I write when I feel like it

Taking a step back

2011-02-19T00:32:00.000-05:00

It's pretty easy for me to get all-worked-up. You know what I'm talking about, I hope: times when I'm so worried or so afraid that I am nothing but wrapped up in those fears. Worst case scenario after worst case scenario cascade through my mind, dropping into an ever-growing hollow in my stomach while I feel my face grow taut.

One of the possibilities, then, is to hide from it, to avoid it, to ignore that I am afraid. Another option, then, is to shut down, stop functioning, stop thinking and just wait it out in terror. It depends on circumstances as to which option is more viable, but neither works. In fact, the former can lead right on to the latter. I've done both, and it's not good for me, or anyone else.

I went through a phase, in the throes of my youthful adolescence I think, where I was obsessed with the analogy of jumping off a cliff. It was, of course, all about fear. I was the jumper and my fears were the cliff. All I had to do was jump over that cliff and wait until I hit the water (it was that sort of cliff) and then I'd be fine. Fake it 'til you make it, some people would say. I think Relient K had something to do with it all.

It's really not the best way to do things, though, because you're still so, so afraid. The first year I worked at Ligonier, I got to do the zipline during staff training. I ran to the edge of the platform, fully intending to make that leap of terror, and I stopped, dead in my tracks. I backed up and paused for a moment, and I asked my facilitator if it was alright if I grabbed the rope holding the harness around my wait to the carriage on the cable. I explained rather hurriedly that I knew that my arms holding that rope wouldn't do anything, it was the harness and carabiners doing all the work, but psychologically, in my head, it would help. Just jumping off the cliff didn't work, so I needed something more, something to assure me that my fears were unfounded.

The next year at camp, I did the High-Ropes once. It was a strange session, with a new and different program involving older kids (aged 16-18), theology teachers, and both genders (yikes! No really, at camp that's sort of bizarre). After all the campers had gone through the course, it was time for Abby and me to give it a shot. I had watched all the kids go through, I had been there before, I knew just how all the things worked, and I said "Yeah, I think I'll be fine." As we progressed through the course and upward into the air, it became more and more clear that I wasn't fine - I was terrified to the point of shaking. Abby, meanwhile, was just fine, and her stability is how the second half of the course managed to go as well as it did.

I want there to be a better way. I'd like to be able to stop, take a step back, and realize that my fears are exaggerated, grown far beyond what makes sense. I'd like to be able to say "There is a sturdy steel cable holding you in the air" or "Your friends won't think less of you" or even "You don't need to worry. He takes care of birds." and press on, unafraid.

I don't have new ideas

2010-12-27T18:27:00.002-05:00

In early-mid-July, I switched from the sort of training section of my company to being placed on a real project in a real office. You can tell, because a week or two later I wrote a post called "Change" and then, if the title of this blog is true, didn't feel like writing for a long time.

It's not entirely true, though, because I've wanted to write. I've wanted to throw some ideas out there and put them into somewhat well-formed sentences and see what you (yes, you! ...whoever you are) have to say about them, if anything. I have opened the posting page several times and written nothing, because I haven't had the words. I haven't had the words, because I haven't had time to think.

I haven't had time to think, because I haven't made time to think. I haven't made time to play the guitar. I haven't made time to pray. I haven't made time to read, and those are all things I think are important for me to do. If you feel like you've read this before, maybe you read the post I wrote just before graduating from college.

Sometime in the last year, I went through several piles of old notebooks, full of writings and drawings going back as far as 3rd grade, saving only a few highlights and throwing the rest away, because I do not need to carry a giant pile of notebooks with me through life. My descendents either won't care or won't have time to look through it all, and, even if I became famous for some ridiculous reason, it will just make me more mysterious which is probably good.

I haven't written a lot of songs as of late, because I haven't been playing guitar (see above) and those tend to correlate (whether or not I'm not writing for guitar), but I sure did write a lot more songs in high school, in the throes of adolescence - what a surprise. I'm not claiming those were very good (some were real woofs), but as I looked back at them I realized that, despite the ways in which I've grown and matured, some of the struggles and themes were the same things I deal with today. It was a little bit too much like the beginning to a Caedmon's Call song, I guess.

