This month marks twenty years
since I first arrived on-site at Lutheridge in Arden, NC, to serve as a camp
counselor. I originally applied for the job in order to fulfill a promise I’d
made to my third-grade self. After spending several childhood summers as a
camper there, I thought it might be pretty fun to serve on staff one day. As
God planned it, one summer as a counselor ended up turning into three more. What
seemed at the time to be a whimsical decision ended up charting a significant
course for my young adult years.
In the intervening years
since that first summer I’ve received two undergraduate degrees and a graduate
degree in divinity. I’ve spent two years living abroad in two different
countries. Ten years have passed since my ordination, and I’ve started a
family. I feel I’ve reached a vantage point from which I can take stock and
assess how much, if at all, those years on summer camp staff formed me. The verdict?
Quite a lot; in fact, I fear they formed me more than any of my school-based
educational experiences did. In retrospect, I can see now where I established
some of my basic patterns of living and honed the contours of my fundamental
worldview. It was not the nine years I spend in academia, but rather around the
campfire and during afternoons of organizing field games. Where did I develop
many of my habits and practices that shape me to this very day? Not in the classroom,
but on the hiking trail and in the camp dining hall. Initially this “camp
thing” was just supposed to be a job, but like other people have pointed out
before, it actually ended up being a school for many “life skills.” As a way of
marking this anniversary, I offer here a list (in no particular order) of the
titles and brief descriptions of each course that serving on camp staff offered
me, along with a summary of how they’ve left an impression on me these many
years later.
 |
| Our first year staff shirt was a color we dubbed "Electric Watermelon" |
METEOROLOGY 101: “Weather is never an
issue.”
Let’s begin with the basic
element of living in a semi-outdoor environment: knowledge of the local climate.
In the mid-1990s, no college students carried around smartphones with weather
apps. Neither did we have reliable access to television or the internet while
we were working in the woods. One major result of this was we never knew what
each day’s weather would bring. If it rained, we got wet. If we happened to
guess correctly and bring along a rain jacket…we got a little less wet. A hunch
that it might turn a little chilly during the evening’s activities meant that
we simply tied a sweatshirt around our waist and wore it that way all day long.
If a sudden storm cancelled our afternoon outdoor activities, we adapted with
sit-down indoor games elsewhere. It seemed to me that no one on staff ever
really worried about weather, even after the week one guy got struck by
lightning crossing the dam in his automobile (thankfully he was OK). Rather, we
assessed it and adjusted to it on an ongoing basis, which is all you really can
do in the southern Appalachians anyway. I’m fairly certain this attitude has
crossed into other areas of my life. Routine is helpful, but the ability to be
flexible about the routine is probably even more so. People who can’t learn to
roll with the weather changes are probably not going to succeed in general flexibility,
and they’ll struggle in this remedial camp course. I think I did fairly well
with it, but it’s had some long-lasting implications: to this day, I still rarely
check a weather forecast. And I still get caught unprepared in the rain. My
wife just shakes her head.
 |
| The end of a particularly grueling week? |
BIOLOGY 201: “Bugs are no reason to
freak out.”
Like abrupt changes in the
weather, summer camp and creepy-crawlies go hand-in-hand. I had always been OK
with spiders, bugs, and various woodland varmints, but I happen to remember the
precise moment when I realized I had crossed into a new territory of tolerance
for them. I was sleeping one afternoon on my bunk bed, exhausted from the
morning’s adventures. I awoke to what felt like a small hair stroking my lip
and nose. It was a daddy-long-legs, perched over my right eye. Who knows where
it had come from or how long it had been feeling out my facial contours. My
reaction was not one of fear or even surprise. Neither did I bolt out of bed in
disgust. Lying exactly how I was, I simply picked him up, dropped him on the
floor beside the bed, and went immediately back to sleep. I remember another
occasion when I got a little unnerved by a mouse that wouldn’t leave my living
quarters in the dank basement of one lodge. I eventually gave in to a peaceable
coexistence. Camp life teaches nonchalance about the presence of creatures that
most of civilization views as pests. Nowadays members of my family call me in
panic whenever a bug is so rude as to venture inside our house and threaten our
pristine living environment. I begrudgingly do my exterminator duty, but always
with plenty of exaggerated eye-rolling. To be honest, I’m usually content to
just let them be, just like I did back in camp days. That really drives my wife
crazy.
ECONOMICS OF ABUNDANCE: “Make-do with what you
have.”
