This is the first time I've ever had to use crutches. I've decided that they're fun for a little, but I wouldn't want to live on them. Fortunately my ankle is only sprained (at least the doctor said he thinks that's all it is) so I'll only need to use them for a couple days. Honestly, my ankle really doesn't hurt, but nevertheless I've been assigned to crutches. I wasn't even going to go to the doctor, but because my ankle swelled immediately when I landed on it and because breaks often don't hurt as bad as a sprain, I was told I should have it checked out. An hour and multiple phone calls later (don't you love insurance companies and telephone menus?) I found out that it wasn't broken, for which I'm thankful. There's a lot less money involved this way, although not much difference in recovery time. The upshot of it all is that I won't be able to use my ankle much for thenext few weeks -- at least not anything super-active (i.e. fun).
I sprained my ankle at a volleyball tournament Saturday when I came down from a double block (which didn't even work) and landed on my friend's foot. The worst part about it was that it was early in the day and I didn't get to play the rest of the tournament, which I really wanted to play! Ironically, the ankle I sprained wasn't even the ankle I'd sprained at camp. That one was still wrapped up like a Christmas present when I rolled the other one. Between ankle's and shoulder surgery, I'm beginning to feel like I'm always recovering from something. I'll look forward to the day when I can play without having to worry about some temporarily defective body part going out of kilter. You really don't realize how much God created to go right with the human body until a few small things start going wrong. Oh well, that's life and it's part of the risk of playing volleyball . . . but would (and will) do it again. Without a little bit of risk life gets boring.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
Back for the summer
Sweat.
I almost forgot what it was like to work outside in the hot summer sun. Almost, but not quite. The sensation of skin slowly cooking and the blinding glare every time I look up. That feeling of water running down my hair and across my face (sometimes managing to get into my eyes) mixed with a fine shower of sawdust from someone who was so considerate as to cut their board directly above or upwind from me. Usually the sawdust cakes into a sort of paste that sticks to the skin like some sort of mud plaster. I call it a sawdust shower and I'm getting one almost every day right now. That's okay because I've heard they're healthy for you.
Actually I kind of enjoy being back at it again. There's something about building houses that makes you miss it when you aren't doing it and wonder what exactly it was that you missed when you come back to it. Either way, I'm thankful to have the work. I really wasn't expecting Larry to have work when I came back but he did, at least for one week. Good thing too because the other jobs are a little slow right now.
It's been amazing this summer to see God work out my schedule. I don't always know very far in advance what I'll be doing, but every day there's always something to do. Sometimes there's more work than others, but it is almost always proportional to the amount of spare time that I have. Sometimes the “not very far in advance” part worries me, but I'm beginning to get used to it. As one speaker at camp pointed out, “God is never late; He's not early very often, but He's never late.” I think He does that to teach me faith. He knows I like to have things planned out so He makes sure I can't see very far into the future so that I have to trust Him as I come to it.
It's good to be back from camp for the summer. For those of you who didn't know, I did work at camp this summer. I was a counselor for five weeks at a little camp which was located about two hours away in Hughesville. (The camp keeps jumping around because they don't have their own property yet. It used to be in York, but that didn't work out this year so the whole camp up and moved to Hughesville – and let me tell you, that is no small amount of work!)
The first time I walked on the property, my thoughts were “no way. This isn't camp and it's never going to be.” It just didn't feel like camp. All the memories were still back at the “other place” in York. However, I couldn't say that because there was no “other place” to go to. However, once the staff arrived and we started hacking our way artistically through the woods (the director said he wanted an “interesting” trail, and that's exactly what Greg and I gave him – perhaps a little too artistic on second thought seeing as a couple people got lost on them =) and cleaning all sorts of things out of the old cabins, it pretty soon began to feel like camp. Camp really is all about the staff and by the end of the summer we had created another “camp” that will be in my memory just like the old one was. There were a few drawbacks to the property -- for instance the dining hall was really more like a large living room so that once you got about 60 junior campers sqeezed in there it was so loud that you couldn't hear yourself think -- but there were also a few advantages like the larger activities center (actually an old barn) that went perfectly with our farm frolic theme and gave us enough room to play indoor games when we got rained out. If any of you have ever had to try to figure out what to do with 60 energy-pumped juniors when your outdoor game gets rained out, you will appreciate that. I think part of the reason they were so energy-pumped was because Airheads (basically sugar concentrated into a bar form) were so cheap that kids were buying 16 for two dollars and eating them all during one afternoon. The counselors all decided that next year they are definitely going to be more expensive!
