Once again, I find myself in the awkward position of trying to put words to the unexplainable. Camp. Camp, where the director tells the kids that the week is all about them, and, then, I walk back to my cabin to find the girls talking about people across the world who do not have access to clean water.
Camp, where the biggest rule is "no purple" (girls are pink, boys are blue...), and where it is legal for middle school boys to cry.
Camp, where I spend countless hours doing hair wraps on my girls and play clapping games waiting for meals, but I am still, somehow, constantly surrounded by my boys.
And, camp, where God has the power to work beyond us and despite us.
(Pictures are random and rarely connect to the text around them.)
He works despite high school counselors who are still reeling from Haiti and don't have the distance to see the burning trail behind them. He works despite homesick kids and despite leader pranks that nearly get the entire "Canada" team disqualified from the camp olympics. He works despite soggy food and too much free time in the dark.
And, when kids are wide eyed with remembered fear, He is present.
And, so, we laugh, and we lavish these kids with more attention then they think they can stand. We wait, when Wednesday comes and they take to pushing every button they think they can find, certain that, by now, we must be sick of them.
When we aren't, the walls begin to come down.
And, they decide that they want this. Whatever it is that they have been waiting and watching for, it finally comes to fruition.
Kids who have loved Jesus but been shy on religion stand up for the first time with a group to say that, "Yes, this church thing is what I want." Kids who have been slowly gathering information over an hour of Sunday school here and two weeks of Sunday school there stand up to say that, "I know enough, now, and this is what I want." Kids who have been at church every week since they were born stand up to say that, "This is still real, and I still want this, even when I make mistakes."
Over the last week, I got to watch them slowly build up trust with counselors. I got to watch eleven-year-old boys, who normally shy away from men, come to the conclusion that these male counselors fully intended to protect them and keep them safe. (Not that I ever fully lost my shadows, but that they became less "mine" and far more "ours.")
I got to watch as they took that tentative trust and applied it to a God that is bigger than any individual counselor.
I got to watch holy moments unfold.
In between, there was all sorts of crazy. Two of my girls drew on mustaches with sharpie. We fed them more sugar than ought to have been legal. Cabin "fairies" came and delivered gifts when they weren't looking. The girls used watercolors to splatter paint me a shirt. We used mode podge and glue sticks and scissors during cabin time.
They stuck to us like glue, down the zip-line, down the slide, into the river, and playing ninja destruction in the grass. We canoed, stuck seaweed in our hair, and swam through dozens of tiny dead fish. They were blobbed. We all fell off of the log roll. And, they laid on their beds in the cabin and giggled.
By the end of the week, our cabin smelled like musty river water and bug spray.
We played (and cheered) in dozens of "Olympic games." And, I took breaks to chill with my 6th grade boys. We filled in mud puddles with gravel, sat and talked about nothing and everything. They used their fingers to pop a paintball on my arm and ended up wearing half of it. I heard about every paintball they got hit with and how badly it hurt. "It was all purple. I almost cried."
They would stand in chapel and give me that look that we have perfected after weeks and weeks of Sunday school, until I came over and hauled them to their feet, clapped their hands for them, or bopped whistling fingers out of their mouths - many thanks to their counselor for the whistling trick.
On the bus ride home, they saved three seats: one, in front of them, for their adult counselor; and two, side by side, behind them - in the perfect position for hands to land on heads and shoulders any time they caused "trouble" - for their high school counselor and myself.
My girls sat directly behind us, and I lost track of the number of times I heard my name from all angles. Jessica has always been able to hear us all at once, right? Why should now be any different?
I take my girls to snack shack and end up engaging with all of them, sixth through eight, guys and girls, because, how do you say no to eyes that light up at the smallest smile of greeting? The older girls come and watch me do hair wraps and then come to the cabin to borrow supplies. The boys watch with undiluted curiosity and laughingly ask if I can get one to stay in their hair.
Sorry. Back in the skater hair days, perhaps. But, not right now.
On the bus home, the sixth grade boys discover the bag of hemp, and I spend the ride making bracelets as transition pieces for four of them.
One of them just wants to match me and my bracelet covered wrists. One of them is collecting everything that he can to prove to himself that camp is real. And, two of them are experimenting, using the new found boldness of camp to verbally ask Jessica for something for the first time, rather than waiting for her to offer.
One of those holds onto his bracelet for the rest of the ride, circling his hand around his own wrist, as if, if he lets go of it, it might disappear.
Because, these are the kids who hover outside of the TAB when everyone else is in line for meals and then "sneak up" through the snack shack, because waiting in such a long line, for such a long time, and listening to your brain tell you that there might not be enough left, is more scary than potentially missing a meal on your own terms.
These are the kids who tell me about every move their counselors make the first few days of camp, as if my approval means that there are no hidden motives behind words and actions.
These are my shadows during the Star Wars night game, because there is no space in their mind where it can be safe for adults (camp staff) to be hitting kids - even with pool noodles and plastic lightsabers.
These are the ones who measure our closeness to home by the prison.
These are the kids who never stop moving, until a little girl gets up during the talent show to sing the first part of Temporary Home and they freeze under my hands, whose dark eyes look up at me afterwards and beg for a distraction until I wrap my pink bandana over their face and we pretend that it never happened. Because, at eleven years old, there are some things that they don't need words to communicate.
These are older boys who nudge the younger ones into participating in worship and fly to their sides when they are hurt.
These are kids who catch my eye across the chapel and grin, because they know that I just saw whatever they did and that it was good.
These are the ones who come to a worship station and easily spend an hour with just them and a passage of scripture, and, who do it on purpose, without falling asleep, without talking to their neighbor.
These are kids who can be corrected with a word.
Who see and feel and know the pain of their friends, but who continually dive in deeper. These are the kids who haven't learned yet to put a cap on how much of themselves they give, who can pour everything into their friends and trust that the same will be given in return.
These are the kids who raise their hands in worship and dance like they are trying to wear through the floor, who not only know the right answers but mean them, who pour out their souls in their artwork and write worship songs that are nothing short of beautiful - mature and honest and exquisitely written. These are the kids who earnestly go after everything that they do.
They have drama. What human being doesn't?
They make mistakes. But, they fix them.
They learn like sponges.
They remember everything.
And, once they decide they are yours, heaven forbid anything try to remove them.
("Isn't that one of your boys?" I heard more than once at camp. "You should go talk to him.")
"The boys really like you." My girls would look at me, slightly puzzled, trying to understand the steady stream of smallish males.
"Well, that's good. 'Cause I'm rather fond of them myself."
"But, why?" Faces would wrinkle up. "They're annoying."
I told one of the girls when she explicitly declared her attempt to "see how far she could push me," there is almost no way that a student could "push me" into being ticked off at them. (Not to say that she didn't give it her best shot. But, forty-five minutes isn't long enough to register on the radar as anything but amusing. Sorry, hon. I have a source of stubborn beyond your imagination.)
They push. We dance. They pull. We dance. Laughing, crying, running, sitting, homesick, or deliriously happy; we dance.
And, somewhere in the middle, we find God.
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