One of the great things about a blog is that it's super-easy for me to look back at what I wrote in the past and realize that I still have the same problems, which just confirms my observations of my 16-year-old songwriting self. I'm not saying that I haven't changed, that things haven't gotten better, but it looks to me like the root causes in the heart are the same.

I don't read the Bible much, outside of my weekly Small Group Bible Study, because I don't make time for it, but I remember that back in my adolescence I was a huge fan of the end of Romans 7. This is probably one of those things unique to certain kinds of Protestants, but the problem of feeling like I want to do the right thing and then doing the wrong thing was a major concern in my life. I can't tell you how many songs I wrote about that. Paul says this:

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

I've tried a lot of things to change myself and overcome my problems. I don't know where to draw the line on the great continuum of trying to fix yourself and just sitting around doing nothing saying "Well come on God what is taking so long" and I feel like I've done both at various times. If you feel like you've read this before, maybe that's because I have written all this before.

A year ago, I was in St. Louis at Urbana 2009, and no, I still haven't committed to intentionally serving Christ in a cross-cultural context in the near future, and that was far from the first time I thought that was a good idea. I still haven't done all kinds of things that I sometimes I think I ought to do, like learning to make time for things, and fixing one of those things would probably fix all the rest: changing myself to be a better person, whatever that means. Michael Jackson may have sang about only needing a mirror to identify and fix his problems, but I've been staring at myself for years and I think it takes more than deciding to change. If you feel like you've read this before, maybe you read the ending of the post I made last on this blog.

If I can't change myself and God is taking so long, what can I do? Try harder, try different things, or be patient. I've tried the first one, I'd do the second if I wanted to, and the third option is so difficult.

Change

2010-07-18T23:13:00.001-04:00

The first two years of college, I church hopped all over the place, and I think that was a useful and important educational experience. During my Junior year, eventually my friends and I settled on Rivers Edge Community Church, a Presbyterian church near UMBC. It's a pretty good place, and I kept going there after I graduated and moved back in with my parents, because a twenty minute drive isn't all that bad, and it was familiar to me by then. As summer approached, though, I realized that there were other churches that I might be interested in, much closer to home. I visited a few, and have been going to City of Hope Church on Sundays. It's in Columbia, less than a ten minute drive, and it's a lot like NewSong Community Church up in Baltimore. It's a good, small, fairly young church.

One of the reasons why I didn't mind not going to River's Edge is that, for the most part, I haven't gotten to know anyone there, even though I went there consistently for two and a half academic years and first went there as far back as 2006. I know a few people, but not particularly well at all. When there was a crowd of us college kids, it was pretty typical and not surprising that we'd all bunch up together and only talk to each other after the service. But after I graduated, and after Smitty moved to Cincinnati, it was just me, and still I didn't talk to anyone. After the service was over, I'd usually just leave.

I've been going to City of Hope for most of two months now, and I've met a few people. If someone sitting near me accosts me after the service, I meet them, we chat for a few minutes, and then I leave. If that doesn't happen, I just leave. When I stopped going to Rivers Edge, I said that it'd be different at City of Hope, because there were people my age, because I'd be an adult there instead of a graduated college-kid, because I'd be outgoing and friendly, because I wouldn't run away from the intimidating and uncomfortable situation of meeting people. Now I talk to myself every week as I walk across the parking lot, asking why I left, why I didn't stay and talk to the people I've briefly met in weeks past.

I don't do New Year's Resolutions, but it looks like I do New Place Resolutions. Going to Camp, living in a different dorm, moving home - There have been many semi-unstated goals, where I wanted to start doing something, or stop doing something, or change how I did something. I've never kept track of these, but I don't think I've done all that well. Does that mean that my ways have never changed? By no means! But change doesn't happen overnight, it turns out; I suspect it's slow. I'm hopefully moving out of my parents' house in the coming weeks, and it might do my mental health some good to remember that all my faults are not going to disappear when I come up with a new and clever way to organize my belongings in their new environ. I'm not saying I shouldn't try, though.

