I’m the oldest of three siblings in my family. I have a younger sister (Lindsey) and a younger brother (Ethan). Here’s the deal, though, I am TEN YEARS older than my brother Ethan. If you were to look at Ethan and I side by side now, you might not be able to tell the age difference, at least, I like to think so. But when I was growing up, for reference, when I was a 15 year old teenager my brother would have only been five years old. That’s a HUGE difference! We were in such different life stages that it often made it difficult for us relate. I was in high school when Ethan would have been starting kindergarten!

As you can imagine, it took some years for Ethan to get to the age where we had many of the same interests and desires. Now, Ethan and I can relate and talk about almost anything! We like many of the same things now. A few years ago, in an effort for Ethan and I to spend some time together we decided to go out, just the two of us, and do some rustic camping. At the time, my in-laws owned a fairly large family farm in Indiana. Now, nobody currently lived on the farm, but the property was rented out to a local farmer to come in and farm the land. Ethan and I decided to head to the farm, drive my jeep as deep into the woods as we could get it, and set up a campsite for a night or two. Literally, we found a spot that looked like a good spot to sleep for the night and decided that’s where we would stay. Now, we wanted to try some survival skills while we were at it. We didn’t want to use a lighter or matches to start our fire, we wanted to use our survival tools (flint and steel) to start our fire. It took a loooong time for us to get it, but we eventually did! We didn’t even bring water with us. We went down to the creek, filtered some water, and even boiled it over our fire for good measure. We didn’t bring the usual camping food with us we brought the freeze dried survival food and military MRE’s.

We didn’t even bring a tent. Instead, we brought camping hammocks and spent the time finding the perfect trees in which to hang our hammocks. This might sound crazy to some that don’t enjoy the outdoors, but to Ethan and I, we were loving it! Well, we were loving it until….we settled into our hammocks for the night, got comfortable and then heard in the distance a few rumbles of thunder…and then the flood gates opened and it all broke loose! This wasn’t just a thunderstorm this was a downpour with some serious winds…and we were in the middle of woods surrounded by trees! This storm was BAD NEWS! We quickly realized we were quite literally in danger and we broke down our camp in record time! It took hours for us to set up….it took minutes for us to tear it down and get out of dodge.

We found ourselves soaking wet, hours from home, and in the middle of the night, with no place to sleep…or so we thought. The family farm had an old, seldom used camper on part of the property. I was never more thankful for a leaky, musty, mouse infested camper than I was that night to seek shelter in.

You could say much about that night was bad news. We had spent so much time setting up our campsite and we didn’t even get to sleep in it! That storm in the pitch-black woods of Indiana, had us scared. You could say we had a pretty bad night.

Yet, when I look back on it, despite the obstacles, despite the bad news, there was good news. My brother was good news. We were two brothers that growing up didn’t spend much time together. Yet, here we were spending some serious time together. That was a memory I’ll never forget! That leaky, musty, mouse infested camper was good news in a really bad storm.

Life is scary sometimes, and often feels like it’s filled with bad news. Yet even through bad news, there often is good news too. We might just have to look a little bit harder for it.

Jesus was and is good news and he calls us to be good news too.

Let’s talk more about this on Sunday…