I just spent three months at summer camp. That’s the simple way of saying it. The more whimsical and accurate way would be to say: I recently returned from a three month adventure in the stunningly beautiful Northwoods of Wisconsin, where I was given the incredible gift of a sabbath season and I fell more in love with Jesus.

I never expected dedicating a whole summer to camp would be possible: there have always been music and sports practices to attend, summer school or adult jobs to show up to. But this summer the invitation was clear. There were no weddings or family vacations I would be missing. No jobs I would miss either, as I quit those in May. It was wide open time and space to simply receive whatever the Lord had for me.

Over the course of the three months, I felt my heart come alive again. It took weeks for me to be able to sit in stillness and learn to breathe deeply. It took even longer for the lingering effects of stress and burnout from the past season to fully fade. But once they did, I felt lighter, freer, and more content than ever before.

The Lord consistently told me in the early summer days that he wanted to soften my heart. I didn’t expect he would do it by teaching me to hope again.

For years, my heart has been hardened to hope. I’ve trusted God is good, but I’ve also learned sometimes goodness comes through painful lessons. It has felt impossible to believe that God offers goodness with no strings attached. It has felt foolish to hope that the soft, tender parts of me I fight so hard to protect might actually be a gift to myself and the world if I let them be seen.

This summer, I was overwhelmed by a firehose of God’s goodness that softened every hard edge and broke down my walls of self-protection. I couldn’t do anything but open my mouth and drink of the abundant goodness. It was everywhere: in creation, in the faces of my friends, in our worship, in the laughter and even tears of campers. Everywhere I looked, God was moving because we expected him to.

When we expect little of God, we often find it. But when staff, cabin leaders, and campers alike show up to camp expectant to meet the living God and see him move in miraculous ways, we find him and it takes our breath away!

As I showed up expectantly and dared to put the full weight of my hope in the goodness of God, it felt about as unstable and awkward as my first attempts at water skiing. In both skiing and life, I started repeating to myself, “Keep your feet together!” It was a reminder, even when forces pressed against me and I felt like I would fall, to focus on my one task of staying grounded in my calling to live in freedom and bask in goodness.

The more I lived into freedom with my feet together, the more confident I became standing firmly on hope. I started embracing the full emotional spectrum, which meant some days being extremely angry and other days giddy with excitement. I felt like a teenager experiencing new emotions for the first time, because this season really is my first experience living from an open and honest heart rather than a carefully guarded heart.

As I reflect on this shift in me—from cautious and calculated to full and free—I can’t help but be grateful. I still have hard edges that need refining, but major battles have been won in the victory of learning to hope again. I have tasted and seen God’s goodness with no strings attached, and I have a whole summer of memories as proof that it is both safe and FUN to dive headfirst into the ocean of God’s grace and swim around.

Popsicles and polaroids became ways to mark moments of goodness. I cherished the freedom, simplicity, and delight of eating popsicles on boat docks with friends. I celebrated my poor attempts at water skiing and chose to laugh at the way my body collapsed like a taco. I stared for hours at sunsets over the lake, and marveled that I had capacity and time to simply sit and behold. I took photos of favorite places around camp with my polaroid camera and gave them to friends. Popsicles, polaroids, laughter, contentedness, delight—these are tangible markers of goodness I got to share with people I love because of a God I love and who loves me more than I ever imagined.

Friends, God is good! It is worth it to wait for, hope for, and expect to see his goodness. It is worth making radical life changes to follow his call.

This summer the Lord did what he said he would do: he softened my heart. He let me fall in love with him again, and to feel love again. He taught me to delight in abundant goodness and embrace a life of freedom. And the best part is goodness and freedom have followed me home. Or more likely, goodness has been around me the whole time and now I have the eyes and heart to celebrate it.

“Those who put their hope in you will never be put to shame.” (Psalm 25:3)