Narrative

2010-07-05T22:33:00.000-04:00

I've only read one of Don Miller's books (yes, it was Blue Like Jazz), but I've been reading his blog lately. He is, at least lately, real big on the idea that if your life is a good story, then it's a good life. I think this makes sense in an existential fulfillment way, but I'm not sure that's best. I know that, even before I read anything he ever wrote, I would try to find narrative threads in my life. People seek order and meaning, even if they're looking in random chaos, and that's all that is, even if life isn't actually random chaos. As a Christian, I believe God is working all things for the good of people who love him. Christians can and often do frame the history of mankind as one big narrative, as told by the Scriptures. Thanks to prophesy, we can know the ending, God creates the new heavens and the new Earth and dwells with his people in the New Jerusalem, while we're still in the story itself. That's different than framing your life as its own story. When I try to make my life a story, I make the story all about me, and that's not how it ought to be.

Work

2010-06-16T21:07:00.001-04:00

Genesis teaches that if everything was right in the world, then work wouldn't be toil. I don't work outside tilling the soil all that much; I'm paid to sit inside and press little buttons, and to think about which buttons I should press in what order. Work can be very enjoyable, when it is fulfilling. Physical labor can feel very fulfilling, I've found, but that is probably actually just my body telling me that I don't exercise like I should. Still, when I accomplish something I care about, that sense of accomplishment makes the labor worth it. Am I working for that feeling, or am I working because I care about whatever I'm working on? I know I don't care about pressing the little buttons all day; I just do it so I can get money so I can get other things that I care about, later.

When I work on things that I care about, even that isn't easy. I say that it's worth the work when I start, then later I don't believe it and I stop. Later still, I realize it is and I go back to it. I say that I care about doing something, then my actions show that I care more about watching someone play piano on youtube. It's not that I care more about that video than I do the task at hand, but instead that I care, in that moment, about doing what is easiest, and being entertained is nearly always easiest. Sometimes work is hard to do, not because the actual labor is difficult, but because it's hard to remember what's important.

Last summer, working at Ligonier Camp, near the end of the summer, I was assigned to work for a week with a new program involving staff from outside Camp and kids who were of an age with which I wasn't used to working. Working with the outside staff and the older campers was tiring, and, due to the nature of it all, I didn't get a day off all week. The actual day to day wasn't physically tiring, we spent half the day sitting around discussing theology, but I was exhausted by the end of it. The last night there, it looked like we needed an extension cord for a projector, so I ran off to go find one. By the time I got back, they had solved the problem and didn't need the cord, so I ran off to go put it back, ended up going all over the place, stopped for several minutes in the Dining Hall to talk with counselors who were doing normal Camp things (like watching Wall-E) because I really wished I was doing that stuff (like watching Wall-E) instead, and eventually ended up where I started, where I was supposed to be. I felt emotionally and physically exhausted, the most tired I can ever remember feeling, but when I finally had the chance to stop and think, it felt like all this work was good, like I was doing the right thing, except for maybe that part where I stopped to chat with cute girl counselors who were watching Wall-E. The fact that I felt so tired told me that I was doing something right. A day or two later, I spent hours throwing up, because I had the flu.

Urbana 2009, St. Louis, Missouri

2010-06-09T20:58:00.014-04:00

Every three years, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (along with their Canadian counterpart) holds a a conference called "Urbana", because it used to meet at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Those facilities, however, became too small, and so it has met in St. Louis Missouri since 2006. It takes place from December 27th to just after midnight on January 1st, and its attendance is somewhere around 18,000 people, I think. It's aimed at college students, but seniors in high school and post-college folks have been known to attend as well. It features a whole of speakers and is focused on what Christians call "missions", the preaching of the Gospel everywhere.

