Re-reading the verses surrounding Paul's assertion, I am struck by how much of what he says reminds me of the week I just spent. For example, "For Christ's love compels us... And [Christ] died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him."

Hundreds of people volunteered to make this camp happen, from high schools students serving us meals in the dining hall, leaders pursuing girls back home and bringing them to camp, to women sending us handmade blankets to give to each baby during the week.

Paul continues, "So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view." I think too much of our society, a sixteen-year-old girl with a baby is viewed as a fairly hopeless cause. However, this week we cheered as girls stepped off their buses and descended into camp. These girls were served meals, received free childcare, and were pampered during a Spa day.

The passage concludes, "And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though Christ were making his appeal through us." While the girls heard from speakers and mentors about Christ's love for them; I and other childcare workers made Christ's appeal by loving and caring for their babies.
The babies were divided up into nursery groups called pods, according to their age. I was in the Frog pod with nine month olds. We had nine babies and seven childcare workers. The youngest volunteer in our pod had just graduated from high school and our oldest was 81. We were in the pod with babies most days from breakfast until lunch and from supper to around 11 p.m.

Although I spent time with all the babies in my pod, one boy named Tony quickly captured most of my attention. I fell in love with this tiny, adorable, fussy baby. His mom said she had never left him before, and you could tell because he would get upset while she was away.

However, we bonded during the week, and as long as I was holding him and walking he would be calm. As a result, I clocked a lot of hours carrying him in my arms, walking in circles around the hall and up and down the road behind our nursery. It was exhausting, but during those hours God drew me closer to His heart, taught me things, and filled me with love for that little boy.

During the week I was reading a book called Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. In one chapter Bell describes what I call Holy Moments, times when, as Bell says, "we cannot escape the simple fact that there is way more going on around us then we realize."

For me this week was full of sacred moments. Some I shared with others, like when we listened at the end of the week as girls stood up individually in front of the camp and declared that they has begun a relationship with the Lord. Other moments were cloaked in the ordinary. One afternoon I took a crying Tony outside and sat with him on the side of a grassy hill. The day was beautiful. I blew bubbles and Tony cuddled against me playing with the grass and reaching for the bubble wand, and I remembered Bell's descriptions of times when, for a moment, everything seems to be right in the world. Looking at Tony I said aloud, "This is holy." He stared back at me, broke into a huge smile (the first I'd seen from him in over a day) and threw his head back to stare at the blue sky.

In many ways the week was extraordinary -- where else do you see so many teen mothers and babies together in one place?

In other ways it was far from glamorous, full of wet diapers that leaked onto my shirt, wailing infants, and lots of baby drool. Throughout it all I was reminded of the story of Jesus healing the paralytic. This man who is paralyzed has four friends carry him to the home where Jesus is, then they climb onto the roof and physically dig a hole in it so that they can lower their friend down to the feet of Jesus. When Jesus sees the faith of the man's friends, he heals him.

Changing dirty diapers, bouncing babies on my knee, and pushing strollers, I felt like the friends, digging through a roof one handful at a time to bring a friend to Jesus. I volunteered in faith, and was a witness to broken lives beginning to heal as girls met Jesus for the first time.

By the end of the week I was exhausted, but on the trip home God reminded me how ministry is not something we can mark on a calendar with a beginning and end. I arrived at the airport to find that my flight was cancelled. I was at the back of a spiraling line of people waiting to make new travel arrangements. During the three-hour wait in line I made friends with the woman behind me. Sharing my week with her and the ministry of YoungLives was extra meaningful because twenty years earlier, she had been a teenage mother of two daughters.

While my travel agent was on hold for nearly an hour trying to confirm my new flight, I chatted with him and his colleagues, and he marveled to a co-worker that I was the first person who had not been annoyed by the wait but was actually laughing. He said he wanted to move to the South because people in New York weren't like that.

I was unable to get a flight out until the next day, but spending the night in the airport became an adventure when I ran into one of the groups that had just been at camp and were stranded for the night as well. I latched onto the small group of teenagers, their babies, and leaders, who, like me, are in college.

I thought my childcare was over for the week, but I ended up spending the night playing with and eventually putting to sleep a highly energetic three-year-old boy. I stayed awake all night, sitting on a hard plastic chair in the Newark baggage claim, with a baby girl asleep on my stomach. It was another of those moments that is far from enchanting, but beautiful just the same. A time when I knew without a doubt that I was in exactly the right place and that in the midst of something ordinary I was Christ's ambassador, as though he was making his appeal through me.