The only youth pastor that they have known is moving on, and this is both their first chance to process as a group and also their week to say goodbye.
They've been deciding all week how to process this, texting each other, texting leaders, talking, thinking, talking. But, it doesn't ease the tension on a circle of worried sixth grade faces that already know exactly what I am going to tell them. They still don't like it.
For some of them, the reaction comes with greater force than others. The girls who have known Julie as a discipleship group leader are teary eyed, and the questions come quick and quiet. Where are Chris and Julie going next? What are they going to do? Who is going to take Julie's discipleship group? Her job at the school?
This is familiar but also different. So very, very different from what the high schoolers walked through before them. Quicker, cleaner, more certain. A change from one familiar couple leading the ministry to another, perhaps not forever, but for right now. And, for the kids, this nebulous sense of "now" seems to be enough.
Enough to make cards and eat cookies and watch a slide show. Enough to say their thank you's and their goodbye's and to step out into the falling snow.
Because, the transition also means that the change in youth pastors wasn't the only thing that they learned about in their parent letters.
There is a winter camp that I wasn't going to be at, because I have yet to learn the art of being in two places at once. Transition has moved them to the same campus as the high school retreat. They will be joining the older group for meals and chapel.
And, they are a well earned mixture of thrilled and terrified.
By text, they were moans and groans about the change, certain that they didn't want their siblings around, dismissive of the idea that this could be something good.
In person they are close and excited, bouncing off of my hip and standing just within reach, spilling over with half stories, and coming back again just as often as they leave. One moment there because they are nervous, the next grieving, the next there because they are excited.
Falling into camp habits without any appearance of conscious thought.
The girls help me to set up the game, scattering the floor with hula hoops and familiar manila tags.
No one is sure anymore which of the "standing in the middle of the woods" handwriting is theirs, or even which of the dozens of words they would have used to describe God. How, after all, do you begin to contain the Divine onto the space of a single card?
Some of them went with the sorts of words that Christians have been parsing through for centuries, "immutable," "omniscient." Others chose words that were less pretentious but no less powerful, "grace," "love," "faithfulness."
Today, instead, they talk about bus rides and ridiculous games, and who played with which app on my phone when they were too sun kissed and dirty and exhausted to string together another sentence. And, maybe, in this case, it isn't so different. These are the things that we know, not about God, but about each other -- and, through each other, the things that we know about God.
We know that God is present in our joy, present in our hurt, a soft place to fall back on when we have moved past our ability to do anything else.
Grace. Love. Faithfulness. Steady knowing. The things that they see of God are the things that they have seen in human lives.
In the high schoolers who play truth or dare with them and in the leaders and friends who climb aboard these noisy, smelly busses and commit the time to doing life together. Sure, we're a mess. Put a dozen humans together in any sort of a situation, and there will be mess. But, in the midst of the mess, they are learning how to be human.
So, today, when things are just a little messier than normal, they fall back on those patterns. Drop the barriers of grade or gender; pull in a little closer; circle up a little more often, sit a little more in each other's space. Remind each other with stories of the past, present, and future, that our God is present and patient, that, in all of it, we are never alone.
They can say goodbye to two leaders who they love. They can handle changes with grace. They can move forwards even when they don't know what happens next.
For today, they can run a mutant form of a relay race while the leaders throw dodge balls at them from the balcony. They can collect these familiar cards. They can eat gluten free cookies and deliver cards and pray out loud. They can do everything in their power to honor two people who have been serving in this ministry since they were in preschool.
Because, just like at camp, there are patterns of faithfulness in the midst of the chaos.
