Author Archives: Kristen

Zoe and the Midnight Puke Fest

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Yesterday I didn’t have anything to write for the blog. I had procrastinated too long and missed my chance to interview our fabulous cook and I was in a panic. I rushed downstairs where the kitchen crew was playing a board game with Scruffy and Choco and informed them that I needed a quick and brilliant story about camp. Zoe kindly succumbed to my panicked pleas and agreed to an interview. When I asked Zoe if she could define camp for me, what it is that makes it such a strange and beautiful place, this was the story she told.

Once upon a time there was a sweet young C.I.T. who had a debilitating fear of vomit. And once upon a very similar time (the same week in fact) there was a camper who traipsed off to summer camp, even though she had the flu. The queasiness was just nerves, she assured her mother, it would improve upon exposure to camp and its various activities. But what actually happened, was that she shared.

And then, in the quiet darkness of the night, the flu bug struck down two or three of Zoe’s campers. One of whom leaped up out of a sound sleep, dashed from her cabin, down the hall, into the speakers room, and proceeded to vomit onto the speakers bed…while he was sleeping peacefully therein.

And so Zoe and her senior counselor proceeded to gather up their pukey charges, clean them up, and settle them back into their beds until their parents could arrive and collect them.

Finally, it was about 2:00am and all of her campers had succumbed to a fitful slumber, but there was still one task to be done. Clean up the vomit.

Although the campers were small, their collective stomachs had produced a spectacular mess that ranged down the stairs and into the domain of the speaker himself. Zoe pushed down her encroaching panic and went to the kitchen for the mop. “Ahhhhh!” her mind screamed, “All the puke! ALL THE PUKE!!!” But this was what she had signed up for and this was what being a C.I.T. was all about wasn’t it? Doing all the terrible chores until one matures enough to have sole charge of the campers. Through her tears Zoe filled the mop bucket with warm soapy water, retrieved the mop, and proceeded to her doom.

 And then, out of the nether Splinter appeared (a senior guy counselor) who was also up with his own troubled campers and he said something to Zoe that changed the way she viewed Christianity, and service, and the body of Christ. 

“Don’t worry about this, I’ve got it. Go be with your campers.”

And so Splinter and Shinobi cleaned up the vomit, even going so far as to clean around the unconscious speaker as he slumbered on in his pukey bed. Zoe went to bed and then awoke the next day to base her own service with the kids and the cook staff at camp, upon that moment. When someone who was older, who had more seniority than her, and needy campers of his own, took up her burden, her mop, and cleaned up all of that wretched vomit himself.

  Galatians 6:2–“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”

 

 

 

 

Unexpected

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So…how did Scruffy get snatched up into all this crazy?

There is a hair-pin corner on the camp road that we call “Rattlesnake.” If it is icy, there is the possibility of launching oneself onto the guardrail or beyond. When I was a kid, our progress on this tricky bit of road was sometimes halted by insane teenagers slinging their bodies down this slippery slope on runner sleds. It was quite annoying and of course very dangerous. This was Scruffy’s introduction to camp. Yes, before he met Christ he was even crazier than he is now and after I married the man, I found out that he was one of those “foolish teenagers” risking life and limb and making us late for church, ha!

He grew up and ran smack into God at college and moved back home where he was an occasional speaker at AWANA and summer camps. Then he started dating me and wanted to earn some money before we got married. In a bold plan to earn grand piles of cash working with his brother up on the slope in Alaska, he quit his job and flew up to Ketchikan, AK. The bottom went out of the oil industry while he was mid-flight. He spent four tortuous months “unemployed in Greenland” or Alaska as it were, wondering if God even had a plan for him at all. He came home just as our current camp director resigned.

The camp board offered him the job…and we were going to turn them down, but promised to pray about it first.

Scruff wanted the job, he really did. But he’d only been a Christian for seven years, had a degree in landscape architecture, had never been to Bible college, he didn’t think he could do the camp justice. But he told God that he was willing to try, if that was His will.

