"then a little bit of hope came singing from cabin 9."

i found this in my journal from summer '09.
it was written during the lowest, darkest point of my camp "career".
someone had left. again. but the entire staff was feeling it this time. i didn't see how we would be the same without this person to look up to.
i didn't want to be there anymore. i wanted to leave and never come back. i didn't see how i could go on.
laying on the cabin leader's bed in cabin 10, so numb i couldn't even cry, i suddenly heard hannah failoni's cabin singing this song(i miss that song, i'll have to remember to teach my campers next year. it had awesome fun hand motion things to go with it. anyways...)

bind us together lord, bind us together
with cords that cannot be broken.
bind us together lord, bind us together lord
bind us together with love.

and with that, i knew i could stay. it wouldn't be the same ever again, but God would fix it. He'd given us each other for a reason, and we could suck it up together and go on. and we did.
and i still have. truth is, i thought about that every day this summer. i saw how much it forced me to grow. my first one and a half summers were like riding a bike with training wheels; the middle of last summer i had to learn to stay up on my own. well, correction: i had to learn to stand up with God's help, and not primarily find my strength and encouragement from other people. i had to see God as the center of camp and the reason it was so amazing.
i think that's why this summer was so exponentially better than the other two. the first two, i was leaning on somebody else. both years, that person got taken away. thank goodness the second time around i learned. and it made all the difference in the world.

hibernating/family.

i've never seen camp in the winter, but i've thought about it. i figured it would be sad to see, but even when everything is brown and dead, and you can see unit 1 from the admin and the lake from cabin 5's deck since there's no leaves on the trees, it's still the most beautiful place in the world. it's just sleeping. in the summer when we come back, it'll wake up and be all green and alive again.
i think working at camp gives people a bond that can't be explained by anyone or understood by those who aren't in it. in two short months you go from coworkers to friends to sisters. so when i got there yesterday, after bruising a few people and hugging everyone in sight, i sat down and it was like a sunday night when we'd only been apart for a weekend. i was home with my family and nothing had changed. with them, i am who i am and everyone loves me for it. i don't get that anywhere else.
once a camp friend, always a camp friend. i'm starting to see the truth in that more and more.

oh. and as per jane's request, this is how my mind works towards camp.
i think about camp probably about once an hour, sometimes more or less. if you notice me zoning out now and then, i'm probably there in my head. i don't talk about it much because it annoys people, but i am always either thinking about it or praying for it or just plain missing it.
and i dream about it a LOT. so a lot of times i'll wake up really sad cuz i'm not actually there.
so when i'm there for a short time, like yesterday, or open house, it takes a while to sink in that it's real and i keep waiting to wake up(i have really vivid dreams, see, and it's NOT fun to wake up from them). but it makes me happy when i don't. lightbulb: maybe this is why i don't sleep much at camp. i'm subconsciously afraid of waking up and being somewhere else.
this all probably makes me sound crazy. but we knew that already. =]

for once, i think i'll talk about my camp staff a little.

[note: i started this a week ago and just now finished it. all but porter's were written a while back.]

i've noticed a trend in my camp related posts: it probably really sounds like i don't like the people i work with.
seriously. i'm always saying how the campers are my reason to stay, how if i were only there for the staff i would have quit a long time ago, and all that. this makes me sad. because for the most part, that isn't true.
i love everything about camp. how much i love the staff should show you how much i love my campers, because i'm always saying i love them even more. which i do. it's kinda like when people think about how much they love their kids, and they try to imagine how much God loves them when it's even more than they love them. you know?
anyways.
as a camper, i thought the sun rose and shone on people like britnie reid, elizabeth teal, lucy...i could go on. i wanted to be just like them. they were like celebrities to me. getting to actually work there was my dream from the age of 13. it was like getting to be a guest star on friends or something, working among all the greats that i'd loved and looked up to for years. i remember in my interview, i told cindy that i wanted to be to my campers what my staffers had been to me.
so my first summer, the highlight was of course the people i got to be around. i got to be an equal with all my heroes. in a lot of ways, i think i still thought of myself as a camper. my view of camp got shaken up and turned upside down in the best way possible that year.
my second year, i had to get used to a lot of people being gone(the whole turnover deal, like i talked about a post or two ago), but as usual there were lots of great new people. that was the year that taught me about leading not just my girls, but also the staff in some ways. but not as many as the next.
this summer was the hardest, but that's what made it the best. within my first few hours on the day the new staff moved in, i knew God had a challenge for me. people were looking up to me like never before. when i said things, they were listening. when they didn't know things, they were asking me what to do. the incredible thing was, i somehow knew the answers. and i realized, that now i got to be what my old staffers were when i was new at the job.
and as each summer has gone by, i've learned to appreciate the whole dynamic of the staff more and more. you learn so much about a person by working closely with them for ten weeks. cindy tells us at the end of every summer(and she's told me this a lot of times throughout the year too, i forget it a lot) "once a camp friend, always a camp friend." i think that finally clicked for me this year. it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll always stay in touch or even that you'll see each other again after the summer is over. but whether you're friends for 5 days, 5 years, or the rest of your life when your time at camp is over, you become a permanent part of each other's lives. you have a whole summer of experiences that only those people can fully understand. it's like you've shared this separate little world for a time. you've seen God move and had your life changed in ways that no one else can quite appreciate. you don't forget things like that. 
yes, camp friends are special. people like them just don't exist in the real world.
so while the campers are still my main focus and purpose, i still love the relationships that are such a big and important part of camp. there's so many that i either just happily remember now, or that i've kept up since june 2, 2008. or there's some that i was glad to see end, but i still learned from them. 
here's a few.


