"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. =]