The weather was a big answer to prayer this year. Besides being unseasonably cool, a mixed blessing when it comes time for studious campers to hose down selected staff members (in fact one week half the counselors got sick from being cold and wet) the rain came at about the perfect time. See, camp is sort of like farming: you need rain, but you would really prefer not to have it at certain times. Thankfully, most the rain that was needed came in quick thunderstorms or overnight or during an inside activity. It was just enough to keep the stream full and most the campers dry, although there were several nights when our cabin strongly resembled – and smelled – like a cheap laundromat. I think the only reason the rafter in camp cabins are exposed is so that people can hang wet clothes from them.
Speaking of hosing staff, I think there ought to be a rule against hosing someone right after they wake up. The one afternoon, during one of the only two “free hours” counselors get during the entire week (actually it's only about 30 minutes and it's not usually free), I fell asleep. I had just drifted off when I was awakened very rudely by a sopping wet fellow staff member jumping up and down on top of me. He had just been hosed and was taking great delight in informing me that I was next. Still only half awake, stumbled out of my cabin to face a crowd of cheering teens who couldn't wait to see some girl who I barely knew and to whom I had never done anything wrong or even slightly mean, spray me down just because she had said enough verses to entitle her to that privilege. Some people may call cold water a refreshing experience. I call it a lousy way to wake up!
There are a lot of other things that happen at camp which I don't now have the time or desire to put down in writing (some things are better left unsaid), but one thing I have discovered after two years of working at camp is that it will stretch you. Whether it's pretending to be excited about being hosed down with very cold water, or trying to get kid's excited about a game that you know isn't going to go well -- such was the case with a certain pig which despite being chased all summer did not get the idea that the idea of a pig chase is that the pig runs away when the campers chase it instead of sitting there stupidly until a camper picks it up by its legs and then squealing so pitifully and so loudly that all the campers feel so sorry for the poor piggy that some of them won't play and other more radical ones threaten to call the humane society – or whether it is playing a country bumpkin (and that took a major acting job, let me tell you!) *no comments please* that ends with a number where you have to sing a solo of “Let me call you sweetheart” to the whole camp, or whether it is something more serious like dealing with a camper who won't listen, or leading cabin devotions, or spending one-on-one time with a camper who is going through things you've never had to deal with, or even something like finding things to pray about when you've just been asked to pray three times in the past ten minutes (you never realize how little you think about God or count your blessings until you are asked to do so publicly multiple times during the course of a day), you will be stretched. No one comes away from camp thinking they were ready for what they faced, and those who are older and wiser don't even head into camp that way. At camp, especially a small camp like Servant's Heart, staff are are given a lot of responsibility. One thing I've discovered about being given responsibility is that it reveals your strengths and weaknesses, which can be a good thing if it is handled properly. Realizing your own strengths and weaknesses presents a tremendous opportunity to grow. It also provides an extreme temptation to compare yourself with others and to get proud or feel inferior. It all depends on how you deal with your strengths and where you turn for help with your weaknesses. You can try to do it all yourself, maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses, but eventually you reach a point where you realize that you are totally powerless to do anything except throw yourself at the feet of an almighty and all-loving God and say “help me.” Getting to that point may not be fun, but it's a good place to be and God will always try to get you there. That when you begin to see just how strong and sufficient God is.
