Sue | Retreat Owner

Speaker: Sue Crumpler

Sue Crumpler : Hi, Dia, this is Sue. Um So my story is that for the last seven years, I've been creating a church camp for our church and the kids in our area. And I've been really excited about it. It's been a long drawn out process of buying land and um then purchasing it more land and clearing the land. And so it's taken a long time. Um So I was really excited last fall when we finally began breaking ground on the project. So, um I had gone to the church leaders frequently um throughout the six years telling them, you know, what I was doing and they seemed very excited about it. And so, um when I told them groundbreaking had started, um they were very excited and they said that they would be out soon, but they did not know exactly when they could come. They were busy. They had um Halloween events and they had community events and one by one, they had um you know, these, these excuses as to why they couldn't come, but I knew they were busy. So I didn't think anything about it. So then um the edge leadership started and I was really excited because I didn't want to look stupid when they came out and I didn't know anything about leading. And so, um, I started in and then I was beginning to be a little bit embarrassed about how small my vision was, um, because I felt like it maybe wasn't big enough, but yet I was doing what the Lord told me to do. So God's in it. So it's gonna be good. right? So then um I was really getting drained financially. Um But I knew the church would step in at some point. And so um Graham cook started to say about how the Lord always has provisions for your visions. And um I was diving deep into the training and praying that God would I open up the eyes of my understanding and during my periods of creativity, I was really seeing what God was going to be doing on my land. And I was always seeing many, many Children being saved. And then about a month into the training, I woke up one morning and I realized it had been five months since I had told the church about it. And um they were busier than ever with all of their community events and their Prades and everything. And I suddenly dawned on me that they were not interested in a place of rest and I was rather devastated. I thought Lord, what am I gonna do now? You know. But I started to just say, Lord, what can you be for me? Now, in this situation that you couldn't be for me any other way and um continue with the training, continue with the learning and really opening up my eyes and my mind to um God's ways are higher than mine. So I was asking God just to open up my eyes to what he might see and have him store then out of nowhere. Um we had a realtor from Dallas, uh come to our place and he got out of his car and could not stop raving about how wonderful my place was and how everybody in Dallas wants to come for a weekend at a place like mine. He said, you're right a mile and a half off of the main highway that takes Dallas people to the parks in Oklahoma. And he said, but nobody has a place like yours. You have the animals, you have the sheep, you have the goats, you have a cow that people can pet, you have horses and he's like, you have a huge area that can handle groups and we can't have that. He said, just finish what you're doing and put it on airbnb. And um I was just so excited that he was excited about my place that I didn't hear what he was actually saying until the next morning. And my time with the Lord, my deep work time that I always had with the Lord and all of a sudden, the Lord just opened up my eyes to what he was saying. And then a few weeks after that, I met a marketer from Dallas and he repeated the exact same thing to me over and over again and he said he'll just finish your project. You will be booked out months in advance. People do not have anything like that. I came from Dallas, I came from marketing. I know what I'm talking about. So I'm so excited. I feel like I have gone. Um, you know, initially, I felt like Jesus when he came into his own and his own received him. Not. And, um, but now I realized that maybe it's not the church people that need my camp. Maybe it's the highways and the byways and the world that needs a place of rest and the edge leadership has opened up my eyes to a whole new possibility. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and God bless all of you.