Almost as familiar to summer
camp as bugs are tight budgets. Lutheridge was no exception. We always began the summer with a set number of craft
items, sports equipment, maintenance tools, worship materials, etc. and had to
make them last for nine (or was it ten?) whole weeks of hard livin’. If you went
through too many of the bright colors of construction paper in the first week
or so, all you had left at the end was brown, purple, and gray (I once suggested
we do a Lent-in-August Week to use up all the ugly, boring colors, but
strangely the idea never caught on). If something broke or went flat, you
either learned how to jerry-rig it so it would work again, or you just came up
with a different activity altogether. One time a guest Bible study leader was a
little dissatisfied with the materials our area director had provided for her
to use that morning in her session. “I needed two large pieces of posterboard,” she complained politely, “not
one.” Knowing how tight the craft budget was, and how difficult it would be
able to procure another whole sheet of the stuff, the area director held up the
one she had, ripped it cleanly in two, and said, “Here. Now you have two.” The particular
feature of Lutheridge that best exemplified this principle was the dilapidated
yet just-functional-enough pick-up truck we used for general duty assignments
around camp. Its deep electric blue paint color leant a certain energetic look
that belied its engine tremor. It wasn’t technically road-worthy, and I swear
parts of that tin bucket were held together with duct tape, but it got the job
done. A hundred-fold. (And I would like to point out that I once "fixed" a friend's car with duct tape).
 |
| Care for a ride in my G.D. truck? |
This type of frugality has
influenced so much of my life that it is difficult to describe all the ways
adequately. I suspect that in the corporate work world, supplies and equipment
are generally easier to come by. Budgets in most businesses, by and large, have
more wiggle room. If an employee needs something to help him function at a
higher or more efficient level, it can be provided. In the non-profit world of
summer camp, one learns to work with what little they have, and that has served
me well (most of the time) in our family budget. Tinkering and fiddling with
broken parts often must suffice for an all-out replacement. It breeds a healthy
form of stewardship—and it does cause one to tap into their inner MacGuyver—but
it also makes life a little more difficult sometimes. But you know what? At
camp you learn that hours of fun can
be had with a partially-inflated volleyball and a clothesline tied between two
tree trunks. Or with just a partially-inflated volleyball, for that matter.
 |
| Family-style dining for every meal. That's a gilbert there at my left elbow. |
NUTRITION FOR DUMMIES: “Eat whatever’s served you.”
The joke among the staff at
Lutheridge was that guys lost weight while they worked there and the girls gained weight. Actually, there was a lot
of truth to it. There is no greater contrast to the eating habits of a college
student while they’re at college than when they’re at camp and have to eat
three square meals a day after they’ve spent the day chasing kids across hilly
terrain. I know I was rail-thin in those days, and I appreciated the way camp
life kept me in shape, but the biggest lesson I learned was to be thankful for
whatever food was placed in front of me. Prior to camp employment I was a
fairly picky eater, but, as Garrison Keillor says, “Hunger makes the beans
taste better.” I developed a taste for foods I never would have tried had I
been somewhere else: Chicken a la King (it was served at least once on our
ten-day menu rotation); mealy red apples (they were the fruit component in every single sack lunch for off-site field trips); corndogs (hey,
calories have to come from somewhere, right?). All of this was a lesson related
to the economics class above. A life of true gratitude will never be borne of
greed or condescension. You eventually learn to receive whatever cup is given
to you, to pass it around the table so all can have a fair share, and to hope
that when you come back to the next meal there might be something you really
love, like maybe Boston Crème Pie. The ironic thing is that at Lutheridge I
finally learned to like Chicken a la King and yet I’ve never encountered it
anywhere since. But I bet I’d still be thankful if I did.
 |
| One cabin of middle school boys. Can you hang? |
PHYSICS OF MOTION: “Objects are almost never
at rest.”
For most people, college and
graduate school require some familiarity with a transient lifestyle, but neither
of them can compare to the constant motion of working at a summer camp. Every
week you get marching orders to a new cabin, a new assignment. Sometimes you
live on a trail or out of a canoe. Personal items are schlepped back and forth
between car and bunk bed and shower-house on a near daily basis. Cleaning
laundry is squeezed between camper bedtime and your own, or perhaps in the
all-too-brief window of free-time on the weekends. Your automobile—if you have
one—becomes the only permanent living space of the summer. As a result, things
accumulate there and never really disappear. I’d like to think I learned at
camp to live with fewer possessions and to keep better track of the ones I do
have. It certainly presented this
opportunity. This is a good life lesson, and one that camp living is certainly not
alone in teaching. Before I purchase something, a little voice in the back of
my head asks, “Do you want to be carrying this around all the time?”
Unfortunately, this lifestyle burned a bad mark on me, too. In so many ways I
am still partially living out of my car. This has been somewhat problematic,
especially when I need to transport passengers. I end up having to shift the
clutter to the trunk or the floorboard while they wait patiently by the car door.
One bright side: I think at any given time during the past twenty years I have
been able to locate a complete change of clothes somewhere in the confines of
my car.
 |
| You will never forget a week with mentally-challenged campers. |
TIME MANAGEMENT BASICS: “Every minute
counts”
During my first summer
orientation twenty years ago, the acting director pressed this notion into our
heads like a red-hot brand: these campers do not pay to come here and sit
around. This director emphasized over and over that we, the counselors, were
the key to their having a good time, the catalysts to the deepening of their
faith, their tour guides to the great outdoors. Every minute, therefore, was to
be filled with some kind of activity, even it was mindless, silly singing ("When days are hot, when days are cold, in the swimming pool!").