There were a couple instances this summer when God showed me what He can do. One of them involved a boy named Rico. Rico is not the most eloquent or educated person I've ever met, he can be quite good at forgetting things, and he comes from a very bad environment in the city, but Rico got saved two years ago at camp. Since that time he has developed a relationship with God is truly unique. Rico has a hard time reading the Bible and hasn't had much good teaching or good examples to follow growing up, but he wants to know more about God and has grasped the concept that the only life worth living is a life that is sold out for God, no matter how hard that may be. Watching Rico's perspective on life and listening to him talk about what God is doing and teaching him, I realized that even though Rico has not been given much, God has more than made up that. God speaks much more directly to Rico than most people I meet and it is evident that God's Spirit has taken a much more active role in his life than in the lives who think they can do things on their own. One night Rico preached a message to the staff and I think I got more out of that message than any message that the evangelists gave. It was not the most brilliant message I have ever heard, actually it was a very basic message about salvation mixed with his own personal testimony and there was a lot of stumbling and mistakes until he got going, but God showed me a lot through that. Mostly I realized that it really doesn't matter much what someone says when they are giving a testimony or how they say it, what matters is what God has done. Nothing can be said that hasn't already been said, and probably it was said much better before, but if God has truly done something and a person is truly grateful for what He did, that will come through and mean more than a shallow testimony that is worded to sound significant. It was a reminder to me to be truly thankful for what God has done and to ask Him to give me the passion to do right and the conviction of things that are wrong. I stopped asking Him for those things way to long ago and I think they are something that need to be asked for regularly.
Another thing God showed me is that too often I view Christianity in a negative light. Not that I think Christianity is bad, just that my enthusiasm about telling and showing unsaved people how good and joyous it is to live life God's way doesn't match my conviction to point out how bad and miserable it is to live life their way. There is a balance and I think so many times we as Christians focus so much on what is wrong and get so good at picking it out that we ignore the other side of the coin and overlook everything that is not bad. We assume there are to classes of action, bad and normal, and very often what is normal becomes boring and mundane. It is not . . . or at least it should not. There are two ways to help someone. One is to point out where they are wrong. The other way is to encourage them in what is right. This summer I learned the importance of the second method. When I look back on my life, the people who have had the most impact were not the people who told me not to do wrong but the people who encouraged me to do right and showed me the benefits of it. During the second week of camp, this, became very evident.
The second week of camp was bad. It's not that all the kids were angry and defiant, it's just that there were enough of them to set the mood for the camp. During staff training we learned a lot about the importance of not letting other people control you by your reactions. If someone can get you to lose your temper or get in a bad mood by doing something that annoys you, they are controlling you. Any time you react to someone else, they are -- for better or for worse -- controlling you. That particular week, my cabin had some problems and while I wasn't blowing up at my campers, it was taking the fun out of my week to constantly be dealing with attitude/behavior problems. Thankfully, God knew what I needed and that week the evangelist who was there, Mike Westburg, was just what was needed. He had been a counselor in his younger days and I learned a lot just by watching him. He knew that this was a “bad” week, everybody on staff did, but instead of just cracking down on the bad behavior and settling for the role of firm but resigned baby-sitter, he made it cool to do the right thing and have fun. He played with the kids and participated in the events, bringing some energy and enthusiasm that was needed much than stern reprimands and a critical attitude towards the kids. At the one staff meeting when asked for help with how to tell kids what they are doing is wrong and get them to stop, he pointed out gently he has heard it said many times by teachers that you need to encourage what is good much more than you discipline what is bad. If there's one area I know I need to improve, it's on how to focus on what is good and have fun with it even when everything seems to be going bad.
