A tale of two camps, part one

Okay, now that my first summer as a youth minister is over, I can look back. The first three weeks of June were a complete blur. The first week I took 5 kids, two of which have since left my youth group to go to another church ( I know...I'm winning them over already!), to Nashville Work Camp.

I've heard about NWC for the last four years through working at Abilene Christian. I even spent some of my budget money to help them with their meals and all that. Hearing about it or seeing pictures has nothing on actually doing it. Every morning, Monday through Friday, myself and our group would leave White House at 7AM and drive down to West End Church of Christ, have some breakfast and a meeting and then seperate into our groups and go to the house we've been assigned to fix and repaint. My house was in Antioch southwest of downtown Nashville. The house was old, unkept, the front yard was full of dog-poop and we were in a culdesac so everyone in the neighborhood got a good glimpse of our work. I, in my first year, was named leader. I had a co-leader named Kayla who was a student at Lipscomb that had much more experience under her belt. The first two days were spent scraping and priming....in fact, we didn't start priming until Tuesday late morning because there was so much scraping. Kayla and I's group consisted of about 10 kids from Indiana to Georgia and, of course, the mandatory few from Nashville. I even had two of my youth in the same group as me.

We made some progress until Thursday afternoon, on our lunch break, the White House church van's radiator busted and we were stranded at a gas station just off I-24 in Antioch for the afternoon. That left us Friday to finish painting 3/4 of the house. We got some help but wasn't able to finish until myself and a girl named Angel from my group went and finished it during the last week of July.

Sounds like all work and no play, right? The bonding and watching the kids who wanted to work was priceless. Being able to catch up with my kids that were in different groups was also priceless...getting to hear their stories and watch them scrape the paint off of themselves at the end of the day was awesome. Don't forget the trips to Maggie Moos, Dairy Queen or the "popsicle place" that we almost didn't get to go to.

At night, everyone ate dinner together and worshipped together. There is nothing better than hearing a big group of teens who have been able to be Jesus to those who need a little "light" in their life praising God and singing their lungs out. There are those that don't like to sing and I guess I get that but, when you're at a place in your life when you feel the Holy Spirit move through you, there's nothing else to do but open your mouth and praise God no matter how it may sound. We sang our lungs out and painted our arms off that week.

The two kids that left my group? They're going to a neighboring church and I hope not regretting it. We need to be better workers for God and Nashville Work Camp is great training in how to be servers to each other. Two weeks later, I would find out that it wasn't the worker in me that needed to come out...I needed to re-find my inner child. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I found out so much more...and so did the campers at White House Christian Camp 2008.