Week 3 – You know you’ve been on summer staff a long time when…

Admin note: Again, sorry this is a week late. I have been unable to access my website most of this week. Supposedly another site on the server was clogging it. Sigh. The downside of shared hosting…

Thanks again for your prayers this week. We had a great week of camp and the Lord was really at work. This week we had some of the larger church groups that come regularly, so we had a lot of what we call, “professional campers,” or in other words campers who sometimes know the routine better than their counselors! Sometimes that professional camper attitude is accompanied by an insensitivity to God’s working as well, as they’ve “been there, done that, got the team shirt,” but thankfully that was not the case this week.

Perhaps because of all the returning campers, there were a lot of things this week that reminded me how long I’ve worked here. For starters, the theme this year, “Days of Knights” is the same theme as my first year working here, back in 2005. More related to the campers, one of the campers in my prayer cabin has an older sister who was one of my students this semester. Another JBC camper this week has two older brothers, both of whom were in my cabin on different years when I was a counselor. Another camper told me my sister had taught her violin at school this semester. And then to top it all off, in the middle of his message Friday, Big Bob called to me up in the sound booth regarding a detail of one his illustrations that he wasn’t sure about – while giving the illustration! Ok, maybe I have been here a long time. But I love the opportunities the Lord has given me here, and I’d be thrilled to keep serving here as long as He wills.

Kinda related, and I’m not sure if this is on purpose or not, but my assigned prayer partner each week so far has been a first-year counselor without a whole lot of experience. As a result, I’ve been able to share some of the things the Lord has taught me from my experiences which has been a great encouragement to them (and me). That’s just another reason to be thankful for what the Lord has allowed me do. This week, one of the campers in my prayer cabin was very homesick. Understandably, homesickness is not uncommon at JBC, but usually after the first night and the next morning’s activities, the campers are having so much fun they forget about being homesick. However this camper was still a little teary at lunch on Wednesday. However, I was able to help his counselor talk to him about the exciting things they were going to do that day (tubing, water wars, superslide, and of course the amazing, crazy, and hilarious Zing Zang Zap game show 🙂 ) and I continued praying for that camper. On Thursday when I saw him, he was no longer homesick and was having lots of fun!

This weekend, I got to have some fun too. Camp opened up the brand new paintball field for the operational staff, since we aren’t able to play during the week with campers like the counselors are. And even better, they opened it up for FREE! 😀 So I spent about an hour and a half Saturday afternoon shooting and being shot. I have a couple of small welts to show for it, but it was a lot of fun, nonetheless.

Speaking of fun (or more accurately, work, on the sound crew’s part :P), our annual Summer Prayer Partner banquet is coming up in just a few weeks on July 16. I hope to see some of you there. You’ll probably have to look for me behind a sound mixer, but I’ll be there :P.

This week, Tom Farrell is back for round 2 at teen camp, and at JBC we have another favorite speaker, Mr. Ed Dunlop (and of course, his dummy, Andy) 😛 Looking forward to seeing what God has planned for us. Thanks for your prayers.