1. chasity was my cit in 2006. (in cabin 11, with amanda holliday =] ) God put his sense of humor to use and put me as her cit two years later in my first summer. we were a pretty awesome match. she was good at calming down my inner camper and showing me how to be the leader without making me feel like i was doing something wrong, and since she had been a cit before, she was GREAT at showing me how to do things, keeping me from going crazy when no one would listen to me, and getting me to breathe the day of our first mother-daughter. ;]
thanks for being such an awesome role model, "teacher", and friend that year. i think you would have been proud of the way i ran things this summer. =]


2. hope was there from the very beginning. she was the first new person i met my first day of orientation my first summer. we were cit's together that year. both of us had been campers before but had no clue what we were doing. we were in different units, but as cit's get the honor of doing(and that's only a slight exaggeration. it's SO much fun, you get to see people you don't ever see, and you get a break from the girls without feeling like you're doing nothing. i always thought it was pretty great), we had fun times in the dining hall after every meal. we weren't too too close that year(i actually thought she was shy at first. no, seriously), which surprises me now that i think about it. although. i do remember one time, it was coed week. hope was in cabin 5 and i was in 8, and cabin 10 had come to 8 for our cabin visit. it's raining and starting to storm. hope comes crashing in right while the missionary was talking(that cool guy from india that wrote worship songs), and pulls me out to help her take the flags off our pole. so we're trying and trying to get the string undone, but it won't come off and there's lightning all over the place, and we both realize we're touching a metal pole. we both freak out and decide to just leave the flags, and we run screaming in opposite directions to get back inside. anyways, back to seriousness...
our second summer, we had both grown a lot. hope got to be a cabin leader that year, but i stayed a cit. (i've never been quite sure why i did that) in all honesty, i was sometimes jealous of her, because as orientation went on, i was thinking i could have handled being a cabin leader(although i disagreed at the end of the summer when i had the job for two weeks), and people kept forgetting that i had been there just as long as she had(since i was a cit, it does make sense). over the summer, God seriously humbled me.(not just about hope, that wasn't a huge deal, but that's who this little section is about and it's a small example) and really, i looked up to her and would a lot of times forget that we'd worked there the same amount of time. honestly, i still think she's better at the job than i am.
this year was the best. i wrote this in my journal the day me and the other old staff got there this year:

        "we talked about how we're all leaders, not just for the girls, but for the new staff too. i looked around the room, and i realized: all my supports, the people i used to lean on, are gone. the only person left from my first summer is hope. everyone will be looking up to us now, and when i look up, there's no one there. that's terrifying."

after this, i found myself watching hope more and more. and i thought a lot about how much we had gotten to see each other grow over our first two summers. she's become so much more important to me now. God taught me so much this year through her.
hope: to think that when i met you, i thought "we'll never be close." but all our near death experiences, and other awesome times together made my whole summer. thank you for being such an encouragement to me, and as you figured out when we got to live together, i'm always here for you. =]

