Clog #4 - My world's on fire, how 'bout yours?

Camp was postponed for 24 hours due to the Waldo Canyon Fire, and camp ended today at 2:30 because of the same fire. Camp is not in any immediate danger, and as far as I've heard, no one has died.

We evacuated in an orderly fashion, forming some sort of convoy from Woodland Park to Colorado Springs (two other convoys went to Littleton and Denver). The four eleven-year-old girls in my car held up really well - we entertained eachother with jokes, songs, and the camp version of a "Bangladesh" accent.

Life goes on.

Can't change that.

My parents and I are staying at some friends' house, far away from the danger. It feels entirely unreal. The drama queen in me is enjoying this adventure, the realist keeps muttering something about what if my house actually burns down...

I don't know. Life would continue on. There would be grace, and trouble, and I'd be more aware of the grace in the times of trouble.

Speaking of grace and trouble, our program team worked together well. Miraculously well. We probably like being around eachother too much. On Tuesday night, when we were supposed to be planning for a game, we shared about the last time we cried (mind you, this is a group that contains a 20-year-old man, two 19-year-old girls who had a major conflict the last time they saw eachother, and an 18-year-old from Texas named Brady). 

We were definitely lacking in the organization and forethought departments, but we made it somewhat smoothly to the evacuation (codename: "birthday").

More to come on the fire when there's more to tell.

Clog #3 - For Ecuador

Here’s the week in numbers:

At the 2012 Varsity Elimpics, Ecuador’s medal count totaled 4: two bronzes (one for long jump, one for cabin clean-up) and two golds (one for synchronized swimming and one for tug-of-war).

Perhaps our numbers weren’t that impressive. But it deserves mention that we are the only cabin in the history of Elim that has done “The Wobble” together in the pool.

My cbf Morgan and I counseled together, which was a good experience… we have different styles, but each had plenty of opportunities with 14 campers.

I read about 30 pages of The Brothers Karamazov. A word from Father Zossima: “If you have been talking to me so sincerely simply to gain approbation for your frankness, as you did from me just now, then of course you will not attain to anything in the achievement of real love; it will all get no further than dreams, and your whole life will slip away like a phantom.”

MY WHOLE LIFE IS A SHAM.

CAN’T CHANGE THAT.

The speaker’s longest closing prayer lasted for about 9 minutes, during which he did 2 altar calls… I wish I had had the courage to get up and walk out.

But then someone might not approve of me anymore, and I don’t think I could handle that.

I’m not sure if anything I did was for Ecuador or for me.

I want to want to be a selfless, humble person who doesn’t fight for attention.

More Words

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."

                                                                                            ~Fyodor Dostoevsky


Hypocrite update! I just considered bringing The Brothers Karamazov with me to camp next week so people would see me reading it...


YHGYUTYRTY*


It's not like I'd have time to read it anyway.

Right?

*face smash against keyboard

Clog #2 - General Silliness

What a weird week.

The new camp catchphrase (which is overtaking “That’s because I’M KATNISS!” by about a mile) is: “CAN’T CHANGE THAT!” The tone is sarcastic (and typically loud). It can be used in any circumstance, but it’s the most effective in situations that actually involve something that cannot be changed.

Sometimes we follow it up with a fist-bump that transitions into a shrug and a look of despondence.

We think we’re FREAKING HILARIOUS.

We’re also freaking injured – incidences from this week include: 2^nd degree burns from hot water, various shoulder/hip/knee maladies and rug burns from a variety of dodgeball called “Protect the President”, blisters (I’m glad that we live in a country and century that allows women to dig postholes), sunburns, broken fingernails, scrapes, and sore feet.

And we’re also all in camp love… which is to say that working with staff members of the opposite sex can be a major distraction… which is to say that no, I don’t actually think I’d date any of them (well, not at the immediate moment…), but I consider working at Christian camp a “window shopping for qualities in a boyfriend” kind of opportunity… and then I remember that a relationship is a sacrifice and not a shopping spree.

I don’t understand that yet. I am not mature enough to even sort of consider whether or not I’d be willing to consider someone else’s life more valuable than mine.

So, I focused more on boys than on grace. Well… I have this weird thing inside of me that sort of rebels against finding security in something that 1. I can’t even pretend to have earned and 2. Doesn’t get me some sort of attention.

At camp, I’m more of an actress and less of a servant.

Hypocrite.

And (since I view others the same way in the same way that I view myself) I go to prayer meetings with a bunch of hypocrites. All the passionate singing, the stiff praying – I’m spitting out sawdust.  

We sit around in circles… singing to Someone and talking to Someone… and it seems so very silly…

Because it is.

The notion that I’m allowed to speak (to ask for things) and to sing (off key) without being struck is quite silly, unless God can be seen as sort of silly (or at least impractical) Himself in his love for me.

Clog #1 - Real or Not Real?

