I Love This Place

I am place person. By that, I mean that there are certain places, as in phsyical places, that I attached deep emotional meaning to. (sorry for ending my sentence with a preposition, fellow grammar geeks.) A few of those places are the Balsams in Eagle River, WI, Cindy W's kitchen in Kingwood, TX, our vicarage church in Kingwood, TX, my parents house, and Camp Pioneer in Angola, NY. It's not necessarily about the places, it's about the experiences I've had there and the memories made.

I am thinking about camp this weekend for two reasons . . . 1--we just finished up a week of VBS and I felt like a camp counselor all over again--songs with crazy hand motions, fun games, and girl drama. 2--there is a staff reunion at Camp Pioneer in Angola, NY this weekend and many old friends are there. I'm a tiny bit sad that I can't be there. I would love to see this tonight . . . one of my favorite things about camp.



I went to camp as a middle school camper, volunteered every summer in high school, and then was a counselor for four years in college. I have quite the history there. I guess it's 9 summers total. Lots of people who are camp counselors are there for one or two summers, but that wasn't me. I was sold out to Pioneer. 100%. It was a place where I experienced God, a place where my faith became my own. It was the place where I learned to serve others and how to love people who weren't like me. I have a deep attachment to this place because it is one of the places where I can always immediately feel God's presence.

Some of my favorite memories include staff training, learning how to break into the kitchen, sin ice cream, the craziness of special camp, siestas, furiously trying to memorize my lines for the woman at the well monologue, house parties, the sound of hundreds of kids singing "Oh How I Love Jesus," and doing the Johnny Got Run Over By a Bus skit a million times. I love the memory of Nate and some of the other guy counselors performing Ice Ice Baby. But I mostly remember the people I worked with. We had some really fun times and those summers were some of the best I've had.

Nate and I met at camp and spent two summers there together:) I thought he and his friend, Dion, were the craziest people I had ever seen when I first met them, and here we are 12 years later--married for almost ten years with two little redheaded sweethearts. Pioneer holds a lot of memories for us and I'm thankful for the time we spent there. I know that we touched many lives while we were there as counselors, but I also believe that the counselors and staff are ministered to just as much as the campers that actually paid to come. At least I know I was:)