3. in 2007, i had heard about somebody that everyone called "bean." i had no idea of the story behind it and never actually talked to her that year, except for the first day when she read the names for adventure rec, she of course said my last name wrong(it is NOT said like "sweer". so i corrected her, saying "swier-don't-forget-it!" so the next day, and the rest of the week, she would read "linda swier don't forget it?" and i'd say "here, good job." little did i know that in a year she was about to become one of my favorite people.
while i was over in cabin 7 with chasity, bean was in cabin 6, plus i got to work with her in adventure rec(i was usually emily's partner, but still), so we saw a whole lot of each other. and while i appreciated her awesomeness and all, it wasn't really until the next year that we started getting close. as everyone started dropping like flies in the middle of summer '09, i turned to her. while i was right in predicting she'd be next to go(i appreciated it being after summer was over), she kept me going. when the words "i'm not staying here one second longer than i have to" came out of my mouth, she was the one to remind me why i love camp.
i'm so glad that we've stuck even after our camp time is over and i've loved how much closer we've gotten since last last summer. thanks for keeping me sane, making me laugh and just being an awesome friend! 

4. sarah porter...where do i start? 
as a camper, i was honestly terrified of her. in not such a bad way, i loved her but i was scared to death to talk to her. once i started working with her, for the most part i thought she really didn't like me much. but that first summer, when i was at my absolute lowest, she became the person i went to. and i found that she's one of the most encouraging people i know. for that summer and the next, i could always look to her for a hug or a "great job" or a reminder to "rest," or permission to be in the deep end while the girls were diving. ;]
i miss you porter. and i know you love me, even if you show it in unusual ways. =]



i've told stories about the others in other posts or in my facebook notes; it's one of those days where i miss them too much to write about them, so you can go read about them somewhere else. so as much as i do love my campers, i could never survive the summer without my "family". they've taught me so much and gotten me through the worst days. i've met some of the best friends i have because of camp. 
just one more reason i have the best job in the world.

"what do you wanna be when you grow up?"

such a simple question. when you're little it's a fun one, because your livelihood doesn't depend on it or anything. then you actually do grow up, and the question is terrifying, mostly because you either don't have an answer or don't know how to make the answer happen.
i was so much more sure of myself when i was little.
when i was 5, i wanted to be somebody's wife.(not that i don't want that anymore, but it was funnier back then when i didn't have any other option in my mind and i was positive that was all i would ever need to be)
when i was 6ish, i wanted to be a vet.
when i was 8, i wanted to be an olympic gymnast.
when i was about 9, and on until i was about 13, i wanted to be a vet again. i was pretty serious about it until they killed my cat, then i decided vets are evil people and i couldn't be one.
and finally, kind of overlapping the vet thing, when i was 14 i wanted to join ballet magnificat. and as much as mrs debbie assured me that i would NEVER make it, i was sure that it was what God wanted and that it would happen. but after screwing up both of my knees, being told enough times that it didn't matter how much i loved dancing for Jesus i just sucked too much to even audition, moving 30 minutes away from my old studio, and quitting dance, that dream just kind of died.
and with all of that, there was always an assumed "and in the summers i'll work at camp."
starting when i was about 14, i thought about going to new york film academy and being a director(the idea of writing sitcoms was floating in the back of my head a little too). i kind of wanted to be an actress, but in much the same way as i'd rather take pictures than be in them, the idea of creating movies, being behind the camera where people couldn't see me, was better to me. on the side of whatever i ended up doing, i wanted to be a critic in my spare time. and after i quit dance, gained 15 pounds and knew that ballet mag was no longer any kind of possible, i seriously thought i would be in new york after i graduated. movies were my life. if i wasn't watching them, i was writing about them, debating them on imdb, or just thinking about them in some way. it didn't matter what kind of effect something had on me, or how much my parents told me not to see any certain one, or how much some of them went against what i claimed to believe. and i didn't care about school, since i figured NYFA wouldn't look at my grades, they'd just want to know that i knew movies.
but God started shaking this in the summer of 2008. i've told the story too many times, go find it in one of my older posts.
my senior year i took mrs montgomery's film class. besides learning how to write a paper(being homeschooled, i had never written one until that semester), and getting to watch/discuss/review movies and call it school, i learned so much about how movies affect the way we think and look at the world. i saw how twisted a lot of my thinking had become.
side note: "hollywood worldviews" by brian godawa is one of those must-read-before-you-die books. such good stuff. and any of you homeschoolers that i still talk to that go to the resource center should take that class the first chance you get.
so, over the course of that semester, while God was still working on me with the whole "go to csu, major in psych and learn how to help those unfortunate kids that you love", i threw out the NYFA dream(although semi secretly, i'd still LOVE to go take a 4 week workshop just for fun) and decided to follow God's dream instead. the only problem was, i didn't know what that was yet. and it's still kind of illusive.
so. what DO i want to be? well, the beauty part is that that's not even a question i care about anymore. i want to know, what does God want me to be when i grow up?
i don't actually know. but it makes me think of camp. in a bunch of ways, but the one i'm talking about now is megan's painting on tuesday nights. what she would do was she'd have all these pieces of a picture, kind of like a puzzle. she'd paint the outlines on the mixed up pieces, and the more you saw, the better idea you had of what it would come out as. when she was finished, she'd unscramble them and put them in the right order so it made the camp logo.
i think God's plan is like that. He paints one piece at a time until finally, we have all the pieces, we just need Him to show us what to make with those pieces. i'm at that point. i can see that there's something awesome in His head for me, i just don't know how all these are supposed to add up.
i know that i love Jesus, i love people, i'm fascinated with understanding how people think, and i love listening and helping people. but i also know i'm not meant for counseling, at least not in the conventional way. (i'm too empathetic, i would always be mad at someone or depressed about something if i had people telling me their problems all day)
i LOVE figuring out how people learn, i think my fellow ADD sufferers are the most interesting people in the world, and i would so love to help them understand how they think so they can learn better, but that couldn't be all i did.(my most recent ADD doctor asked if his job sounded appealing to me, i told him "no, it's boring and you had to go to school for too long, and most people don't understand themselves as well as i do and i don't have patience with people like that." he laughed for like a whole minute, but i meant every word i said)
i love kids and i love camp. i have this great big passion for kids that aren't loved. i would love to help families learn how to love each other, but you need a master's for that and i'm not a good enough student to handle grad school, plus...i just don't WANT to be in school more than the necessary 4 years.
and somewhere in there, i wanna go to guatemala and love on all the orphans. just for a little while, like less than a month. but i'd like it if God had that in His calendar somewhere for me.
in all honesty, my 5 year old dream is still the one i'd have in a perfect world. but since i need a backup, i may as well keep looking for something that includes everything else i'm good at.
can i just work at camp all my life?