My motives were less noble. I didn’t want to do it because I knew exactly how hard the job would be. I had just finished college and had never lived away from home. I wanted to get married and go away to Bible school and jump into an occupation that had at least a short honeymoon period. You know that first year where you don’t actually realize how difficult work is going to be. But camp? I’d grown up here. I knew all of the tribulations of camp. But I told God that I would try, if ordered to do so.

And so we rushed away from that board meeting, praying that God would make it clear to us, clear that this job was too difficult and untimely for Scruffy and Boo Boo.

We had a week to give the camp our decision, and by the end of that very day our prayers had miraculously changed. By that evening we were telling God that we really wanted to do this, but we were willing to say no, if ordered to do so. Once we said yes, an incredible weight lifted from Scruff’s shoulders. For the first time in a long time, he knew exactly where he was supposed to be. Sometimes, folks will offer Scruff a job somewhere else. He answers them before they even finish their speech, because this isn’t just a job. It is a call.

And really, aren’t most of the paths that God sets before us too difficult? Do we ever have the necessary experience or talent or perseverance for the task at hand? God knew Scruffy’s heart. He knew his passion and his personality and that he would be absolutely perfect for the job. And God knew one more thing, that we do not need to be ready and able, that is His job.

That will be fourteen years ago this May (23 years now), and I can think of no other occupation that would fit my husband better. He is the man who went down “Rattlesnake” on a runner sled, the man who will never really grow up. Scruffy was made for this place.

What about Boo Boo, the reluctant Camp Director’s Wife? Well, I found that the best things in life are hard. Being a wife, a mom, working at camp. I also discovered a small slice of camp that needed exactly what I had to give. I’d wanted to be a photo journalist as a girl and thought that dream was dead. Guess what I’m doing today? I stand quietly on the outskirts of the action (like the introvert I am) and photograph this wild beauty that is camp ministry. I listen, I observe, I jot down the stories as they happen. I post photos of your kids and write the story of each week on the blog, so that you can be a part of the adventure. Don’t say no just because a task is difficult. You will miss out on everything.

Psalm 139:5–“O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord. You hem me in–behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me.”

Boo Boo

The Call

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My parents had a dream as well. Someday they said, they wanted to move up into the mountains and work at camp. But it never seemed to work out… until the call came.

The problem, nothing had changed to make it work out. Call from God or no call, moving to camp just didn’t make sense. They had a house that hadn’t sold. They were pastoring a church with a brand new building and no replacement pastor. My dad had built a playhouse that we couldn’t move with us and we had a Shetland pony and no horse trailer. But most daunting of all, there was no housing for them at the camp and no guaranteed income.

So what did they do? Left the playhouse, shoved the pony into the back of a pickup truck, and moved to camp into my grandparent’s house. Half of the week we stayed in their old home in Lake Chelan, an 80 minute drive from the camp, and the other half of the week our family of four lived in a single bedroom of my grandparent’s home at the camp.

And then my Dad started the summer camp program and all of the Camas run camps. We eventually build a house of our own and even got to live in it for 2 and ½ years before he died. Sometimes I can’t believe it was only six years. Dad worked his heart out at camp for six years and finally that very last summer he had enough camp counselors to go around and a fairly solid program. He didn’t have to be the director, program director, and speaker all at once and things were looking good. Then he died in an accident and we realized that those six years were his last.

I’ve thought about what Dad would have done if he knew he only had six years to live and love and serve here on earth. And you know what? He would have done exactly the same thing that he actually did. He would have left everything behind and lived his dream and changed camp forever. Camas Meadows went from being solely a rental facility to somewhere that created affordable summer camps for children all across the state. Dad started training his own summer staff, planning his own summer program, and changing the lives of children in our own community. He did not leave the nitty gritty of ministry in the hands of the churches who rented our lodge. He wanted to do it himself, and he made it possible for Camas Meadows to continue to do just that to this very day.

He listened to the call. Ignored all the crazy, and plunged ahead just as though what we were doing was sane.

It is amazing what God can do with just a handful of loony people and a dream.

2 Corinthians 4:7—“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

 

Boo Boo

The Platypus of Children’s Environments

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Camp is a strange duck.

