The *Same* Places
Gratitude for Summer Camp
**This was written one month before the tragedies that took place at summer camps along the Guadeloupe River in and around Kerrville, Texas. Our hearts break for those who have been touched by this tragedy**
Earlier this week, along with piles of sheets and towels, socks and shorts, sunscreen and flashlights, we packed pairs of flip-flops and boots, Crocs and old sneakers into trunks and duffel bags. Yesterday I watched my sons anxiously lace up the running shoes that their grandmother gave them for Christmas which (grayed from 6 months of everyday use) will now take on that next level of hard-wear that only a month of summer camp can produce.
Every June I drop my sons at summer camp in shoes that I don’t expect to use again, with the hopes that over the course of a month on a mountain, my boys, just like every year, will find their feet again.
Summer camp is the same.
While it is so different from home, the power, the magic of summer camp is its sameness. Every summer we drop our sons off in the care of a handful of directors and staff, and a slew of college boys in clumsily tucked green collared shirts, and every summer as we pull our car back on to the pavement from the long slag road through the woods to re-enter the “real world” for a month without our sons, I am overcome with emotion. It is not just that I will miss my sons, although I will. The emotion is much more a mix of gratitude and longing, memory and hope.
Summer camp is the place where my sons know exactly what to expect, and at the same time they will know that the possibilities are endless. They know that almost every morning they will wake up, make their bed, sing silly songs with some of the coolest 19-22 year olds they will ever know, eat breakfast, clean-up, play hard and learn for a few hours, eat lunch again, shower, rest in screen-windowed, bunk-bedded, fan-cooled cabins and then do it again that afternoon.
It is the sameness that anchors them. Though I attended a different camp than my sons, I can still close my eyes and, in my mind, walk through the camp where I spent 26 days for 7 summers of my own boyhood. I can tell you which stairs there are the steepest, and which water fountains are the coldest. I can remember not just the trees, but specific roots of specific trees that you could use as spring board over a low rock wall on a short cut to the dining hall.
Camp is where kids can find their feet on the unfinished hard wood floors of their cabins, in the quarter inch of water in the bottom of their canoe, in the cool mud between their toes in the river bed, in their sneakers (that might go in a gas station garbage can on the drive home). They can find their feet in so many places, and begin to recognize the self that is connected to those feet in special ways. Good summer camps are those that strive to be places where kids come and belong to the place, belong to one another, and where they learn to belong to themselves.
Camp can also be where we finally understand that we belong to God. Just after we said good-bye to our boys, my wife said, “Stop” and she jumped back out of the car. She was not returning for one more hug from her boys, she spotted someone else. It was her favorite counselor from her time at a sister summer camp nearby. “Grace” was dropping her sons on the mountain just like we were. They hugged and talked, and after the comments like, “Can you believe I am old enough to have been your counselor?” I heard her say (about one of her own children), “You know, they are like you were… just not too sure if they want to be here this year.” Twenty-five years ago, my wife reluctantly went to back to camp for her 4th year, as a 15 year old. She said she was a “good kid”, but she knew she was “hard”, she felt hard, maybe even hardened. Camp was the place where a 15 year old could come in hard and be met by a 20 year old who recognizes where she is and has the time and space to fumble through it. Camp can be one of the special places, stewarded by special people, where, as the hours of sameness drag on, away from the “worries of this world and the desires for other things1” God draws us to himself. I pray that my sons will experience that this summer. I am thankful for my years at summer camp. I am thankful for God’s grace to me through summer camp and for “Grace” who not only still knows Marianna’s name and face, but she remembers her 15 year old heart who needed to belong.
This summer my boys left for camp from our home in Louisiana and will return from camp to our new home in North Carolina. This has made me especially grateful for the gravity of the place of summer camp for them. We have spent the better part of a year wondering what the world will look like for all of us. We have wrestled with so many wheres, whats, and whys and have been asking God for reminders of His constancy.
And while I knew it was coming and that I would get the same feeling as I left them there at camp, the SAMEness landed so much more with me for THEM.
Just before I left I heard another dad say to one of his son’s counselor, “I went here as a kid, but I actually worked at another camp in college and after, driving boats at a summer camp for girls, but I tell you when I came back through those gates all these years later, its the same, its just exactly the same.”
I am thankful for the magical adventures than can take place where thoughtful people work to create simple, safe, sameness where we can find our feet again, even in places that we did not know we could stand.
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Aside: I hope that if you had a good summer camp experience as a child or as a counselor, that you will get a chance to be grateful for it today, maybe write a letter (you remember those from camp) to someone who impacted you there. Maybe you can help someone else go to camp this summer. I realize that camp is a luxury that is not available to everyone, and that plenty of folks don’t have great memories of summer camp. My summers as a camper, a counselor, and then (maybe especially) as a camp minister for two summers as a full grown married adult have shaped my entire life immeasurably.
Mark 4:19
Love this ! 🌲