Week 2: Ministering to girls too?
Thank you for your prayers this week. God blessed me with another great cabin. I had 9 senior high guys, 10th grade through high school grads. In fact one guy had to leave early to go take his ACT test in order to be accepted at the college he is planning to go to in the fall. I enjoyed and was challenged by brother Gleiser’s messages this week. All 9 of my campers responded positively as well. They listened well and were obedient for the most part. Several of them made good decisions about improving their devotional life, and others received assurance about their salvation.
You’re probably wondering about the title of my note this week. I’ll be honest, I normally view the girls at camp as distractions to my guys that keep them from doing what they should. And as the vast majority of guy/girl relationships between campers are immature and self-centered, i try to discourage them. Thus i normally don’t interact a whole lot with my sister cabin. We may do s’mores on Friday, but that’s about it. However this week during one of the meals my sister counselor planned some brother/sister cabin activities with the guys in my cabin (brother/sister counselors sometimes switch places for meals which is how this happened.) Her girls were supposed to tell me the plans, but evidently forgot. So i found myself and my cabin tubing, playing gazeeball, hiking to the shoals, doing s’mores, switching places for three meals, and running into them more frequently than usual around the campsite. As a result i was able to minister to them in a more personal way than normal which was a good thing. One more dramatic example was on Friday when we went to the shoals. One of the girls sprained her ankle badly and was unable to walk on it. So I, with the help of two of my older campers, ended up carrying her back to camp piggy-back. Not the most ideal situation, but it was the best we could do under the circumstances.
Well, since i’ve already mentioned a lot about the brother/sister cabin thing, i’ll make that my topic of camp life for this week. Officially the reason for brother/sister cabins is to help with cabin cheering (the girls are hard to hear just by themselves and the guys need some motivation to cheer in the first place). However several more things normally go on. You obviously sit together at meals so you can cheer together. You also sit together for all the services and other meetings in the Activity Center (orientation, final scoring, etc) except sr. high only Christian Life Seminars. Normally there is also a competition between the brother / sister cabins in Scripture Memory (so far the guys have been blowing the girls away in this). The loser of the Scripture Memory challenge may have to do any number of things such as sing a silly song in the dining hall (I’m a Little Teapot and You Are My Sunshine are favorites), roll around in the creek and/or sandlot volleyball court, have coke/shaving cream/other gunk dumped on them, or maybe if they’re lucky just pay for s’mores. Most brother/sister cabins also try to get together to do s’mores toward the end of the week which may include a hike out to a place to do the s’mores (Shoals, 1st, 2nd falls). If you have any other questions or have another area of camp life you would like to hear about please let me know either by email or posting a comment.
Next week I’ll should have jr. high campers (or as Rand Hummel calls them “pre-people” :P) Should be a lot of fun. The speaker next week is John Goetsch who was the speaker when our teens were at camp last summer, i believe. He has an amazing grasp of Scripture passages and enormous bank of, not just verses, but lengthy passages he pulls from in his messages. Thanks again for your prayers!
