Camp Retrospective

It’s been two days since returning from camp. I think my mind and body are still in recovery mode. Rather than a lengthy narrative of everything that happened, I’ll briefly jot down a few thoughts in retrospect.

We got two of the best and brightest directors from Camp Mivoden in Idaho (Upper Columbia Conference). They had no idea what they were getting into nor what kind of help they could expect. They came prepared to basically run the whole thing between the two of them and were pleasantly surprised to discover the breadth of skills and talent in the volunteer staff.

I was glad I had only three boys to look after, and just two after Thursday. They were ages 7 (almost 8) and 8. Overall, the girls outnumbered the boys 2 to 1. That made for a lot of work for the girls’ counselors, but it sure made life easier for most of the boys’ counselors for whom this was a first-time experience.

We were fortunate to have five dry and sunny days out of seven. It would have been miserable having to deal with all the kids and wet weather. The worst of the weather held off until Saturday night and Sunday, after all of the activities were finished.

There were some complaints, but overall the vegetarian meals went over pretty well with the kids. There were always quite a few kids waiting for the announcement to get seconds (and thirds, and fourths…). The kitchen was headed by the assistant from previous years, helped out by another lady from Prince of Wales island who has pervious experience as a professional chef. We also had a sixteen year old help out who has an interest in the culinary profession and had attended culinary camps.

There were no major injuries or sickness that required transport of campers to Wrangell. There were the usual bumps and cuts but nothing more.

There is nothing like camp for the sinful nature to be on full display – the desire for control, the desire to be first, the desire to get even were on full exhibition. (Kids haven’t yet learned the more socially acceptable ways of self-centeredness…) It seemed like the first few days were spent by the kids (particularly the boys) trying to establish the new pecking order, and then the rest of the week fighting to maintain those positions. It took supernatural strength of will and wisdom on the part of the staff to deal with all the incidents in a patient and loving manner. By Sunday most of us were just hanging on praying nothing more would come up to test us.

I taught two sessions of photography each day. I had five in one and four in the other (all girls). About half of each class was interested in really learning about making photographs. The others just wanted to take pictures. For them it was a contest to see how many could be taken in one class period. I’m glad they were all girls since I had about $3,000 of my personal equipment running around in their hands for about 2 hours each day. There were some pretty good photos from each of them. Some I am quite sure were accidents. Others were intentionally done and done quite well.

The spiritual atmosphere, particularly in the evenings, I thought was much better this than last’s. The theme for the week was “Real God, Real Life.” The daily topics were: dealing with distractions, getting unstuck from sin, giving up control, God works in little things, God uses the willing, and trusting in God. I preached a sermon on each of these plus a Sabbath morning one reviewing the whole list.

I didn’t have a choice but to employ the Spirit-led preaching method I’ve been using since the early part of this year. All I had was the topic for the day and a brief outline of the skit in the evening. I spent what free time I had thinking about it and then coming up with several Bible passages and personal experiences that might be relevant to the topic. Often I didn’t know how I would start or what I would say in the sermon until the skit finished and I was walking up to speak. We were surprised (although I supposed we shouldn’t have been) how well many of the skits and the sermon came together.

At the end of the week we had two girls who wanted to begin a new walk with Christ and were baptized into Christian fellowship (vs. into the Adventist denomination). The camp directors couldn’t perform the baptism because as ministers of the Adventist church, they could only baptize into the church and not only that, policies do not allow them to baptize out of their district. Thus I had the privilege of performing their baptisms. The glacial waters were very, very cold! And never having done this, I had a difficult time with the mechanics of it. Shelley, too, wanted to be baptized but no one there could do it because she wanted to join the Adventist church. My personal opinion is that something is dearly wrong when baptism has to be postponed because of policies of human inventions. Rather than waiting until all the ducks come into line sometime in the future, I plan to do something this Sabbath to affirm her desire and decision.

There were a number of others that afterwards expressed desire to make a commitment for Christ. Since camp does not exist to make Adventists, I pointed them to all the fine pastors in the local communities that can help them do what needs to be done to follow through on their decisions.

The “God Talk” through the week even got through to the two campers I had at the end. The youngest one in camp said that he wasn’t sure if God existed before but now he thought God probably did because how could the world exist if there was no God? The other one said to me that all this talk about God had him forgetting his parents’ names. They were first-timers to camp and although the youngest wanted to go home for quite a bit of the week, by the end of the week in spite of all the fighting, the discipline, and the “God talk” they were looking forward to returning next summer.

As for me, serving as counselor is probably never going to be one of my spiritual gifts. It was a good experience but not one I would likely want to repeat. The class teaching and camp pastoring tasks I think I can handle adequately.