I miss Camp right now more than I have ever before. Real life is just no fun. There is no rest hour and there are more annoying people here. There are flirty people and people who won't give me the time of day (don't I sometimes need to know what time it is?) and people who try to make me feel sorry for them all the time when I just don't. I refuse to because that's dumb.
You guys don't want to meet post-Camp Laura. She's always cleaning her room but never seems to make much progress and then she cries but doesn't know why and she doesn't hang out with people. It's very confusing. Even for her.
So to cope with it, I'll just talk about Camp a lot.
Every summer at Camp I learn some kind of lesson. It's always something I need to learn but pretty unpredictable. The first summer, I learned how important it is to respect yourself. I mean, I'm no Aretha Franklin with the whole R-E-S-P-E-C-T thing, but I just had never realized before that it's necessary to respect yourself. And then I met a cabin of eight teenage girls who hated me. They hated me. And I let them. If I had respected myself, they would have seen that and respected me in turn and I think that week would have unfolded a little differently.
Then last summer, I learned how much I need Jesus, which I talked about a lot in this post. I learned about my relationship with Him, how it's not just Him giving up His life for a girl who sometimes eats too many cookies and doesn't always study adequately for exams and tends to turn awkward life situations into slightly entertaining tweets. No, it's Jesus completely giving up everything for a girl who sins. Solid sin. Straight up, y'all. This is a girl who purposely avoids perfectly kind people who she doesn't want to talk to at the moment, and that is just not very nice at all. A girl who, once, kind of accidentally sang the f-word in front of a baby. This right here is a girl who sins and knows it, but doesn't even know how bad it is. She thinks she's doing the world a favor by existing. This is a girl with a big head. Last summer taught me how clueless I was to how much Jesus really gave up for me, and how I'll never fully understand all that entails.
Once I realized that both of my past summers have held a lesson for me, I got really excited to find out what this summer's would be. Nerdy? Yes. So...drumroll for what I learned this summer...
I learned what it means to be a child of God. I got to see an image of that daily. My campers were such a great picture of that to me - just getting to observe their easy dependence on me was so amazing. After knowing me for minutes, they felt comfortable asking me to take them to the bathroom, letting me wipe their bottoms, complaining to me about everything they hate, and telling me all about their lives. They didn't feel the need to know all about me and what I stand for and where I come from and how old I am. They just knew that I was there for them, so they let me do what they needed me to do. They expected that I knew how to deal with them and they loved me from the minute they arrived at Camp. It was crazy.
When I'm at Camp, I'm either about to be sobbing all over everybody or delirious with joy. And during those hard times when I just had to close my eyes for a second and not say anything because I was afraid of very mean words coming out of my mouth, I prayed that God would make me like a little child, of my strength and wisdom spoiled, seeing only in His light, walking only in His might. Because that was the only way to survive those moments when I honestly could not imagine feeling physically and emotionally worse than right then. I prayed that in little moments, and then, during rest hour, I read God's word, which calmed me, and did actual journaling, where I constantly asked God to help me to learn from my campers and to lighten up and to enjoy my time and to love Him and to trust Him the way my campers were modeling that love and trust to me.
So that's what I learned.
If you ask me what I did this summer, I'll tell you that I worked at the Outdoor Lab, which houses Camps Hope and Sertoma, for adults with special needs and underprivileged kids. And then I'll awkwardly trail off with, "yeah, I love it" and probably smile a little bit.
But what I'll mean is all of that above. I learned what it looks like to lean on His loving breast, where a weary soul can rest. I got to experience some super stressful situations. When I got home this week, my brother told me that my eyes looked "really sad and tired." ...so that's encouraging. But with all that stress came the amazing comfort of my Savior, in a depth that I'd never reached before. I think that if I had sat at home and slept until 12 every day and read Anne of Green Gables seven times and made blackberry jam all summer, I wouldn't have really been super stressed out. But the intensity of the stress I felt allowed me to feel so much more repose and tranquility in my Savior. I learned how to rest when I wasn't sleeping. It was amazing.
I miss each of my campers always. I miss being farted on and force-feeding peanut-butter and jelly to a girl who said probably two words all week and getting bitten and not having time to poop. I miss it all.
I miss being so stressed I feel like I'm about to throw up all the time. I miss people jumping on me and saying hilarious things that I can't wait to tell to my co-counselors later.
And I can't wait to go back.
Love,
Lauralicious
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