The first camp was God Seekers. It was only 3 days which was perfect for that age group. They definitely had a lot of energy. I think there were about 40 campers. We did have a lot of fun...needless to say we spent most of our days herding kids from one place to the next. That had its pros and cons. It was exciting to see the kids learn new things about God. My favorite part was watching the campers sing some of the camp songs. For example, we sang one called "The Karate Song." As you might imagine, it had some actions and sound effects. Those little ones really got into it. Even of they didn't quite know all the words, they sang at the top of their lungs!
Another exciting part of God Seekers camp I didn't know about until Friday evening was we had an unexpected visitor on camp Thursday night to the dumpster. Earlier in the week, they had put up a trail cam on the dumpster to catch any action, and sure enough they caught a bear on camera. A large brown bear came to the dumpster, tipped it over, opened it, and ate a little of the food that was left in it. Now keep in mind that the dumpster was supposed to be bear proof.
The weekend was pretty relaxing. We went into Anchorage for lunch and a trip to the Saturday Market a.k.a. tourist trap. There were a bunch of little tents with food and trinkets for sale. Some of the stuff was pretty cool, but I could tell other stuff was just a rip off. It was a fun was to spend the afternoon. That evening, a family in Chugiak invited us to supper for a BBQ. The highlights of the meal were grilled salmon and homemade root beer! Yum!!! A story of the evening was that the family across the road was having a garage sale, and a momma moose and her twins decided to stop by the sale for a bit. We never got to see the moose, but it was still a good story.
Youth camp was a whole other story. It was a real challenge changing my thought process from lower elementary mode to junior high and high school mode. I will say it was nice to not be herding kids from building to building. It was interesting to see the dynamic of jh and sr. high together.
My cabin was mostly upper high school girls. It was awesome to be able to connect with them. The evening worship services were amazing. It was great to see how open all the campers were to trying new things. For one of the worship activities, everyone took a handful of ash to represent the desert in their life, and then they went down to the lake to have their "desert" washes away by the water. It was super cool. There were a lot of other cool worship experiences as well. I get the opportunity to play with the Birchwood Band aka the Woodchucks for the music portion of worship. It was fun to play with a whole band.
Throughout the week, the campers really opened up to the many opportunities to share how God was working in their lives. Some of the high school girls in my cabin mentioned how cool it was to see the junior high kids get up and share stories about how God was working in each of their lives. Since the campers were older, we were able to play games with them and really connect at another level with them.
Playing on the worship team was unbelievable. It was like having a front row seat to see God working in the building. Awesome. God is so good.
Another perk of the older group was that we had an opportunity to participate in a native sweat ceremony at a sweat lodge that was built at Birchwood. It was very interesting. Kelly, the gal who lead us through the process, said that a sweat is to help you really focus on God. Since your body is so hot, you can either choose to focus on the heat or God.
There were 4 rounds of prayer....cleansing, prayers for others, thanksgiving, and blessings you are asking God for. When I first walked into the lodge, I didn't know if I would be able to handle being in there for an hour. Then I just made up my mind I would stay for a little while. I'm glad I did. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure my body was cleansed of all impurities. My clothes were completely soaked with sweat. Even my knee caps were sweating. I didn't know knee caps could sweat!
Friday night we got a chance to simply relax for a while. That was really nice. I was also glad to be able to sleep without worrying about campers. It was a very restful sleep.
Saturday afternoon we took a trip to town to pick up this and that, and then we went to supper at a Tex-Mex place called Jalapeños. The food was pretty delicious.
After supper, we(all of the interns) decided it would be a nice evening for a kayak ride. So we took some inflatable kayaks and a couple of real kayaks out on the lake. We didn't intend on getting wet, but that soon changed. If you saw the inflatable kayaks, you would see that they look similar to surf boards. I thought it would be fun to run off the dock and slide onto the water like I was surfing or something. As you may have already guessed, it didn't turn out very well. When the kayak hit the water, it immediately flipped. I got a good laugh out of that. Maybe I will try it again someday. :) In the end, we all went swimming. It was a blast.
That evening we started helping a couple people move out and old convection oven and put in a new one. It was quite the process. We started about 9pm and didn't finish til about 12. We ended up having to take out doors and move appliances to get the old oven out. Luckily we had about 8 people there to help. We were even able to have a designated mosquito killer when we were moving the oven outside the building. It was a good project to get done. We has decided we are now interns by day and construction workers by night. :)
I'm looking forward to another day of rest tomorrow. I think the campers this next week are going to be pretty energetic. They are 4th-6th graders. I can't wait to see what God has in store for us next week. I'm sure it is going to be amazing.
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