GuGo2016

Middle school camp is a whirlwind.

Middle school camp is always a whirlwind. A place where Holy looks like thirty minutes spent dragging kids into the shallow part of the river and dunking each other over and over again into the water that we have stirred up to brown with the constant scrambling of our feet. Looks like tiny sixth graders who bury each other in sand and kids who sass back at leaders who are teasing them.

Holy looks like chapel services with sixth grade girls stretched out long on one side, seventh and eighth grade boys on the other, and sixth grade boys lined up behind, all of them watching each other, learning, protecting. Becoming this crazy family that passes around my phone simply to have it and keeps hawk eyed track of who is injured or stressed out or tired.

We play endless hours of volleyball and gaga, climb up and down the hill and down and up again. Carry gunny sacks up to the top of the slide. Lounge in hammocks and make videos and weave our confessions into artwork down by the stream.

We get lost and frustrated and find our way again, learn that sometimes you have to turn around to where you came from to get back on course, and sometimes you simply have to follow someone who has walked the path before you.

We have worship stations that are art and nature walks, service and music, and, when night falls, we leave our schedule to the mercy of the growing darkness. Run through unseen blackberry bushes, search for counselors who disappear into the blackness, and sit under the stars to sing and talk with these kids who curl like puppies to keep each other warm, their shivering, tired frames struck by the Holy of this mountainside.

On the final night, we gather on the floor of the chapel, and our kids practice the kind of transparent honesty that comes so naturally to middle schoolers on the last full day of camp.

My girls make it back to the cabin mostly delirious with exhaustion and still wet with tears over stories that they hadn't expected to hear. They talk and then we pray, a steady stream of eleven year old voices that stretches until the calm ones are falling asleep where they sit, and we send the rest of them to bed, still holding hands and sniffling, because, sometimes, what they really need is rest.

They've spent the week making signs to decorate the wall outside our cabin and breakout times rifling through their Bibles to show each other favorite verses. We're all in one lodge again this year, and they've taken advantage of the hotel style hallways in the best ways possible, using them to check in with each other, to return belongings, to make plans for the day. To be family.

Because, our kids are in love with the water front, when no one else is there, and they plan their afternoons carefully to avoid the crowds of the larger camp that meets below us. We line the dock to watch people play on the log, life jacket clad bodies trying to push each other off of the spinning, padded cylinder, and the flat surface tips with the weight of us.

It's a little cold for the water most days, but no one seems to mind, not when the sun is brilliant on the last day and we can speak the easy language of pushing each other off and dunking each other under, of sand fights and mud fights and M&Ms given out for the completion of puzzles. Of forgetting rolled ankles for long enough to take advantage of these moments and of settling into now familiar spots to hear truth fall from each other's lips.

Because, at middle school camp, everything is Holy.

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Bridgetown 2016

Bridgetown is a lot of things.

Perhaps more so because I remember being here as a high schooler. Remember falling asleep to winged horses on the windows and the shouts and music of life downtown. Remember waking up to brush my teeth with a finger and roll up my sleeping bag, not knowing what came next.

I remember sitting on warm red bricks to offer coffee and sandwiches and walking under the bridge during Night Strike to catch a glimpse of Holy that took my breath away.

Bridgetown is where we go to watch our kids be strong.

Not the earth shattering, news making kind of strong but the kind that it takes to squat down or take a knee and have a conversation with someone that you might not have otherwise. A, stumble through a prayer on an empty street corner, do the thing that you don't want to do, completely uncertain of what happens next, kind of a courage.

Sometimes, traffic is stopped for miles on the freeway, so we climb out of vehicles and share snacks and quickly discover that nearly everything in the desert is prickly. We pause at a rest stop, breathe in the smoke that was blocking the road, and the John Day kids remember last year's fire, watch with anxious eyes, uncurl a little when the mountains turn green and we have left it behind us.

And, it's a little thing. A move too fast and you might miss it, mostly wordless, thing. But, it is there, and they prove themselves strong.

On Bridgetown trips we ask them to be stubborn.

For the, "This is too hard!" to be followed by standing to their feet and making it happen anyways. To sort their way through to the bottom of the clothing pile, and to find a way to keep walking, block after block and mile after mile, even when the only shoes that you brought for the week are cowgirl boots.

For a prayer walk that seems to take place on an endless stream of corners and for waiting awkwardly until someone takes the initiative to offer a coffee or a sandwich.

Two of my boys have their own unique reasons to be thrown into tailspins when they don't know where or when the next meal is coming from, and yet we send them into Urban Plunge with no money or food for breakfast or lunch -- or the knowledge that they will be getting dinner. "How are you going to get breakfast? What are you going to do?"

They give me that look like I am murdering puppies, but they bite their tongues, and none of the fear in their eyes spills off of their lips.

Stubborn. Strong. Courageous.

Do the hard thing. Do it scared. I'm right here. I will keep you safe. But, I won't keep you comfortable.

And, they figure it out, these five kids who can't decide whether they are glad that I am there, or frustrated that I won't simply tell them the answers already. Find breakfast. Find lunch. Find ways to entertain themselves in between.

Basketball with a sleeping bag. Hot potato. Conversations with whoever happens to walk by.

