Contend - Snow Blast 2016

"Are you going to sit up front with us on the bus?"

My 7th and 8th grade shadows fall easily back onto this old habit, stretching the final hours of camp into long segments of Spot the Differences, Never Have I Ever, and Mad Libs. 

There are certain chunks of time that have long been property of the boys. Half of each bus ride. Snowball fights. The final hour of free time. Space after at least one meal. They stake out their claim, and we pull along whichever girls want to come along for the ride. 

Play pig after the gym has cleared from the whirl of volleyball games and dodgeball tournaments. Throw snowballs and attempt to whitewash faces and generally become soaking wet with the melting mess of it, even when there are pauses for tears and frustrations, the way that there always are when you pile up enough middle school lives, raw and together. 

Listen to jokes and riddles and pass off my phone a couple dozen times, because there is power to this. 

 Power to being clustered around the end of this dining room table as the boys trickle in and my girls filter out. To doing nothing more than listening and laughing and acknowledging when they are clever. To trying our very best at being Love and Grace who are stuck in the middle of that middle school mess that their brains and hearts and bodies are trying so hard to figure out. 

Power to pulling our girls from the group game and crunching through snow banks to take pictures in the empty skate park instead. To watching them be brave enough to drop in when the edge suddenly looks steep and strong enough to prove to themselves that they can run up and out the other side. 

Power to snowball fights where there are no real teams, but the frozen trickle melting down the back of my sweatshirt makes it feel like “throw snowballs at Jessica” might be a favored game. 

To sending girls off to their beds to draw and journal and process and to bringing them back together for raw, honest truth and water works that might just take us all by surprise. Except that it is Saturday night at camp, and they have been saving up all of the feels, storing them away in a bottle for just this moment. 

Because, in the midst of the uncertainty and change that rules their insides, middle school camp is made up of patterns. 

This leader comes down first for quiet time. Then that one. Then that one. This one brings the chocolate covered expresso beans and that one processes what they’re reading out loud.

We pray and read before we talk. Before we gather with the rest of the leaders for an official meeting. Before we pray again. Before we scatter to breakfast with our kids and start these days full of rhythms that repeat, year after year.

7th and 8th grade girls who pass around a bag of conversation hearts and murmur the truths that I have heard from so many lips before them, the ones that I would tattoo on their arms, so that, as they get older, they would never forget.

"We are: called, loved, kept, contenders, cherished, protected, servant, free, children, beloved, forgiven, embraced, befriended, #blessed."

"If we really, truly believed that God is our Rock, we would feel remembered, stable, loved, supported, and safe; and, because of that, we would act courageously and generously."

Ten girls who have a dozen different ways of expressing what the Gospel means to them. Who fill up pages with marker and washi tape, water color crayons and long paragraphs of reflection or creative writing. Because, oh do we ever have some girls who can write.

Girls who pass around packets of Marias and lemon drops while they ask big questions about truth and salvation, about choosing a religion for the convenience that it offers or living in one without really believing it, and about how on earth any of this is fair. About depression and divorce and death, science and theology and life. Who would talk for hours about all of these things that they are wrestling to get their heads around but are also itching to go play a game.

To run around in the dark and giggle and protect each other, to look foolish and to feel clever, to stay up too late eking out details from the one who is going to walk during New York Fashion Week, and to take a dozen more pictures out in the snow.

Goofy hand motions during worship with one of the girls and random dances with the same boys who save a seat for me on the bus and then find a way to have Jessica standing, so that we all three fit into the two person space.

And, the bus home stinks like cat pee and middle schoolers who have not showered, but we get back early enough for Superbowl parties that they may or may not fall asleep in the middle of. Back into the rhythms of everyday life. Praying that, somewhere between the ceiling shaking with the games of sixth graders above us and the floor shaking with the jumping throb of middle school worship, they found a better picture of God.