who comes up with this stuff?

i'm always saying that the difference between dr pepper and mr pibb is that dr pepper went to school for longer, and hence learned more about how to taste good. (i hate the question "is mr pibb okay", which so many countless waitresses have had to ask me[ps, mr pibb is NEVER okay], one time i asked for dr pepper, and they said "we have mr pibb" and i said, "oh, i'm sorry for you, i'll just have water." [then i felt like one of those nasty customers you see in movies, so i gave them a good tip])

but i took a study break to look up what the 23 flavors were, and i just got so much more respect for my liquid heaven. who would have thought to put all these random things together and actually thought they'd taste good?

1. Amaretto(is that even a word?)

2. Almond

3. Blackberry

4. Black Licorice

5. Carrot(!!!!!!)

6. Clove

7. Cherry

8. Caramel

9. Cola

10. Ginger

11. Juniper(heh?)

12. Lemon(really?)

13. Molasses

14. Nutmeg

15. Orange(it's like they're taking from sprite and mountain dew and coke all at once i guess.)

16. Prune(ok. so whoever made this was really bored in the

17. Plum   grocery store and just took the first 23 things he saw.)

18. Pepper(SERIOUSLY.)

19. Root Beer

20. Rum

21. Raspberry

22. Tomato(not cool. this and pepper [and rum since i don't know what it tastes like] are the ones i can't taste no matter how hard i try.)

23. Vanilla

so, like with most things, i started thinking. and i thought, how in the world did they think that these 23 things would taste good together? especially when so many of them aren't even good by themselves. (tomato, pepper, prune, licorice...)

then i thought of camp. of course.

30 some college girls, all thrown together for a summer. all with different personalities, different passions, different points of view. there's always one or two that don't seem like they'll work out. then the campers come. and when you see everyone working together, you realize that when he mixed all these "flavors", God knew what he was doing.

just like the guy who made dr pepper.

everything i needed to know about college, i learned from camp.

