by Jeremy Camp
My parents had a heart for troubled people—especially youth—and wanted to provide a stable home environment that most of them didn’t have. They did that even though we were struggling financially.
God always met our needs, though.
There was one teenager named Todd who lived with us. Todd was a big kid who could really eat. One day he opened the refrigerator and there wasn’t much on the shelves.
“Teri,” he asked my mom, “what are we going to have for supper?”
“Don’t worry about it,” my mom told him. “There’s food in there you just can’t see.”
Todd gave her a strange look and shut the refrigerator door.
As dinnertime neared, my mom put together everything she could find in the refrigerator and in the cabinets. When Todd came to the kitchen table, he did a double take when he saw a full spread of a wide variety of foods. Todd ate all he could and left the table amazed that so much food had come out of what had looked like so little.
No matter how accustomed our family became to seeing God provide, each instance still surprised us a bit. We truly understood that God was always meeting our needs.
THE BATTLE WITHIN
My mom likes to tell the story of when someone gave us a freezer full of liver. We ate a lot of liver for a while, and my mom remembers praying, “Oh, Lord, I just wish we had something different to eat.”
Shortly after praying that, she read in Deuteronomy where the Israelites were reminded of how the Lord had provided for them in the desert. The Israelites grumbled and complained because the Lord kept giving them manna to eat and they were tired of eating the same thing over and over.
As my mom was reading, the Lord reminded her, I’m providing for you. I am doing this to test you and to know what’s in your heart and to humble you. Then, when you come into the land of plenty, you won’t forget Me.
It hit my mom that God was providing for our needs but that our needs weren’t what the typical American would consider needs. My mom had not been raised in an environment of want. Her family had plenty in their household. They took nice vacations and stayed in nice hotels. It was nothing like the conditions we were growing up in.
But almost from the day my mom had become a Christian, she looked at times of need with this question in mind: What would it be like to be a missionary? She thought of missionaries and the conditions in which some of them chose to live to take the gospel message to the unsaved, and she chose to look at her surroundings with a “think missionary” mind-set. To this day, she still will hear of someone describing a seemingly difficult set of circumstances, make the quote marks sign with her fingers, and say, “Think missionary.”
With all the different people moving in and out of our home, my parents were very careful to make sure that, as their kids, we received the proper parent-child attention we needed. I don’t recall ever thinking the other kids were taking away from something I should have had. Looking back now, perhaps living with kids from difficult backgrounds helped me keep proper perspective on what I did have at home in my parents’ time and attention instead of what I did not have in material goods.
Still, though, I made some poor decisions in response to the circumstances we faced growing up.
At age four or five, I had asked Jesus into my heart, and I had grown up a good, churchgoing boy. Beginning in junior high and into my high school years, I began to stray.
I excelled in sports, and I worked out a lot and was in good shape. When I reached the age when I could play team sports in school—especially football—my athletic ability afforded me a “cool” status on campus.
I set out on a course to prove that I could do whatever I wanted. I honestly don’t think I was going through some sort of ultrarebellious stage, because I don’t know what I would have been rebelling against. I wasn’t angry at my parents. I wasn’t angry at the church. Even though we were poor, I wasn’t angry at what some would call “the system.” But I think that after growing up in humble surroundings, being a popular athlete in school made me want to test how far I could stretch my boundaries. I had missed out on some pleasures at home that my friends had enjoyed, I thought, so now I was going to have some fun. If anything, I was insecure and trying to be accepted.
I wound up in an internal tug-of-war. I knew what was right and was influenced positively at home by my parents and at church. Yet at the same time, my desire to be part of the “in” crowd was pulling me in the opposite direction.
To appease the “be cool” side of me, I started partying and drinking alcohol. When I drank, I felt braver and almost got into several fights. Because I was one of the strongest boys in my class, there really weren’t any takers for fights, so mostly I put on a display of macho bravado, knowing I probably wouldn’t have to back it up. Although I wouldn’t have minded if someone had dared to challenge me.
I also used my status and strength to stand up for those who were picked on. I wasn’t really interested in trying to gain acceptance from the superpopular kids—I wasn’t among the coolest of the cool and didn’t care to be. I did run with the popular crowd, but because I had been an underdog for much of my life, I kept an eye out for opportunities to protect the poorer or less popular kids who were ridiculed. If I saw someone in the underdog group being picked on, I’d step in and tell the bully to stop, and usually he would without my having to become the enforcer. Although I wasn’t always doing good things, I still had a lot of do-good in me.
I didn’t turn my back on God. I still went to church and did the church thing, even though one trait I admired about my parents was their intentionality in behaving the same away from church as they did at church.
I didn’t lose my sense of right and wrong. I knew the truth. If I was going to a party, I liked to drink a little before I got there so I’d already be a little numbed to the feeling of conviction I’d get while I was there.
