much longer or not half that long?

five years. 48 weeks. close to 400 days. on august 10th, that's how long i will have been at camp.
last weekend i got together with a bunch of camp friends, and we were talking about camp(of course), and hope says to me "this is our FIFTH year. can you believe it?"
depending on the day, i can. sometimes it feels like so much longer. i've seen so much happen, so many people come and go. has it really only been five years?(or for now, only four)
but most of the time, i can't. five years is so long. so few people have lasted this long, and most of them were like 23. but now i'm one of them. is this real life?
seriously. five summers. since thinking about camp always makes me feel young, i always forget how much younger i used to be(that was a really dumb sentence but it made sense in my head so just go with it) until i look at pictures. then i can see it.

this is me when i was a little baby.

okay so i wasn't a baby but i WAS sixteen. if i were cindy i wouldn't have hired me, if for no other reason than the fact that i looked twelve.
i thought i knew everything back then. i had been a camper for five years, i should know exactly what a good staffer is, right?
but i didn't even know what camp was.

this is me when i was a slightly bigger baby.

back in the day when i constituted half of snorgtees.com's business.
i miss you emily T!
that year, i really thought i knew everything. i had been a camper AND i had worked there. there were people older than me who knew less than i did.
but i still didn't know what camp was.

this is me when i was not such a baby but still a kid.

that is one of my favorite MKs ever. me and amber fought over her that entire explore group.
i was finally a cabin leader, finally not one of the very youngest(i was in the lower half, but the top of that. upper middle class?), and finally i realized that i didn't know what i was doing at all. because now i knew what camp was.

and this is me when i was, well yesterday. almost.

and that's one of my sweet campers who is now about to be on staff. (adding to my feeling old! all my kids are growing up, make them stop!)
i didn't know, until it was over, how beautiful that summer was. i learned so much and i learned it all the hard way.

and now, i'm 30 days away from my fifth summer. five is a huge number. my four heroes lasted three, three and a half, four, and four and a half years each. if i survive this one, i will have beaten them. that is big and scary.
i've gone from baby CIT knowitall to actual real veteran. i always knew i'd be at camp for a long time, but i never knew i'd make it this far. i remember the assistant business manager my first year telling me that if i was here at sixteen, i'd be the assistant director by twenty-one. i laughed at that. and i still do; that would be the worst job in the world, no offense to cindy(she understands). if God had come to me on june 2, 2008 and told me what all he would do in the next five years, i would have laughed and been terrified all at the same time.
habakkuk 1:5 is one of my favorite verses.
"...i am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told."
God has already done a lot of those somethings. and even after they've happened, i still don't believe them.
i can't wait to see what somethings he'll do this time around.