Okay, so this is a lot longer than I thought it would be. It's hard to wrap up six weeks in one afternoon of typing, but I don't have enough spare time to go into more detail. Anyway, that's what I've been up to and what God has been teaching me over the past several weeks. Overall, I don't think I would want to be a counselor for a living and it is a lot of work, but I learned a lot more this way and had a lot more fun than I would have doing a lot of other things. If I wasn't working at a Christian camp, I would have to say that I gave up a summer to do a lot of work for no money (even now in some of my weaker moments Satan asks me if maybe I did) but I've heard it said many times that anything given up for God is not really given up at all and I know I can agree with that! Working at camp this summer also made me realize how much time, energy, and money certain people (parents, pastors, teen leaders, family friends) have poured into me and how glad I am that they did. One thing I think myself and the rest of the staff realized as we made the transition from campers to staff (also teenager to adulthood) is that there is a time and season for everything. For so many years we've been receiving. Now it is time to give back. It's time to do for someone else what someone has already done for you.
I almost forgot what it was like to work outside in the hot summer sun. Almost, but not quite. The sensation of skin slowly cooking and the blinding glare every time I look up. That feeling of water running down my hair and across my face (sometimes managing to get into my eyes) mixed with a fine shower of sawdust from someone who was so considerate as to cut their board directly above or upwind from me. Usually the sawdust cakes into a sort of paste that sticks to the skin like some sort of mud plaster. I call it a sawdust shower and I'm getting one almost every day right now. That's okay because I've heard they're healthy for you.
Actually I kind of enjoy being back at it again. There's something about building houses that makes you miss it when you aren't doing it and wonder what exactly it was that you missed when you come back to it. Either way, I'm thankful to have the work. I really wasn't expecting Larry to have work when I came back but he did, at least for one week. Good thing too because the other jobs are a little slow right now.
It's been amazing this summer to see God work out my schedule. I don't always know very far in advance what I'll be doing, but every day there's always something to do. Sometimes there's more work than others, but it is almost always proportional to the amount of spare time that I have. Sometimes the “not very far in advance” part worries me, but I'm beginning to get used to it. As one speaker at camp pointed out, “God is never late; He's not early very often, but He's never late.” I think He does that to teach me faith. He knows I like to have things planned out so He makes sure I can't see very far into the future so that I have to trust Him as I come to it.
It's good to be back from camp for the summer. For those of you who didn't know, I did work at camp this summer. I was a counselor for five weeks at a little camp which was located about two hours away in Hughesville. (The camp keeps jumping around because they don't have their own property yet. It used to be in York, but that didn't work out this year so the whole camp up and moved to Hughesville – and let me tell you, that is no small amount of work!)
The first time I walked on the property, my thoughts were “no way. This isn't camp and it's never going to be.” It just didn't feel like camp. All the memories were still back at the “other place” in York. However, I couldn't say that because there was no “other place” to go to. However, once the staff arrived and we started hacking our way artistically through the woods (the director said he wanted an “interesting” trail, and that's exactly what Greg and I gave him – perhaps a little too artistic on second thought seeing as a couple people got lost on them =) and cleaning all sorts of things out of the old cabins, it pretty soon began to feel like camp. Camp really is all about the staff and by the end of the summer we had created another “camp” that will be in my memory just like the old one was. There were a few drawbacks to the property -- for instance the dining hall was really more like a large living room so that once you got about 60 junior campers sqeezed in there it was so loud that you couldn't hear yourself think -- but there were also a few advantages like the larger activities center (actually an old barn) that went perfectly with our farm frolic theme and gave us enough room to play indoor games when we got rained out. If any of you have ever had to try to figure out what to do with 60 energy-pumped juniors when your outdoor game gets rained out, you will appreciate that. I think part of the reason they were so energy-pumped was because Airheads (basically sugar concentrated into a bar form) were so cheap that kids were buying 16 for two dollars and eating them all during one afternoon. The counselors all decided that next year they are definitely going to be more expensive!
