camp reflections

its a cloudy, chilly night in san diego, and i'm back in the little blue house on oliphant street after a roller-coaster week out of the blue.

within the first week or so of being here, the chance to work as a counselor at a church camp in northern california. time went by, and with no response from the coordinator, the whole prospect got conveniently shelved somewhere behind putting in a garden, biking to the grocery store, and all the other random tidbits of life.

two wednesdays ago, however, the phone rang, plans were laid, and suddenly saturday morning at 6 am, heidi and i found ourselves waiting around on the point loma campus ready to load up and move out. the destination: eureka, ca and the blue slide mid-high teen church camp. fifteen hours of driving later, which included an hour and a half of circling sacramento thanks to an unexpected highway closure and an overnight stay in yuba city at the home of one of the most hospitable older couples i've ever met, we found ourselves at the edge of the pacific northwest - the palms replaced by pines, the cliffs and waves replaced by mountains and rivers, and the cloudless skies filled with the low, grey clouds that make greens that much greener and the blues that much bluer.

monday morning came, staff met, campers arrived, and camp ensued. stories upon stories could be told about the girls in my cabin (hailey, elizabeth, mariah, sarah, haley, and laura) or the awesome kids on my red team (sam, natalie, thomas, jordan, allison, kendra, and kaitlin) or the staff who, daily, exemplified god's unfailing love. days filled with dodgeball, arts and crafts, archery, swimming in the river, chapel times, and campfires.

but what i wanted to write about tonight, as i catch up on emails and stream the results from "so you think you can dance" on heidi's computer, was how incredibly touched i was by the reality of the lives of my campers. smack in the middle of humboldt county - a center of alcoholism, methamphetamine abuse, and marijuana use - the kids represented at camp were riddled with the after effects of these destructive habits, torn to pieces by abandonment, divorce, and the painful wounds they cause. out of the six girls in my cabin, not one of them did not carry the scars of the hate, anger, and despair embodied within parental fighting, divorce, peer rejection and the even more powerfully impactful abandonment and the foster system.

in reaching out to these little ones, proclaiming god's unconditional love and his everlasting faithfulness, the conventional words of comfort turned to ash in my mouth, and the tears shed in private were bitter, indeed. but in living through that challenge, i discovered buried somewhere deep within, a steel-like fiber of strength that i didn't even really know existed.

and now, as night has fallen a state's length away from my little dears and the episode currently streaming comes to an end, with the idea of catching up on some much-needed sleep looms to the forefront of my mind, all i can do is to surrender those lives to the creator which breathed them into being and remind my ownself of the words i offered them so often: god is faithful.