At campfire one night, a little girl was playing around – pulling the strings of my sweater and moving my hand around to touch my face. She suddenly moved my hand to her chest. She breathed deep.

“Ask me what do I do with my heart?” She said.

“What do you do with your heart?” I replied, curious as to what she meant.

“I don’t know. I’m trying to think in my body.”

This girl was about 4 years old. I don’t know what prompted the question or if she was really thinking about the answer, but I think it is a question all of Camp Stover has been asking this week. What do we do with our hearts? If God’s love really can encompass more than we could possibly imagine, what do we do with our hearts? If God is bigger than we think, what do we do with our hearts? What groups of people have we been excluding from our love because we haven’t believed God is truly bigger than our differences? How can we even begin to try to express that type of love to the world? To love so much can feel like an overwhelming task. It sounds like too large of a task; it sounds exhausting, not to mention stronger and bigger than us.

In a Bible study I attended, we were talking about prayer and the ways we pray. In one Bible verse we read, Jesus prayed for those around him – clarifying that he was not praying for the whole world but just for those people God had given to him. What do we do with our hearts? Maybe we should share them with those people God has given to us to love. We will have differences and hardships, but our job is to love one another.

When we talk about what it means to be peaceful, I think sometimes we take the conversation to extremes: no wars – wow, what a big answer! Or sitting in silence – what a small step! But maybe it would be more beneficial to talk about peace in a practical sense. I love talking in extremes, don’t get me wrong. I think we all do. But if we recognize that God gives us certain people, the people in our lives who we can love and learn peace with, then we are truly doing our best to follow in the way of Jesus.

Visiting Camp Stover yielded many joyous conversations. Some were complicated and others simple, but I think the most profound question I heard all week was: “What do you do with your heart?”

By Laura Hay, Youth Peace Advocate