The weather was a big answer to prayer this year. Besides being unseasonably cool, a mixed blessing when it comes time for studious campers to hose down selected staff members (in fact one week half the counselors got sick from being cold and wet) the rain came at about the perfect time. See, camp is sort of like farming: you need rain, but you would really prefer not to have it at certain times. Thankfully, most the rain that was needed came in quick thunderstorms or overnight or during an inside activity. It was just enough to keep the stream full and most the campers dry, although there were several nights when our cabin strongly resembled – and smelled – like a cheap laundromat. I think the only reason the rafter in camp cabins are exposed is so that people can hang wet clothes from them.
Speaking of hosing staff, I think there ought to be a rule against hosing someone right after they wake up. The one afternoon, during one of the only two “free hours” counselors get during the entire week (actually it's only about 30 minutes and it's not usually free), I fell asleep. I had just drifted off when I was awakened very rudely by a sopping wet fellow staff member jumping up and down on top of me. He had just been hosed and was taking great delight in informing me that I was next. Still only half awake, stumbled out of my cabin to face a crowd of cheering teens who couldn't wait to see some girl who I barely knew and to whom I had never done anything wrong or even slightly mean, spray me down just because she had said enough verses to entitle her to that privilege. Some people may call cold water a refreshing experience. I call it a lousy way to wake up!
There are a lot of other things that happen at camp which I don't now have the time or desire to put down in writing (some things are better left unsaid), but one thing I have discovered after two years of working at camp is that it will stretch you. Whether it's pretending to be excited about being hosed down with very cold water, or trying to get kid's excited about a game that you know isn't going to go well -- such was the case with a certain pig which despite being chased all summer did not get the idea that the idea of a pig chase is that the pig runs away when the campers chase it instead of sitting there stupidly until a camper picks it up by its legs and then squealing so pitifully and so loudly that all the campers feel so sorry for the poor piggy that some of them won't play and other more radical ones threaten to call the humane society – or whether it is playing a country bumpkin (and that took a major acting job, let me tell you!) *no comments please* that ends with a number where you have to sing a solo of “Let me call you sweetheart” to the whole camp, or whether it is something more serious like dealing with a camper who won't listen, or leading cabin devotions, or spending one-on-one time with a camper who is going through things you've never had to deal with, or even something like finding things to pray about when you've just been asked to pray three times in the past ten minutes (you never realize how little you think about God or count your blessings until you are asked to do so publicly multiple times during the course of a day), you will be stretched. No one comes away from camp thinking they were ready for what they faced, and those who are older and wiser don't even head into camp that way. At camp, especially a small camp like Servant's Heart, staff are are given a lot of responsibility. One thing I've discovered about being given responsibility is that it reveals your strengths and weaknesses, which can be a good thing if it is handled properly. Realizing your own strengths and weaknesses presents a tremendous opportunity to grow. It also provides an extreme temptation to compare yourself with others and to get proud or feel inferior. It all depends on how you deal with your strengths and where you turn for help with your weaknesses. You can try to do it all yourself, maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses, but eventually you reach a point where you realize that you are totally powerless to do anything except throw yourself at the feet of an almighty and all-loving God and say “help me.” Getting to that point may not be fun, but it's a good place to be and God will always try to get you there. That when you begin to see just how strong and sufficient God is.