besides being one of the most incredible ministry opportunities you'll ever get, camp teaches you things in a way that nothing else could. the summer of 2008 was probably the most surreal learning experience i've ever had. besides having my view of camp completely changed(only from behind the scenes can you see its true beauty), it forced me to grow up. and while i learned a lot about just plain old life, i think the first two years prepared me for college more than anything else.
spending up to three weeks at a time there taught me how to live away from home(not that i anticipated this as a problem).
the whole atmosphere in general taught me how to live with people. (i've always heard that if you've grown up with your own room, getting along with a roommate is harder for you, but i had no problem.[in the case of my csu roommate, it was all her, and even then, it wasn't that we fought])
weekends taught me how to be an adult, even though i was only 16 when i started.
i learned pretty much every kind of responsibility, how to live off of very little sleep, and what i was meant to major in.
yeah, my life would be an epic fail without camp.
236 days until i am home.

ok, off topic. i'm in one of those moods where i just have to ramble a little.
i love camp. i miss camp with all my heart. as much as i refer to ciu as home, it's not. true, i'm only a teeny tiniest notch happier at camp than i am here, but that still makes all the difference.
i'm different there. my heart lives there. it's the only place that i'm fully and completely alive. God made me for camp. i can never feel totally at home anywhere but there.
i miss waking up and praying for each of my girls as i go around the cabin waking them up. i miss the questions they ask. i miss sitting in the sun on fridays, moving from one umbrella to the next, and crying harder with each girl that leaves. i miss the ones that hug me and beg not to go home, whether it's because home is just that bad(oh, cricket...) or camp is just that great. i miss knowing that i'm being someone's elizabeth teal. and of course, i miss my staff. i miss talking to jenna until she kicks me out, then standing at her door and talking until i notice she's fallen asleep. i miss sitting on the cit bed with amber, laughing with our girls and taking turns sweeping. i miss winning cabin capers. i miss random worship sessions with hope. i miss sharing times on fridays. i miss getting notes. i miss encouraging people. i miss being forced to nap. i miss hanging out with missionaries, and their awesome kids.(tonight we had some from kenya come and speak, it made me miss explore groups)
i miss summer. i want it back.

there's nothing like it.

i miss camp today.
[side note: something they said in chapel the other day got me singing if you love jesus. while i hate that song and had happily forgotten its existence, it sparked a flood of camp memories and i went straight to my room and cried for the first time in weeks.]

they said at the end of the summer "you'll leave a piece of your heart here when you drive out that gate." now i'm thinking, maybe that's why i miss it so much more than everyone else. i leave my whole heart there and count down the days until i can come back to pick it up.
my heart hurts when i try to explain it to people. i'm already better at putting things into written words than spoken ones, but for something to be so big that i can't even write about it, means it has to be pretty huge. so it shouldn't shock me as much as it does to see that no one understands. no matter how many summers i'm gone for, no matter how many weekends i come home with more amazing stories to share, they don't get it. the worst was one point in the middle of the summer, when i was talking to a friend who will remain unnamed, and i was venting about some things going on, and she replied to my rant with "you need to get out of that camp, it's not good for you." oh no she didn't...
replaying this conversation in my head makes me want to cry. for several reasons.
first off. you do NOT refer to my personal heaven as "that camp." those are fighting words.
secondly. true enough, you do have to experience camp la vida to really know the beauty of it, but how can they not even have a HINT of what it's done for me, what it means to me, how many lives God changes through it every year, etc etc etc? even the things that happen that i hate, i see as part of the perfect puzzle that is a summer at camp. and to still love it as much as i do, when so many other people leave because of the bad stuff, just shows me more that it's where God wants me. if you've seen how happy i am there, you wouldn't dare say it was anything but good for me.
and finally, my friends at home do in fact mean more to me than anyone i'll ever meet at camp. i am not there for the staff. if i were, i would have quit july 6, 2008 then and there. i am there because of my girls. there's nothing like getting to know them,watching over them for a week, and becoming a small part of their life. i love them so much and i love seeing them grow in Christ. especially the ones that keep coming back year after year, seeing how they've grown up a little bit, having them come and tell you how they missed you over the past year. the idea of being to them what my cabin leaders were to me is incredible(and a little scary), and i wouldn't give any of that up for anything.
so to answer any questions, of COURSE i plan on going back next summer unless God calls me(okay, more like drags me, kicking and screaming) to serve him someplace else. i don't care what i'm missing at home. i don't care that i'll be away from my other friends. i love you guys, but it's camp. no one who claims to care about me would try to keep me away from it.

anyone who understands this is so far away. i want a great big, classic 3 second camp style hug, and a SP note, and maybe even a day with the awesome cone, with a round of "if you love jesus" playing in the background of all of it. but i can't have that  for another 250 days.