When I went to Urbana 06, I didn't have a reason to go, just that everyone said it was cool. People said I should probably have some reason, but I didn't ever figure that out, try though I did. All the promotional material about Urbana said "YOU HAVE A CALLING", like if we came to Urbana maybe God would reach down his mighty hand and give us some special revelation concerning his intentions for our future and what we should do. I was pretty cynical about it. I didn't go to very interesting seminars, but I did like some of the talks that people gave. Every morning included a sermon, more or less, which in tandem with Bible Studies (small groups of 2,000), worked through Ephesians, and I really liked those, but I can't remember what I learned. There are a few memories that stick out, like hearing an African pastor challenging our Western-centric views, making fun of Rick Warren and skipping Bible Study to see the St. Louis Arch, because Inductive Bible Study with 2,000 people really wasn't working. There was a big room full of representatives from "Missions Organizations", and it felt too much like a college-fair, like they were trying to sell their organization to you, and I was so sure that that wasn't how God works. After Urbana, Ryan and I got a reputation with the IV Staff in the area as being "the guys who didn't like Urbana", which is apparently a rare condition.

When people started talking about Urbana 09, I had mixed feelings. I wanted to give Urbana a second chance, because people who I trust think Urbana is really great. I had given my 2006 experience a lot of thought, but that's not the same as reaching a conclusion. Additionally, I wouldn't be a student anymore (having graduated in May 09) and, as December approached, it was looking more and more likely like I wouldn't be employed by then either, which was great for having the time for Urbana, but not great for having the money for it. One Thursday night, and I don't remember the reasons why, I found myself back at IV's Large Group meeting at UMBC, despite being an alum. Bethanie was speaking, and she told us about how her experiences doing the Baltimore Urban Program, a sort of missions trip experience thing during the Summer, had convinced her that cynicism is a sin. I'm not so sure it's a sin, but she got me thinking.

Eventually, I did decide to go. In order to save money, Mike German and I didn't get a hotel room, but instead found a host on couchsurfing.org. We didn't pay for a seat on a bus, but instead, along with two others, drove. We didn't buy much food from restaurants while in St. Louis, but instead purchased our meals (excluding Urbana-provided dinners) from a local grocery store chain called Schnucks, a plan we ultimately turned into a UMBC-&-friends "Lunch Collective". We drove downtown from our host's house every day and parked for free at a casino near the convention center. Thanks to some help from my church and our money-saving efforts, the money worked out fine.

I have to at least mention the journey. Julian, as an IV Staff Intern, had to be in St. Louis by 2pm on December 26th, a day before the conference started. Thus, we left Baltimore at 11pm on Christmas Day, and drove all night long. The morning of the 26th, a Saturday, we found ourselves lost in the snowy streets of Indianapolis, trying, with the help of Mike Weber's family's GPS, to find a diner recommended by someone on Couchsurfing, a search which ultimately led to what seemed at the time to be the funniest breakfast ever. We listened to the entirety of Sufjan Stevens' "Illinois" while in Illinois. I am not sure I recommend the all-night-driving method, but it worked out. Because we got there a day early, we got to go to church on Sunday morning at New City Fellowship, which has a lot of connections with IV and felt a lot like Newsong in Baltimore.

Part of living and traveling with Mike was my desire to get a little bit of what I called "The Mike German Experience", which is how I found myself sitting in a parking lot in Mike's car in the cold of December, eating tuna fish out of a bag after having the free beer at the end of the free tour of the Anheuser-Busch brewery. I was consistently skeptical of Mike's plans, particularly when he invited a Canadian he had just met who had no where to stay, to come back to our host's place. I was right to insist we check with our host first, but even after that I was skeptical, yet Joe turned out to be a great friend that week. Thanks to my upbringing, I was never truly comfortable with our daily walks through the casino from the parking garage, but that free parking was a great thing. I was out of my comfort zone, and it was probably good for me.

