just days before his retirement.

If it isn’t tough enough to endure having a family member gone for a period, then it’s a regular thing in the summer to endure another move, aka, PCS. This person who is moving on has had the biggest impacts upon Club Beyond in his tenure since being at Fort Stewart and retired this month from over 30 years of service to our country. Chaplain (COL) Terry Meek was not only a pivotal piece in the development of the youth ministry programs at Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield, but was a true man of character and of Christ Himself. He poured not only into the program, but poured into my own life in giving me insight and thoughts as the program blossomed in his brief one year in Georgia. Teenage lives were changed under his reign and to that I am indebted to his time, care and integrity as our Garrison Chaplain. His biggest insight into the ministry included keeping things simple and doing a few things well rather than a lot in a mediocre way. I ask each of you to please pray for him and his wife as they transition into retirement and enjoy the fruits of his labor for the military family and well beyond while he is retired.

Amy and I on Jekyll Island, Georgia,
under the firework-lit sky as we were
engaged that evening.

Finally, I want to share with you some amazing God-filled news as of late. I had been courting a fine lady, Amy Parker, back from my home church in Kansas City, and as of 4 July 2013, she and I were engaged. I proposed to her on the shoreline of Jekyll Island, Georgia, under the firework-lit sky as we committed to one another to become one-in-three with Christ moving forward. She and I plan on marrying on the same island in Georgia on the 4^th of July 2014 after she completes her Master’s Degree in family and marriage counseling.

Prayer requests: upcoming HS Summer Camp in Brevard, NC, from 28 July to 3 August; completion of MS Summer Camp – that students really come together for a passion for Christ in their experience; the recent engagement to Amy Parker and the distance between us