(The next  several paragraphs are about the Hunger Games, if you just don’t want to deal with it, skip down to the part that says “DONE WITH THE HUNGER GAMES CHATTER.”)

It is my great delight to report that the Hunger Games jokes have continued and even intensified with this first week and a half at dear old Elim.

The theme this summer is “The Elimpics,” which has led the program team* to make these kinds of suggestions: “Well, the Hunger Games is the ultimate Olympics, so we could just do that instead – we wouldn’t have to plan anything, we could just throw all the campers in the sports field with some crap from the prop room and let them have at it.”

NOT THAT FUNNY… (but funny enough to dress up like Effie and to wish the odds in favor of the trainees and whisper “Nightlock, nightlock, nightlock” into the radio every once in a while…)

My bcf (best camp friend) Morgan actually likes the Hunger Games, which is strange, because she usually hates “teen novel sensation sweeping the nation” hubbub. She wants her radio handle to be “Katniss” and often retorts in conversation, “Well, that’s because I’M KATNISS!” This declaration is accompanied by the pantomime drawing of a bow and pretend arrows flying around the general vicinity.

My only issue with this is that Morgan is Team Gale. I mean, HOW COULD SHE?

Another programmer, Mark, dubbed himself “Peeta.” When we asked some trainees which Hunger Games character Mark would be, they said, “Cato,” and Mark promptly pitched a pretend fit and threw them out of the program office.

DONE WITH THE HUNGER GAMES CHATTER

The point of all of that is this – I am glad I’m at camp. I’m actually enjoying myself, which is unexpected… When I left for camp on the 30^th, I was crying. Today, I’m leaving at 2:15 to go back. I can’t wait (and not just because of the HG ridiculousness – if I included everything that happens at camp that makes me smile, this blog would be entirely unmanageable).

I am getting so much more than I deserve.

I am awash in grace.

The world is awash in grace.

The state of grace is the only real thing that there is – everything else is self-deception.

My angsty squirrel moments – my frequent fits about not being good enough to deserve grace – are only pride.

The camp show I’m putting on (and believe you me, I’m definitely putting it on), my show of concern, my pretense of intellect, my appearance of faith – even these are awash in grace.

I saw her this week. She came up for the returners’ session on Friday afternoon.

We hugged – she said, “I’m ok.” We smiled. There will probably be more talk about it – but there is GRACE. She is giving me grace. Maybe I'll be able to screw up the courage to accept it.

Jesus once said, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Looked up the verse on Google – there’s even grace for THAT).

The following thoughts are borrowed entirely from Brennan Manning’s Ragamuffin Gospel: Jesus was not talking about the innocence or purity of children. First century Palestine did not think of children that way. First century Palestine thought of children as worthless, as useless, as insignificant, as incapable.

Unless I come to terms with the reality of my insignificance and inability to deserve grace, I will remain in the same double-minded Christianity circus sideshow that I have been hiding out in for the past 5 years.  I will remain in the not real.

And I can choose to retreat to the not real whenever I feel like it – yet another shard of grace. I don’t have to choose it.

But.

“What is Good and New about the Good News is the wild claim that Jesus did not simply tell us that God loves even in our wickedness and folly and wants each of us to love each other in the same way and to love him too, but that if we will let him, God will actually bring about this unprecedented transformation in our hearts himself.

What is both Good and New about the Good News is the mad insistence that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory but as the outlandish, holy, and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments (q.v.) but in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off by ourselves.

Thus the Gospel is not only Good and New but, if you take it seriously, a Holy Terror. Jesus never claimed that the process of being changed from a slob into a human being was going to be a Sunday school picnic. On the contrary. Childbirth may occasionally be painless, but rebirth never. Part of what it means to be a slob is to hang on for dear life to our slobbery.” – Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking.

So, if you’ve made it to the end of this, I’m going to ask you to do something that I feel awkward about. Pray for me and for you and for your family and for all the people you know. Pray that we will get it. Pray that we will understand just how insignificant we are. Just how incapable we are. Just how fantastic the grace is. That we don’t have to pretend to believe we are sinners while hiding behind self-righteousness (Manning again) but that we can actually believe that we are sinners and TAKE THE GRACE. Take it and RUN WITH IT. DROWN IN IT. SPEND IT, CONSUME IT, GET DRUNK ON IT, AND GO BACK FOR MORE.

Because our sin is real, but the grace is real-er.

*The program team consists of 8 individuals and 2 teams. 4 people on each team. Each team is in charge of the program for the grade school or middle school camps, of which there are three each, creatively named GS1, MS1,GS2, MS2, GS3, and MS3. On the grade school team: Zoe, Mark (Peeta), Brady, and me. On the middle school team: Morgan (Katniss), Kaitie, Ben, and Justin.

All of us are certifiably insane. I think we're kind of important (which is to say I think I'm kind of important), which God probably thinks is funny, because God keeps introducing me to people like Ashley Graummann, a trainee from last week who legitimately works for God and not for appearances.