At home we tell our kids to chew with their mouths closed and to finish all their peas. At school we tell them to keep the talking in the lunch room at a “Level 2” and their backs against the seats on the school bus at all times. But at camp…at camp we teach them the “cup game” wherein an entire table full of nine-year-olds pound their cups in a deafening synchronized glory as fast as is humanly possible. We challenge them to watermelon eating contests and tell them that the record for eating french toast is 26 slices. On the camp bus we urge them to shout out songs like “Bill Grogan’s Goat” and “Jesus Got Heaps of Lambs” and the bus driver is much more likely to scoff at the volume they achieve assuring them that last week’s kids were twice as loud, rather than shush them.

Camp is the Platypus of children’s environments.

I volunteer at my sons’ school once a week and I absolutely love it. I love the crafts and the reading and the encouragement and watching my boys zip through math pages that would make me pause and frown. But I’m so glad that there is also camp.

Yes indeed, there is a golden place nestled up in the mountains where if your children don’t put their napkin on their lap someone is going to sing at them and make them run around the cabin right in the middle of lunch. And if they don’t capitulate and bow to napkin propriety…they will be running the whole meal. There is a place where they must sing for their mail if it is in a colored envelope and they must dance if they get a package. Where if they want to fill someones sleeping bag with packing peanuts or completely switch every item in the Squirrel cabin with every single item in the Chipmunk cabin, all they have to do is gain permission from Scruffy or Choco and get the prank onto a lengthy list of pranks for the week.

And there is a place where God is so incredibly real. Where a child has their very own quiet time for the first time ever, sitting in the sunshine on the rough wooden boards of the lodge porch. Where they ask their counselor to pray for their cat and their parakeet and their great aunt Matilda and their broken family and their shattered heart. Where they sing weird songs and loud songs and praise songs that make them cry. Where they look outside and see God, not just because of the gorgeous trees and sky and mountains, but also because of the camp counselor who walked them down the path to the bathroom at 2:00am because it was too dark and let them sleep with the counselor’s own flashlight clutched tight in their little hand.

Camp is a strange duck, a wild and rambunctious place that is a little bit hard to explain to those who do not know it, but a lovely creature all the same.

Boo Boo

How it all Began

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My grandpa Del moved to Wenatchee from Canada via horse drawn wagon. My grandma Autumn was the daughter of a fast shooting deputy and a southern beauty. And they had a dream…they just didn’t know what it was.

They raised their family and reached retirement and the world was wide open with possibilities. Del came to know the Lord in his fifties and both he and Autumn were burdened with the idea that they were supposed to do something specific with the property they owned up on Blewett Pass, something for God. So she talked to her youngest son (my Dad) who was a Bible collage student at the time, and they began to pray.

For three days they quietly stood before the Lord, seeking answers and a face for this invisible dream.

Del was a milkman. At work that day he was on his knees putting away merchandise. A man strolled by and said, “What are you praying about?” Del was struck by the question because while he was on his knees because he was working, he had also been praying. Specifically, about what to do about retirement and that property up on Blewett Pass. And there, on his knees at work, accused of praying on the job, he received an answer.

Autumn and Greg were still wondering what to do and praying. Del came home from work and he strolled up to Autumn and said: “You know what I’d really like to do with that property?” He did not know of her prayers on that very subject, and so she held her breath and wondered what he would say.

“I think we should start a Christian Youth Camp.”

And thus Camas Meadows Bible Camp was born.

The first camp was in the winter of 1973. They only had the small lodge which housed about 20-25 people and no electricity, plumbing, or running water. The campers prayed and sang and learned about their Lord by the light of kerosene lanterns. They had to use chilly winter outhouses and Del hauled in water from a nearby spring in big metal milk cans. But it was a beginning, and since the whole crazy thing was the Lord’s idea anyway they figured that He would shuffle out the details.

Now, our capacity is 85 campers. We have two lodges and three extra cabins. When you turn on the faucet actual water in both hot and cold temperatures comes out. Forty years after that first camp, God is still amazing us with His beautiful and ridiculous ways.

My grandparents didn’t get much of a retirement, but they obeyed. I only hope that upon looking back at my legacy, I will have been as faithful.

Boo Boo