At church, I would feel convicted about the wrong decisions I was making. I would tell God I was sorry and wanted to change. But then I would go to school the next morning and want to do the same things the others were doing. I wanted to do right, but at the same time I could not say no to what I knew was wrong.
It was the type of internal battle that Paul wrote about in Romans 7:21-25:
When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
I discovered that in my pursuit of having fun, I was only having some fun. The fun times weren’t lasting. They couldn’t last because, as I knew in my heart, the source of my fun was outside God’s will. And I would come to learn that the peace that comes from having fun inside God’s will is far better.
CHAPTER 3
SET FREE
My dad had a guitar that he would play in our house during our family worship and devotional times, and he often led worship at church. Even though his guitar was usually in plain sight at home, I never felt curious about trying to play it because sports—especially football—were my main interest.
One day when I was fourteen, though, I asked my dad if he could show me how to play a few chords. When he helped place the fingers of my left hand in the proper spots on the guitar’s fret board and I stroked my right thumb across the strings, that one chord sounded like a complete masterpiece.
“This is awesome!” I told my dad.
It’s difficult to explain, but having my hands on a guitar just felt natural. With my dad teaching me what he had learned on his own, I quickly began picking up the basics of playing. The guitar didn’t replace sports, but I did enjoy trying to learn how to play songs.
With a knack for playing by ear, I started playing songs I had heard. Songs with a rock edge were my favorites.
Secular music wasn�
�t allowed in our home, but when my parents were out of the house, I would turn on the radio and crank up a classic rock or top-40 radio station. I got in trouble once for changing into a Lenny Kravitz T-shirt after I left our house. I changed out of the shirt before I got home, but my mom somehow found out and got mad at me.
“How can you wear something like that?” she wanted to know.
I began playing songs I heard on the radio by mainstream groups such as Pearl Jam, Aerosmith, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. From the Christian music I listened to at home (when my mom or dad were there), I also picked up songs by Mylon LeFevre & Broken Heart, DeGarmo & Key, and Resurrection Band.
Music was a big part of our family time. In addition to worshiping together and playing Christian CDs at home, our family attended big Christian music festivals—Ichthus (in Kentucky) and Cornerstone (in Illinois). I remember attending one Cornerstone festival and thinking, Someday, it would be cool to sing on that stage. Of course, I also would watch a college or pro football game on TV and think, Someday, it would be cool to play on that field.
As picking up the musical elements became more natural, I began noticing how the lyrics of some songs seemed to tell the story of the writer’s life. I could tell that music could be an outlet for an artist’s feelings and emotions, and I took note of how my emotions stirred as I played.
During one of those tug-of-war contests between knowing right and doing wrong, I wrote the words to a song of my own for the first time.
The song started with me looking in a mirror and seeing a figure whose life was all bent out of shape and in total despair:
I check my separate ways from You.
I really don’t know what to do.
You got to set me free,
Lord, You got to set me free.
You got to set me free from sin.
The song included lines that really stated where I was at that moment in my life:
I know Your doors are open
Anytime I want to come in.
But whenever I come close to You,
I turn back to sin.
I titled the song “Set Me Free.” The tune sounded a lot like “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” by Poison, because that song’s melody had been in my head when the lyrics came to me. I’ve been asked many times about my first song and why I’ve never recorded it. I haven’t recorded it because it sounds way too close to “Every Rose” to record, although I have played it in concerts. For fun in some shows, I’ve started singing “Set Me Free” and then slid smoothly into “Every Rose” to illustrate how similar they are.
My first performance of “Set Me Free” was for my parents, right after I wrote it. They listened and then carefully read the words. They read over them very carefully.
To that point, I had hidden my partying and drinking from them. One time when I had been out drinking with a friend, my friend had drunk a whole lot more than I had and was in no condition to drive. Even though I wasn’t exactly sober myself and was too young to have a driver’s license, I drove us the ten or fifteen minutes to my house. We walked in the door and I told my parents, “We’re tired. We’re going to go crash upstairs.”
Driving home that night was one of those decisions I’d love the chance to do over. I should have just called my parents to come get us. The consequences would have been far less than if I had been caught driving under the influence and without a license.
My parents later told me they knew I was wandering into potentially dangerous areas during that time, but they had no idea how far I had gone because I’d been careful to make sure they didn’t find out. I wasn’t rebelling against them—I was just doing my own thing. If I had been rebelling, I would have wanted them to know at least some of what I was doing. But that wasn’t the case, because I didn’t want to hurt them. I didn’t want to disappoint my parents or let them down.
As my mom and dad read the lyrics of “Set Me Free,” serious looks came over their faces.
“That is pretty heavy,” my dad said. “Are you okay?”
They’ve caught me! I immediately thought. I went into cover-up mode.
“I was thinking of April when I wrote that,” I said.
