Staff Retreat and Cardboard Boats

Every six weeks the boys at camp get an extended weekend home visit.  They leave Friday morning after breakfast and return Tuesday after lunch.  Sometimes the weekend holds planned activities for the staff at camp and sometimes it means a few extra free hours.  The April home visit is characterized by an annual staff retreat although it feels strange to say annual since it’s the first one for the Allegany group.  Two generous donors in Garrett County Maryland offered their cabins for us to use for the weekend.  It was great having some time away from camp when the whole group could get together instead of a few here or there who happened to be off on the same day.  The other fabulous thing that happened was having two girls volunteer to come cook for the weekend so aside from Friday night, we didn’t have to think / shop/  pack / cook / or clean up food.  While cooking together can be a lot of fun, this actually felt like a vacation!

Friday night began with a Dutch oven cookoff.  Fortunately, David actually likes cooking with a Dutch oven.  Some days I think this trait is a prerequisite for being at camp.  My thoughts on Dutch oven cooking run somewhere along the line of bothersome.  Why someone would voluntarily choose to cook food the hard, slow way over a hot, dirty, messy, hard to control fire in a process that then necessitates extensive scrubbing of large, heavy, dirty cast iron cookware …. the reasoning completely escapes my comprehension.  When we started looking for recipes, I found a few that could be mostly made beforehand or that required very few ingredients.  I thought they were brilliant.  David insisted they completely missed the point.  I happily sat on a camp chair and watched the process; he happily cooked up a venison stew with a gazillion ingredients.  Win win.

Saturday was the perfect blend of downtime and organized time.  The biggest event of the day was a cardboard boat building contest.  None of us had any idea this was coming.  They just gathered us all around, divided us into three groups, and gave us a pile of cardboard, a couple of rolls of duct tape, and one hour.  The idea was to build a boat that would win in design; but, more importantly, it had to actually carry people.  There was a small pond next to the smaller cabin and the three boats would need to be manned across the pond, touch a branch, and row back.  Whichever boat carried the most people ultimately won.  It was an absolute blast!  I never dreamed it would take over an hour to build a boat, but we certainly could have used more time.  And I never, ever dreamed a slap-stick cardboard boat was capable of carrying more than one person, but I kid you not we got SEVEN people in that boat.  Each time the boat came back from touching the tree, you had to put another person in it.  All that teaching about deep breathing in childbirth classes became somewhat advantageous.

  {some people purposely dumped close to shore, but we won’t mention any names}

   {our team … 7 out of 10 sailed across the pond at one time and the boat stayed intact. barely. but intact}

  {nothing like a bit of mock drama in celebration}

We named our boat the “Maid of Honor” and she proved herself well, even if people voted against her in design.  But hey, in the battle of cute versus capable, we won.  I have to keep defending that point since our boat carried 1,090 pounds and another boat carried only six people but 1,175 pounds. Clearly our winning stance is very narrowly defined (but only say that in a whisper).

Saturday night and Sunday morning we had an inspirational guest speaker who shared such good, good words with us.  It is a powerful thing to have a stranger speak words that so clearly speak into situations you live with that he knows nothing about.  God’s Spirit felt so real and so powerful.  A few little takeaways:

When a situation is out of control we tend to have one of three responses.  1. Fear.  We’re afraid of getting into the relationship because it will hurt.  2. If only …. if only that person would see themselves, if only I weren’t afraid, if only I had more money, if only that wouldn’t have happened … We do if onlys with a lot of situations, but the truth is, they are never reality.  3. Foolishly trying to force my way — when we do that, we hurt people.

“If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.”

Even when life is out of control, get a hold of life and enjoy it.  Seek to know God.  Praise Him.  Worship.

While Terry didn’t specify those three as responses to out of control situations, they really are.  Out of control literally means out of our control.  Yet we tend to stew and worry and try to fix things.  That might help if it were actually something we can control.  But when it’s bigger than us, to worship God in the middle of it solves more problems than all the fixing we can try to do.  Our God-focus changes the way we respond to the situation and sometimes (not always) changes the situation itself.  But most important of all, it changes us.

And one more quote, “You will trust God only as much as you love Him.”

I didn’t take notes the second session, but I remember that so much of His talk resonated with what God had been saying to me in the days just prior.  Some days it feels as though God is re-shaping so much of my view of christianity.  I was reading Hebrews 12 about being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses and it made me realize again that I expect too much community and too much running alongside.  I idealize church community.  I want christianity to look like a marathon … you know, so many people around you, you wonder how you can run.  Nearly impenetrable and should anything happen, there are plenty of people to jump in and help.  People cheer from the sidelines.  People notice.  It’s a big, happy event.

But walking by faith sometimes means loneliness.  Faith is acting in obedience when you can’t see ahead.    Faith means living in obedience even in the times when it feels purposeless.  Faith {for me right now} means living at camp when it’s not at all a natural fit, because Jesus asked us to live here.  Faith in tough situations means being obedient even when the few people who do see, don’t understand.  Faith means choosing to worship when your prayers don’t get answered.

Genuine faith perseveres to the end; emotional decisions do not.

So many times I go back to the mental picture Jesus gave me at a beach house in Virginia two months before we moved here.  We were spending the weekend with friends and that morning as they talked about an incredibly painful part of their journey, we talked about faith.  A little later as we prayed I saw gorgeous images flash through my mind, all of them characterized by mist and fog.  There was a fog enshrouded path through the woods, the sun trying to burn through the mist rising over the ocean …………… Why is it that not being able to see clearly is so, so beautiful in nature, yet when it happens in real life we feel anxious?  The things that feel like they are leading to bad outcomes … what if they are part of what will make us strong and beautiful for God eventually?  Do the mud puddles matter if the Son is about to turn the raindrops into a thousand iridescent spheres?

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