There were a couple instances this summer when God showed me what He can do. One of them involved a boy named Rico. Rico is not the most eloquent or educated person I've ever met, he can be quite good at forgetting things, and he comes from a very bad environment in the city, but Rico got saved two years ago at camp. Since that time he has developed a relationship with God is truly unique. Rico has a hard time reading the Bible and hasn't had much good teaching or good examples to follow growing up, but he wants to know more about God and has grasped the concept that the only life worth living is a life that is sold out for God, no matter how hard that may be. Watching Rico's perspective on life and listening to him talk about what God is doing and teaching him, I realized that even though Rico has not been given much, God has more than made up that. God speaks much more directly to Rico than most people I meet and it is evident that God's Spirit has taken a much more active role in his life than in the lives who think they can do things on their own. One night Rico preached a message to the staff and I think I got more out of that message than any message that the evangelists gave. It was not the most brilliant message I have ever heard, actually it was a very basic message about salvation mixed with his own personal testimony and there was a lot of stumbling and mistakes until he got going, but God showed me a lot through that. Mostly I realized that it really doesn't matter much what someone says when they are giving a testimony or how they say it, what matters is what God has done. Nothing can be said that hasn't already been said, and probably it was said much better before, but if God has truly done something and a person is truly grateful for what He did, that will come through and mean more than a shallow testimony that is worded to sound significant. It was a reminder to me to be truly thankful for what God has done and to ask Him to give me the passion to do right and the conviction of things that are wrong. I stopped asking Him for those things way to long ago and I think they are something that need to be asked for regularly.
Another thing God showed me is that too often I view Christianity in a negative light. Not that I think Christianity is bad, just that my enthusiasm about telling and showing unsaved people how good and joyous it is to live life God's way doesn't match my conviction to point out how bad and miserable it is to live life their way. There is a balance and I think so many times we as Christians focus so much on what is wrong and get so good at picking it out that we ignore the other side of the coin and overlook everything that is not bad. We assume there are to classes of action, bad and normal, and very often what is normal becomes boring and mundane. It is not . . . or at least it should not. There are two ways to help someone. One is to point out where they are wrong. The other way is to encourage them in what is right. This summer I learned the importance of the second method. When I look back on my life, the people who have had the most impact were not the people who told me not to do wrong but the people who encouraged me to do right and showed me the benefits of it. During the second week of camp, this, became very evident.
The second week of camp was bad. It's not that all the kids were angry and defiant, it's just that there were enough of them to set the mood for the camp. During staff training we learned a lot about the importance of not letting other people control you by your reactions. If someone can get you to lose your temper or get in a bad mood by doing something that annoys you, they are controlling you. Any time you react to someone else, they are -- for better or for worse -- controlling you. That particular week, my cabin had some problems and while I wasn't blowing up at my campers, it was taking the fun out of my week to constantly be dealing with attitude/behavior problems. Thankfully, God knew what I needed and that week the evangelist who was there, Mike Westburg, was just what was needed. He had been a counselor in his younger days and I learned a lot just by watching him. He knew that this was a “bad” week, everybody on staff did, but instead of just cracking down on the bad behavior and settling for the role of firm but resigned baby-sitter, he made it cool to do the right thing and have fun. He played with the kids and participated in the events, bringing some energy and enthusiasm that was needed much than stern reprimands and a critical attitude towards the kids. At the one staff meeting when asked for help with how to tell kids what they are doing is wrong and get them to stop, he pointed out gently he has heard it said many times by teachers that you need to encourage what is good much more than you discipline what is bad. If there's one area I know I need to improve, it's on how to focus on what is good and have fun with it even when everything seems to be going bad.
Okay, so this is a lot longer than I thought it would be. It's hard to wrap up six weeks in one afternoon of typing, but I don't have enough spare time to go into more detail. Anyway, that's what I've been up to and what God has been teaching me over the past several weeks. Overall, I don't think I would want to be a counselor for a living and it is a lot of work, but I learned a lot more this way and had a lot more fun than I would have doing a lot of other things. If I wasn't working at a Christian camp, I would have to say that I gave up a summer to do a lot of work for no money (even now in some of my weaker moments Satan asks me if maybe I did) but I've heard it said many times that anything given up for God is not really given up at all and I know I can agree with that! Working at camp this summer also made me realize how much time, energy, and money certain people (parents, pastors, teen leaders, family friends) have poured into me and how glad I am that they did. One thing I think myself and the rest of the staff realized as we made the transition from campers to staff (also teenager to adulthood) is that there is a time and season for everything. For so many years we've been receiving. Now it is time to give back. It's time to do for someone else what someone has already done for you.
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