Year after year

I did a little math with my free time while I was home in Michigan the last two weeks. This summer marked my tenth in camp ministry. That includes my first two as a Counselor in Training while I was still in high school, and the five I spent as a counselor / core staff at Grace Adventures, the one I was in Tanzania, and the two I've spent here in Puerto Rico as program director. And that's not even counting the summers when I just showed up for a week or so to handle an overflow of campers as a rent-a-staff.

Having thusly proved my credentials, I pretty much have this whole Camp Ministry thing down and should therefore be finished making mistakes.

Yes, well.

I remember a phone call I made to my old director before last summer, in the last few days before staff training. I asked him what I should do if I make a mistake. I don't remember exactly how he worded it, but he basically said that I should just expect to make a bunch of them and move on. While he talked, I was busy realizing how much I had just betrayed my own nerves and fears about being the dude in charge of a summer program.

Now that we've wrapped up our summer camps for 2012, I can proudly say: I made several mistakes and no one ever demanded my immediate firing, and things never came to a screeching halt, and summer turned out pretty great. After all, camp has a way of running itself.

Now that I say that, I realize I probably could have gotten more sleep.

But anyway. One of the reasons camp went well, and that it's able to run itself, is because we had a solid summer staff.

Seriously, though. This was a consistent and constant comment from parents, visitors, mission teams, and other staff:

"Your staff, man... they're pretty awesome. Like, seriously. I didn't expect this."

Okay, that's my paraphrase. But I heard it a bunch of times, and I swelled with pride each time. And I grew increasingly appreciative of the way our counselors showed up and owned camp like they did. Nope, they weren't perfect - like me, they made mistakes, too - but they definitely exceeded expectations. People don't expect a bunch of college kids to be able to handle this, to be this dedicated and this responsible.

But they're the hands and feet of the ministry, and a big part of the big things that God continues to do here. We've got a really solid crew of high-schoolish and college kids who come back year after year and do this camp thing better every time. They volunteer their time a few weekends in the fall, winter, and spring to help us with retreats, too.

When campers come, they expect to see them.

That, to me, is huge. There's a bond of trust, and a sense of community amongst the campers. We're blessed to have a lot of returners and a healthy mix of new faces who quickly settle in like old friends. Because many of them are old friends. The returners know when campers or counselors are missing. They have real relationships, amongst themselves and with the staff. Many of our counselors have been able to invest in the same kids and witness their growth year after year.

It's huge. And I think it's a huge positive for the ministry here at Campamento del Caribe.

So, mad props to our summer staff. Job well done. Keep it up, year after year.



(how about I conclude with an old, semi-relevant Audio Adrenaline song:)

stress and dead horses

Please tell me that I am not the only one who does this. Last night I realized sometime around 2 am that I was stuck in some kind of thought pattern. Just thinking over and over again about pointless, stupid things, mostly logistics about work, about the Unichallenge next weekend. It was like my brain forgot that it was allowed to sleep, to do nothing, to rest, to take its regularly scheduled time off. It decided that this was a great time to fruitlessly attempt to figure out all the stuff that it has the next two weeks to figure out. This used to happen a lot more. Me, laying there in bed, not even realizing that I'm not sleeping.

Scumbag brain, won't even tell me I can't sleep.

And suddenly I realized that I wasn't sleeping, which was enough to break the cycle.  I got up, drank some water or something, crawled back into bed, and fell asleep. It actually used to do this a lot more and I don't really know why. My best guess is that it has something to do with caffeine or stress. I've cut back on the caffeine lately, but there isn't much I can do about the stress this time of year.

Somewhere in there, I dreamed I saw a dead horse on a roof. It was weird... weird enough for me to whip out my phone in my dream to take a picture of it so I could prove it later on. It's the kind of thing that must mean something. Then this morning my brain decided that 6 am - on my day off, no less - would be a lovely time to start back up again. I'm sure the "beating a dead horse" metaphor applies. But also, I really did see a dead horse by the side of the road the day before, and I wasn't dreaming. At the moment, I didn't have the time - or callous attitude - to whip out the phone to prove to everyone that I saw a dead horse. Because nobody here would really care, because it's really not a huge surprise.

And so I was laying there, in the early morning, hearing the waves crash into my back yard as they do all day, everyday, with my brain not-so-sneakily trying to get some work in. If I could remember what exactly it was thinking about, or if I'd made any progress at all, I'd consider trying to count them as work hours. But as it turns out, lost sleep doesn't count for billable hours.

I'm currently in the time of year where there's this huge cloud of undone stuff in front of me for our summer events. (If anyone has pointers on handling this kind of thing, send 'em my way.) One guaranteed way to add to the stress is to think about how I am the last line, the buck, as it were, when it comes to all that stuff. Generally, if I don't do it or tell/remind/delegate someone else to do it, it doesn't get done. Last year, as I learned my way around, lots of little things never got done because I never knew we had to do them and only realized them after they were missed.

One side of camp ministry is there are seemingly millions and millions of tiny details that need to get done. Stuff to move around, people to call, materials to get ready, ideas to scratch out, decisions to make. Not only am I trying to do all of those things, I'm trying to remember and record them to make sure they're not surprises to the person who succeeds me here once I leave. And they're all floating in my head, and on slips of paper, and on slightly more organized pieces of paper. This time of year, that workload of stuff is only going to increase. I'm learning what it means to be responsible for something, and the importance of getting real rest, and the difficulty therein.

But the other side of camp ministry is that the stuff that absolutely has to get done has a way of getting done. Everything else just fills in the cracks, non-essentials, details, which actually are the majority of the things that cause my stress, that keep me up at night. Or wake me up in the morning.