Camp is like a clear night sky: I'm sure I could stand forever just drinking it in and it would never be enough.
Of course, I say that now when I'm not drained in a billion different ways after a month and a week of waking recalcitrant preteens and teenagers up at 8 and supervising their days until I fall down on my bed around 12:30 and hope that I didn't fall loud enough to wake the campers I sung to sleep two hours ago and who just fell asleep after wonderful conversations in the safe darkness of the cabins. At the same time, I don't think there's many places I'd rather be than Camp Joy. My mother got mad at me- she came into my room this morning and said, 'If you had cell phone service up there, I would have called you to make you come home. Did you come back just to go to camp?' And of course it's not true that I came back just for camp (though I would have) but it's not true that it was never on my mind as I tried planning to head back to Hickory this weekend. It was on my mind quite a bit actually.
I wish I had a thousand years to tell you about all my wonderful campers that I've had over the years. I wish I had an equal amount of time to tell you about the staff members, the group leaders and camp director and his wife and children. I wish I had the words to accurately describe the camp ground, but the remarkable thing is not the cabins or the Shepherd Shed or the pool or the meeting room, but it's the feeling you get there. That place, my friends, is holy ground and I hate it when I have to wear my shoes around the gravel roads.
I showed up yesterday in the middle of the staff meeting and was greeted by smiles and gasps and waves and immediately granted a seat on a couch. I made up beds in the cabins, played time-filling icebreakers, ate dinner (and did not have to eat sloppy joes against my will again!), played games out on the field (and watched the funniest human wheelbarrow ever, by the name of Kayla Bowles) and went to a glorious worship time. From the first quiet moments when everyone's waiting on their groups to arrive to the last chaotic seconds of the dismissal from Chapel, I felt like I was back where I belonged, like finally finding that perfect place on your bed before you start dreaming. I kept wanting to call for my cabin and I definitely kept answering camper's questions and calling them down like a group leader. Oh no. This post wasn't supposed to be a reminiscence about the wonderful afternoon I spent pretending to be who I used to be. This post is about Shakiera.
Shakiera, first night last year, first chapel session, broke down at Coach's testimony. I took her into the meeting room and prayed with her. 'And prayed with her.' How flat that sounds! Have you ever felt the Spirit move when someone prayed? Have you ever stood in a huddle, with a secret desire to leave the huddle because this is not 'how you pray', and felt like Amening with the rest of the group because there is a brother praying right beside you and you know, you know he is being heard? Have you ever just spoken straight up to your Heavenly Father, to your Lord who now sits at His right hand, and felt that that prayer changed the world because it was heard and it was acknowledged and it was answered, all in one outpouring of every bit of your broken and maimed and healed and redeemed and wonderfully whole soul? Because if you haven't had that, then yeah, to say that I prayed with Shakiera sounds flat.
Anyway, before that time and even some after, I thought that Shakiera was a loud-mouth, attention-seeking drama inducer. And she is. But goodness knows that child is so much more. In everything she did that week, all the hundreds of little things I can't remember, falling asleep when I showed them constellations on the field, screaming at bugs in the paddle boats, falling out of the paddle boats, comparing me to Anne Hathaway before the make-over in the Princess Diaries, everything, she showed me what kind of loud existence slept underneath my gentle sarcasm and I must have shown her something in return because she hugged me like she would never let me go when I left that day. Shakiera is one of the few people whose name I would yell across a parking lot and proceed to run to hug, which is what I did yesterday. After she jumped on me and hugged me and let me go, I told her I wasn't going to be a counselor this week- it would have been unfair to let her think otherwise for even a second- and she said, 'Why? Don't you know that you're my lifeline?'
Please tell me how that doesn't shine a light into your heart and make you see that what seemed like monsters in the dark are really too tiny to even been seen in the light. All the doubts I had, all the thousand reasons for running away, though one remains valid, all the fears that I had ruined a good thing forever, they were useless when it came to solid evidence for why I picked (I picked) the summer I picked this year. And I think in that second I would have called up to the planetarium and begged them to find someone else, anyone else to cover for me this week because I was needed elsewhere. But then, I have to remember that Shakiera is loud. The kid loves, when she loves, with everything she's got and she wears it like a thousand clanking bracelets or a gorgeous new dress. So I walk with her up to the cabin, sit near her at dinner, cheer for her on the field, make sure she has my address and phone number after chapel and receive two more superbly long hugs before I go. And going was right too, like moving your head one more time before closing your eyes here and opening them in that wonderful world of near near away.
So I stood on the concrete slab outside the meeting room on which I had dumped out flour for showing how craters were formed and vinegar and baking soda for making fun explosions the year before and I pointed out the few constellations I could remember, since most of my stargazing happens in the winter, to another one of the group leaders who wasn't a group leader, though he was preaching in chapel and playing piano and singing at worship the whole week and we talked and I kinda want to hold that in my heart as well, though I'm not sure that the weak part of my heart would stand up to that kind of test right now. I stared up at that sky because it had been a long time since I'd seen one so clear just like I had sung out songs in worship much too loud because it had been a long time since I'd been so near. You forget that God loves you, you know? Oh, I'm sure you always know that God loves you but you forget that He. Loves. You.
The same old question remains for me, though. Coach talked about meeting his wife (he proposed to her three days after meeting her by chance at a gas station and they've been married for nineteen years) and he said something about how God had had that planned all along. God set that out for him and when he found her, it was His way of reminding Coach that He loved him. It had always been there for him, he'd just been over somewhere else. Now, I don't know how much I believe that anymore, that there's a right place for us, that there's a somewhere we're meant to be and if we're not there, we're missing out because I'm a lot more inclined to believe that where we are is where we're meant to be. Right where you are is where you're supposed to be, otherwise, you'd be somewhere else. But I do know that God won't use you like He intended to unless you're willing to let Him and sometimes where you are changes how much you're willing. This fights in my brain and makes its way down to my heart because my heart has made it quite clear who it wants to be with and God has kept where I'm supposed to be out of this whole big mess that has been my thought process.
I apologize for leading you down the crazy road that is my cliche-ridden mind and once again, one day I'll stop with these sappy yet meaningful, if even just to me, posts. Then again, maybe then I'd be healed and how boring would that be? I leave you with the Beatles and some better lifewords.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night.
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.
Arise from the dead and Christ will shine upon you. Ephesians 5:14
Arise, shine, for you light has come and the glory of the LORD rises on you. Isaiah 60:1
Arise, let us go hence. John 14:31
And the best thing is, my wings aren't broken anymore. I can fly (read live, really live) wherever I am.
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