Waiting for the dining hall to open or the lifeguard to summon the kids to the
water were no excuses for taking a break and ignoring our charges. Not all
camps, I now realize, were that high-energy. There is something to be said for
down-time (which Lutheridge had, too). However, too much unstructured time also
allowed homesickness or mischief to take root in some kids. I learned pretty
quickly that those things were worth avoiding at almost any cost. What rubbed
off on me in this time management course was the habit of seizing every
opportunity to point out something interesting in the surroundings, to make
small-talk, to exercise the brain or the body however possible. This can be
applied to life in general. I still appreciate the occasional chance to sit
around and do nothing, but overall I’ve really been thankful for the ways those
camp supervisors taught me to squeeze as much fun or work into a day as
possible. After all, it is a day that the LORD has made. We are to rejoice and
be glad in it. There’s really nothing passive about that at all.
 |
| Cabin signs were supposed to be as welcoming as possible |
INTRO TO PSYCHOLOGY: “A crash course in
human nature.”
Every week in a summer camp
environment is like the beginning of a whole new world. Staff members are
switched around to work different areas. People assume fresh duties. New
campers arrive. Cabin communities are formed. Bonding occurs. And so does
fighting and miscommunication, jealousy and betrayal. The stereotype of summer
camps, I suspect, is that everyone is having a great time making new friends,
developing summer romances and the like, all in the serene outdoors. The
reality is that an awful lot of conflict, clannishness, and claustrophobia can
occur. I keenly remember one cabin of middle school boys who ganged up on one
of their own. One night while I was fast asleep, they passed around a cup,
urinated in it, and then poured it on his sleeping bag. As their counselor, I
was mortified and extremely angry. I tried and tried to get them to get along
that week, to apologize to the poor victim and treat him better, but no matter
what approach I tried, they resisted and rebelled. I eventually learned that
sometimes humans just don’t naturally mesh with each other. Healthy community
cannot be summarily imposed from above with an iron fist or even by pleading.
All an effective leader knows she or he can do is to nurture or cultivate a
sense of community by modeling kind behavior and rewarding positive actions. We
can point the way in speech and gentle discipline and set up some basic
boundaries. We can listen attentively and practice compassion. We can be on
guard against gossip, which, I learned several times, does immeasurable harm. The
rest—the real congealing of human relationships—must be left up to what we
religious folks call the Holy Spirit. And loads of grace.
THEOLOGY MASTER CLASS: “The fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Proverbs 9:10
The best “life skills”
offered through a job at summer camp end up being the very ones that most
people apply to the job to experience in the first place. They want to serve
God and grow in faith by living in community in an outdoor setting that is
intentionally centered on Christ’s teachings. This certainly occurs, of course.
But the extent to which it occurs is humbling and mind-boggling. As long as you
leave yourself open to it, working as a camp counselor teaches you that God is
far more active in the lives of his people than you’d ever imagine. I think the
lessons in this particular course go deeper and reach farther than any of the
others I’ve already mentioned. Each week, each
day is crammed with chances to admire God’s creation up close. And to begin
and end the day with Scripture. Or watch people overcome their fears. Broker peace
between warring cabin-mates. Muster sympathy for the ostracized bully. Nurture
the homesick camper. Recite a prayer in
unison with one hundred muddy-faced creek-walkers. Sing a capella. Witness the Spirit miraculously pull together a Vespers
service when you’ve spent all your planning time at the nurse’s station.
Observe first-hand that confirmation pastors are people, too. Wrestle with your
vocation. Open someone’s eyes to Jesus’ presence. Have your own eyes opened to
Jesus’ presence in them. Slog through a whole week of Good Fridays with a
troubled camper but then glimpse an Easter in him before it ends. Learn your
limitations. Discover new gifts. Let people down. Be forgiven. Fall into bed.
Say prayers. Go to sleep. And by the grace of God—always, by the grace of God—get
up and try it all again for another full day.
 |
| Staff rejoice on Friday nights at their next week's assignments |
Is there a better way to gain
perspective on this whole life we’re given and learn to value God’s many
mercies? I’m sure there is. In fact, I’m sure there are many. But this setting
was the one afforded to me, thanks to the commitment of a very forward-thinking
third-grader. Now I can see how these summer camp lessons formed and shaped me
more than I realized at the time. I may wish every now and then that I paid a
little more attention to the weather forecast, and I know I owe it to my family
to go ahead and outright fix things around the house, but on the whole I still
believe that the outcomes of these lessons have been more good than bad. The
education I received among those forested hills eventually prepared me to be a
pastor and to have a family. For that, and so much more, I give God thanks...when days are hot and when days are cold.
