Epic Living

Middle school camp. Where we put a cabin of sixth grade girls to sleep three nights out of five with stories from Tell Me the Secrets. Where we take long kayak rides to play in mud and longer ones the next day just to talk. Talk about camp and homesickness and sticking it through. Talk about school and temptation and which leaders they look up to. Talk about how older kids who haven't grown up in the church might not know the things that they do and how they can help them to learn. And, talk about nothing as we simply drift on the quiet of the river.

Where, this year, we designed the games and we built them around teamwork and trust and cooperation - around listening to each other and watching one another's backs. Where no one won - but no one seemed to notice. Where they are active and running and playing from eight in the morning until eleven o'clock at night. Where we talk about Calvary in the lunch line and on the way up from the riverfront. Where their artwork lines the walls of the chow hall and their prayers decorate the activity center.

Where they are old enough to flirt and think about relationships but still young enough to be completely engrossed in the building of a sand castle. Where sensory input is our friend and we pass out gum balls to stave off the Wednesday meltdowns - when exhaustion and emotion finally begin to catch up with them, and they realize that they don't know what to do with any of it. Where it is acceptable to cry during music and they talk about feeling God during chapel.

Where we circle the wagons just a little tighter than last year and pull them a little closer, until there is no way for lives not to rub up against each other, against the reality of God. Where their fears can bubble to the surface and be wrapped in constant layers of truth. Truth that they are protected, seen, loved, safe. Truth that hard is normal and struggle does not make them broken.

"Jesus died on the cross for my sins."

It's the first thing to spill from their lips when I ask them for a truth that they heard in Sunday night's chapel, a thought or a belief from the speaker. Any other time, it could have been trite or shallow, a Sunday school answer to a Sunday school question, but it isn't, because the next answers aren't ones that we've given them at all. If you really believed that truth, that Jesus died on the cross for your sins, how would that make you feel?

"Good," they tell me, "safe, comforted, protected."

If you felt that way, how do think you would act?

"Loved, loving," they list ways of being rather than specific actions, but they are so spot on and so unified in their answers that I don't stop to correct them, "happy, relaxed, comfortable."

We move on to other truths, and the actions gradually get more concrete, but I can't help but think that this is it; this is Truth; this is gospel. This is the answer to their fears. This is the core of the epic living that the speaker is talking about, the core of the worship stations that they go to, the core of everything that is camp.

"I can feel good, safe, comforted, and protected, because I believe that Jesus died on the cross for my sins; and, because I feel that way, I can be loved and loving, happy, relaxed, and comfortable."

Perfect love as that which casts out all fear.

This is camp. Where there is no alter call, but they don't need it, because I can see the knowledge of God in their eyes every time that I look at them. Where nothing is sacred and everything is. Where we come home and it doesn't feel so much like coming off of a high, because this year was different.

Quieter. Deeper. More honest.

We played hard. I had the sore muscles yesterday to prove it. But, there was so much more to it than simply playing.

"This year was different." The kids try to explain, but they don't have the words any more than we do, and I am left drawing comparisons to Haiti or to the high school winter retreat, because there is a pattern and season to this thing. A season for the truth to break down walls and quiet conversations to be the the things that set hearts free. A season with fewer "extras" but somehow still more fruit.

They were honest and they were together, and God came to do the messy, beautiful, broken, complicated, simple thing that is the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers.

This is middle school camp 2013 - a year for epic living.