Make Every Place Love

[I don't think this one needs a warning. Maybe a strong caution?]

Love is a place. And I think I just left it.

I came back home after work and washed the last of the pool out of my hair. Don't get me wrong, it's been a comfort these past couple of shifts to have that familiar yet vaguely unpleasant smell in my nose as I wash dishes and scrub floors and occasionally serve people ice cream, but I don't love it so much that I'd keep it around. After the shower, I sat down to my computer and began searching for someone else's words to describe what it's like to love a place.

No one talks about that. Well, and then some do. But you can't quote James Taylor unless you're talking about Carolina (dark and silent late last night I think I might have heard the highway calling) and no one seems to really talk just about loving a place in general, they just talk about the place they love. So I guess three pages into "place quotes" and one awesome youtube video with Ten/Rose and the song Love is a Place later, I'm stuck having to find my own words to describe what it's like to love this place.

I just don't want to fail at telling you what it felt like to leave camp for the last time this summer, knowing it's the last. There's the camp sign that says Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you and I couldn't even look at that. Pray for a thousand years that He'll be faithful to that for these wonderful little people who take my heart away. I'm hiding under my sunglasses with the air conditioning on high and the green leafy dark of a Thursday afternoon out in the woods is peeking in through my windshield. It seems like every curve of the road that's taking me away is fighting against me. There's this tug on my stomach, something pulling me back all the time. I absolutely hate that this isn't the first time I've felt that.

I thought about saying good-bye to everything. I'd drive up to the gazebo (What's a ka-see-bo? One of my favorite camper questions) and sit on the swing and just feel the Spirit move the air around. I'd walk into the back of the Lamb's Chapel and the Shepherd's Shed and I'd pay my respects, remembering so many different songs. I wonder which ones I'd pick to play through my head as I find the exact corners that I see God in these spaces. I'd be tempted to walk up to the cabin, but I know it's not mine now. The poster I left two summers ago is as much a part of the upstairs wall as the second half of the God is Great! poster that's lived there ever since I've seen the place, but I can't take the cabin away from the counselors who stay there now. And I'd want to say good-bye to the campfire and remember its laugh. I'd want to go to the pond and feel its peace once again and go to the creek and let its waters freeze my bare feet one more time. I'd smile at the pool and the field where my campers fell asleep as I spent entirely too much time looking to the stars and not to them.

That place is never empty. It's like the ghosts of campers past float around and rustle the leaves (Have you ever seen a tree laugh?) and whistle through screens and windows. "There is nothing like returning back to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered" - Nelson Mandela. Even though I know it's not, I feel like camp is eternal and changeless. The faces change, the staff comes and goes, but if you told me God was hiding in one place, this would be my first guess. He touches somewhere and the feeling remains. You could take away the cabins and the road and the pool and the barn and camp would still be there.

OK, this is dumb. But how else do you pay tribute to the place where you grew up? What else do you say to commemorate four summers (five summers if you count where my brain was last summer... six if you count the all-too-short time that I spent there these past three weeks)? Beautiful souls. Maybe it's a trick of the light out there, but I feel like anyone who walks in there has a beautiful soul again, no matter the mess we make of it when we walk out.

Listen, I just wanted it to know how much it meant to me. The summer before my freshman year, I went to CTOPs in the middle of the summer, in the middle of camp. While I was at orientation, my heart was at camp, for a thousand confused reasons, and for a thousand more clear ones, and I spent my free time writing notes of encouragement to the staff members that I'd give to them when I got back in a few days. Now I don't think my senior year will be long enough to fill my heart with enough Chapel Hill to last me a lifetime (goodness knows I'm going to try) but I really think in some weird way that I've had all I need of camp, and someone determined a while ago that it had all it needed of me. Someone else needs an incubator for their soul, a reminder that God loves them too (that God really, truly, deeply, honestly, faithfully, courageously, unforgivably loves them too) and a reason to stand up for people whose legs have been knocked out from underneath them, to speak up for people whose voices have been weakened and to work for those people who deserve more out of life than life's seen fit to give them. Someone else must need a living bible to teach them the important things about faith, and the fun things about faith, and the awesome and unspeakable joys that faithfully doing work with God can bring.

Someone else must need to feel like they're worth something again.

God, take that place and make it beautiful for someone else. Keep my campers safe. Be with the staff. Work through my beaten down words to find the heart that's forgotten to praise You and make it whole again. God, I wince to see the Jesus camp that this whole story is going to be reduced to. Breathe into my life. What a miracle You'll work if You can make every place Love.