My sister was doing her own thing too. Except she had gone further than I had, even getting into drugs for a while. Plus, my parents knew more about what she was doing than about what I was doing.
“Okay,” my parents said, and I hid a sigh of relief that I had dodged getting busted that time.
But I couldn’t dodge the message in my first song.
PUSHING THE RESET BUTTON
The summer after my sophomore year at McCutcheon High School in Lafayette, I attended a weeklong summer camp in California.
My dad had started Harvest Chapel in Lafayette when I was fourteen. Harvest is a Calvary Chapel church and part of the fellowship of nondenominational churches that began in 1965 with the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, pastored by Chuck Smith.
Because the church was new and small, there wasn’t a youth group yet, so I attended the youth group at the Calvary Chapel we had attended in Crawfordsville, about thirty miles from Lafayette.
The association of Calvary Chapel churches had a summertime youth camp in California that attracted teenagers from across the country, and my youth group went to the camp. We held fund-raisers to raise money for the trip, and someone sponsored me to cover my remaining cost.
With what was going on in my life at that age, my excitement about going to California for camp was much more social than spiritual.
Cali? I thought. Cool place to hang. I’m there!
Outgoing like my dad, I didn’t take long to make friends. I was meeting people from different states, including some who had driven cross-country from Pennsylvania.
It also didn’t take long for the spiritual purpose of the camp to overtake the social aspects.
In the camp’s first night service, I looked around to see others lifting their hands in worship. I had seen adults, including my parents, praising Jesus like that, but few others my age. It hit me that I was among teenagers who really loved Jesus and had strong relationships with Him. I admitted to myself that I did not have what they had.
What have I been doing? I asked myself. What have I been missing out on?
A sense of shame came over me. I thought of all the wrong I had been doing—and had recognized as being wrong—yet had chosen not to abandon. It was the strongest pull toward God’s side that I had felt on the tug-of-war rope in my life. I wanted to feel what those around me were obviously feeling.
Jon Courson, a pastor and well-known Bible commentator, was the special speaker. That first night, he said he was going to teach from Revelation. Hearing that a sermon is coming from Revelation, of course, can immediately put a scare into an audience. However, Courson spoke about “giving all of ourselves to God,” and he did so in a way that wasn’t scary but full of God’s love and mercy. The way his message came across to me was not as a critical “you’re a bad person.” Instead, it was an encouraging “God has so much more for you.”
As I listened, I pictured myself as having reached a cliff in my life. I had two choices: I could take one more step toward rebellion and fall off the cliff, or I could embrace the truth that God loved me and had a plan specifically for me and then surrender my heart to Him.
I felt that God put these words into my heart: I want to use you, but you are teetering on the edge. You need to run—run away from the lure of the world and run back to Me. I’m right here, waiting for you.
I recommitted my life to God that night. In all my ways, I wanted to pursue Him instead of trying to be cool and popular, and I wanted to stop chasing after the worldly pleasures that hadn’t turned out to be nearly as rewarding as I had expected.
After the service, I called my parents and told them about my decision. “My eyes are open,” I told them, “and I want to serve Him.”
I was so excited that I couldn’t fall asleep that night. I lay in my bunk bed
in our dorm room and reminisced about my life. Not until that night had I realized just how much heaviness I had been carrying on my shoulders. But all of a sudden, that load had been lifted. It was like going for a run that refreshes you and increases your energy level even though you have just physically exerted yourself. The tug-of-war felt like it had finally come to an end. I stood completely on the side of truth, no longer trying to pull against what I knew was right.
I felt free, no longer in bondage to sin. When we are in sin, we mistake sin for freedom because we can do whatever we want. But we’re wrong. Despite how that lifestyle can seem for a while, it is not freedom. It’s bondage—bondage to sin.
We can often recognize people who are into alcohol and drugs because the evidence shows on their bodies and faces. They don’t look peaceful. Sin places a burden on us, and that night I realized just how much of a burden I had been carrying. I felt “healthy” again.
During praise and worship the next night, I lifted my hands high just like the others. I was experiencing what they possessed—and it didn’t take long to understand that I had been missing out on an experience worth pursuing with all my heart.
The Bible studies and services the rest of the week came alive to me. Courson continued teaching from Revelation, emphasizing that the church could wander away from God’s will and the importance of Christians being pure in all their words, actions, and motives. Time after time as he spoke, I thought, Oh, that’s me. Are you talking directly to me?
One passage we studied dealt with the church in Laodicea. Of the seven churches addressed early in Revelation, that one had become lukewarm. The Laodicean church had been going through its own tug-of-war between doing God’s will and pursuing worldly pleasures. As a result, the church was caught between the two sides, a lifestyle that made the church so unappealing to the Lord that he uttered these words in Revelation 3:16: “So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth” (NKJV).
