July 4, 2010

Happy fourth of July! This is my week off and I’m spending some time with my family at my grandparents’ house in Florida. Tonight we are going to go see some fireworks. It’s crazy to think about my life this time last year when we went to the same place to watch fireworks and how much I have grown and changed as a person since then. This past week was my third week of campers. We had middle school girls that are going into the 7th and 8th grade. When we got their medical forms at the beginning of the week the amount of potential medical issues was overwhelming. PTL we didn’t have any serious medical problems arise this week!

I hate home in the woods. Let me just say that. Every week I try to go into it with a positive attitude and a fake smile and each week it confirms my hatred. A lot of things at camp really push me outside of my comfort zone and I learn a lot from it. Home in the woods basically shoves me outside of my comfort zone in a not so exciting way. My first week of home in the woods I was with Sam and we had our CITs(counselors in training) and it rained. Everything went wrong and we had to laugh it off to keep us from crying. My second week we didn’t have home in the woods and it was glorious. This week we are getting ready to leave for HIW at like 245 before we leave at 3. 3:00 arrives and so does a downpour. So now we have to deal with wet ground and wet wood that isn’t easy to ignite. We wait out the rain and get to what we thought was our site at 4ish. We start to unfold our tarp and another group shows up and we realize we are at the wrong site. So we hike back up to a different camp site and start over. We set up our tarp for the girls to sleep under and we set up a tarp over the fire to keep the rain from putting out the fire. Then we describe to the girls what “poopywood” looks like so that they don’t collect it for us to burn in the fire. My co, Katie B, and I try to start the fire. For a long time. Fail. HIW is stressful because tarps have to be put up, a fire has to be started, food needs to be cut, food needs to be cooked and eaten by 7:45 so we can make it in time for outdoor worship at 8. We were running behind schedule because we still didn’t have a fire. So we find another site with fire and cut our food and make our hobos and take them to their fire. For those of you who don’t already know, a hobo is a mix of food in foil that you can throw in the fire to cook. At Asbury Hills that mix contains your own personal preference of potatoes, corn, carrots, onions, meat and seasoning. Our girls get fed and some have to eat hobos togo at worship. Not that big of a deal. When we get to worship the counselors engage in illegal full frontal hugging to comfort the attitude of resentment toward HIW. We get back from worship and I’m super excited because HIW is getting closer to being over and I get to sleep in my hammock for the first time-which is all I was looking forward to. We tell the girls to get ready for bed and we will do devotions in the tarp. They follow directions and take their shoes off and start getting ready. One of my girls decides to step off of the tarp after she’s taken her shoes off and come very close to stepping on a copperhead. Snakes are one of my biggest fears. They make me cringe and make me want to throw up. This takes HIW to a whole new level. So my co and I get it away from the girls and decide to squeeze each other’s hands and scream SNAKE! to alleviate the stress. We say a prayer that consists of loud pleas and plan how to kill it. We decide to drop a large rock on it. Neither of us wanted to hear it crunch so we made the girls sing a song-loudly. Katie drops the rock and I don’t know if it missed or if it bounced off but it most definitely did not kill the snake and the snake came at us and the girls in the tarp. This is the part of the story where I screamed a bad word and made the girls stay back. By the grace of God the snake moved to the left and went into a part of the woods. Katie and I decide that there is no way for us to kill it, no way to ensure that it won’t come back and get the girls, no way to ensure there aren’t more, and no way that the girls will sleep here anymore. I stood there with the flashlight on the snake for 30 min while the girls packed up all of their belongings and we trekked back in to main camp. On the way back we had to drop off a skillet at another camp site so they could have breakfast and we encountered many field mice. In order to stay sane and keep the girls from freaking out we sang worship songs that we had been singing all week. Some lyrics that comforted us went like this “It’s gonna be alright cause I know my God saved the day and I know His word never fails and I know my God made a way for me. It’s gonna be alright!” Or “God be the solution” It was definitely a teachable moment because even though it didn’t seem like it, God was present in our time of trouble just like He is during the hard times in our lives. We were all safe and we stayed dry during the rain. Once again, I hate home in the woods. All HIW hostility aside, it was a good week and I got to have some quiet time this week. I took an hour off and got to enjoy the creek, butterflies, birds, worship music, and some time with my God. God was faithful throughout all of the distractions this week and still did work in the girls’ hearts and spoke through me to make an impact in their lives.