We don't travel far. Drawn like magnets back to a single park, they nap in the shade and sketch tic tac toe boards onto the blacktop with tiny wooden crosses that we picked up along the way. The crosses don't survive the encounter, but I suppose that is rather the point. We are here this week to encounter the Divine, and the cross, as end game, never survives that interaction. The beams are separated, the body taken down, and the grave makes room for new Life.

These are resurrection kids, because they are part of a resurrection people.

Anxiety, fear, discomfort, uncertainty; those things will never be end game, because the grave makes way for new Life.

For Night Strike, where we wash feet and serve meals and hand out clothing. Where hair is cut and nails are painted and conversations are had. Where everything that should be messy and raw is covered with grace and beauty instead, because everyone here has the right to be just as human as everyone else.

"I think that this is my favorite part." We find a breath in the constant whirlwind of clothing distribution, watch the throb of life under this overpass, and two of the boys turn to me with brilliant eyes.

"Mine too." Right now, we aren't being stubborn. In the midst of this noise and the subtle waft of headache inducing smoke, they are more at peace than they have been all day. "This is what church is supposed to look like. This is Holy."

Church is Night Strike. Church is service projects and hand crafted invitations. Love Feast and hours spent listening to and laughing with and learning from some of the ones whom they have been always taught to fear. Because, a good meal can tear down all sorts of barriers.

Church is sometimes getting lost and driving around in circles for a solid hour because no one can quite decide where you should be. Church is fort wars that start out playful and end up messy. Church is kids' club and face paint and water soaked high schoolers. Church is laughter and sweat and checking the rearview mirror every few minutes, because one of the boys managed to smash his head into the concrete moments before we piled back into the vans.

Church is doing it joyful and doing it scared.

For this week, for these kids and these leaders, church is Bridgetown.

Broken bread and coffee at the water front or a park, a soup kitchen or a niche in the sidewalk. Baptism by water bottle from a giggling little girl. Confession that is more than simply stories heard and treasured, but the changes that those stories work in our lives, because, all too often, we, as the Church, also have confessing to do.

The power of touch to heal the things that are sick within us, not forever, but in this Sacred Now.

Confirmation as we learn a new catechism, a new way of hearing, seeing, understanding. And, a house father who teaches us that not every calling is glamorous, but every calling has value.

Church as Love with skin on.

Grace Upon Grace

Royal Family Kids Camp has a way of making the rest of the world come to a halt.

Shootings and protests and the world's new found ability to wander around and 'catch' imaginary creatures all stop at the gate, or, perhaps, somewhere a little farther down the highway, where we first pick up cell signals again.

Everything focuses in, centers, becomes about this moment and these campers and the things that are happening right here, right now, and nowhere else.

"That's why you go to a big training before camp," my eleven year old leans in close with a soft shake of her head when the half dozenth pause in the movie pulls a frustrated groan from thirty-six campers, "so you can learn how to not get angry at kids and to smile."

She doesn't have the word for it, but I know what she means. She means that these red shirted 'grown ups' are overflowing with Grace.

Grace for littles who get stuck, who get sad, who get angry, who get anxious, or happy, or excited, or overly tired. Grace in counselors who let their little boys comb through their hair with dinner forks and who curl the hundredth strand of little girl hair for fancy dinner.

Grace when kiddos wake up belting out Gold in the early pre-coffee hours of the morning (Proverbs 27:14) and when we stumble our way through dances that the kids have learned at Breakfast Club. Grace when we stay up late putting together scrapbooks and writing letters and Grace when we get up early to shiver our way to a Polar Bear Swim.

Camp is marked by counselors who help to 'hunt' chipmunks and catch every spider that we come across, by hands gently cupped around moths that made the mistake of resting on the nurses' cabin and peering into branches for hidden caterpillars.

Camp is hula hooping and tea parties and costumed children who wander through meals and activity stations as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

It is CITs and staff members who drop whatever they are doing to walk us to the bathroom or watch us make our way back to the cabin, counselors who end the week realizing how very little they have found the time to shower, and campers who manage to have a 'great day,' even when the big feelings are trying take control of their little hearts and minds and bodies.

It's girls who trust enough to let you save them from bees and who ask to sit with their brother for a meal, because they don't get to live with him right now. It's kids who lean in close for the scary parts of the movie and who finally, on the very last day of camp, decide that you are allowed to braid their hair.

And, it is re-doing those braids three times before lunch, so that they will still look 'perfect' when she gets home.

When your camper who spent last year blacking out every word of her letters to you finally sends ones that you can read, because it's less scary to claim you, now that you aren't quite so close. When you spend hours practicing the hand motions to the eleven year old's favorite Music*lly and the nine year old doesn't have the patience for you to braid both sides of her hair at once.

When the bobble heads have been painted and the birdhouses/bug barns/tool boxes have been built. When there isn't a single screw left to undo in take apart and when dress up is wet and muddy. When their earbuds have been practically glued into their ears since Birthday Party and their name signs are rolled up into purple trash bags for the trip home.

When camp is over, we can only pray that they remember Grace and Love.

That they remember that not all grown ups get angry at kids. That some grown ups smile and ask them how their day has been and make sure that they always have enough to eat.

That, no matter what comes next, there will always be a place in the mountains where time comes to a halt.