Urbana opened with a dance performance, accompanied by a spoken-word piece based on John 1. Jesus, the Word, was portrayed as a dancer, calling the universe into being with tap, then forming humans who danced as he did, then sad as they turned to a new, uglier sort of march. John the Baptizer made an appearance as a hip-hop artist, loudly proclaiming Christ's arrival, and Jesus then got to work teaching those who would learn to dance with him. I had seen dance and various other arts used in worship before, but I hadn't seen them used so well before. It just worked.

The two biggest ideas I had for making Urbana 09 a potentially better experience were not being cynical and having a list of goals. One of the biggest goals on that list was to go into the big room of organizations, willing to hear out the people from the organizations, instead of just deciding the room was terrible. I went in, I walked around, I didn't really talk to anyone, and I left. This time though, I realized that that room is useful to some people. Some people really can find what they're going to do with their summer or even their lives by talking to people in booths. I am not one of those people, but I should not write off that whole method of communication as being a bad idea.

I tried hard to make sure I went to good seminars, this time. I heard someone talk about The Church and Homosexuality, and how Christians are doing a terrible job loving people who don't identify with heteronormative values. She didn't really have answers on what we should do, but it was good to hear and see other people who are concerned about this, maybe even ones who aren't Derek Webb fans. I heard a panel of members of various New Monasticism communities talk about their struggles and desires. During the Q&A time, someone asked about their style of ministry in non-urban contexts, and the panelists had nothing to say, no experience from which to comment, thus checking off another one of my goals. I heard a man talk about moving his wife and kids to Darfur, Sudan, while various Missions Organizations have policies that their workers can visit Darfur for a day maybe sometimes, but certainly not live there, much less bringing their families along. He talked about preaching to a gathering of village chiefs, and about confronting warlords. His talk scared me, because I thought "What if that is me, someday?", but he closed by saying "Please don't think there's anything special about me. I am just like you. It's God doing the work." I had two separate opportunities to hear John Perkins, one of the founders of the Christian Community Development Association, speak, and one of those was in tandem with Shane Claiborne. Perkins is 80 years old, and it was really good to hear his wisdom, even if he does ramble on and on sometimes. The second time I heard him, a lot of people showed up to hear Shane Claiborne, but Perkins did most of the talking. I think it was good for them.

The last night, sitting in the big stadium listening to Brenda Salter-McNeil preach, a guy three rows in front of us came back to his seat with a box of pizza. He took a little bit (It was cut into small squares), then passed it on. Soon, there were many of us eating pizza. Elise took out a cookie, Smitty took out Peanut Butter Crackers, and those were shared too. Kathy, who's IV Staff in Baltimore, said "I think we just had communion." and I agreed. A little while later, I took communion, bread and wine, offered by the aforementioned Brenda Salter-McNeil, a woman now wearing white vestments. The German missionary in Darfur told us to think of the darkest place we could, and then go there, because God is with you, so you have no reason not to. People talked about hard problems without presenting answers, and that was okay, because Jesus is in control. Native Americans danced in ways that made no sense to me, but they said they were worshiping the one, true God who made all things. Mike invited a man we'd just met to come live with us for a week, because he had nowhere else to go. All these surprised me and scared me, because I agreed with them.

The drive back from St. Louis was similar, but we had Kaylyn with us now, and it was daytime when we started. We bought donuts at a gas station in Illinois, even though we had breakfast already. We ate at Steak 'n' Shake, and it was just as good as Robert Ebert said it would be. We saw the great flat places on Indiana, where you can just see forever 'til the world curves away. Instead of going back to Baltimore, though, they dropped me off in Ligonier, at Camp, for the Staff Reunion. It was like leaving a giant family reunion and going to a different one, and while there I had a long talk with people about figuring out life and where we want to go and do. I still haven't figured out all the meaning, implications and applications of my experience at Urbana, but I'm glad I wasn't cynical.

Footage hosted by Vimeo.

Footage hosted by Vimeo.

Ideals, Beliefs

2010-04-03T23:26:00.006-04:00

A few weeks ago, my friend Mikey-G said something on facebook that got me thinking. He said "20 min lunch break outside of shorts, no shoes... and then back to work. a 9-5, nearly windowless, pants-only job. something went very wrong since last may.", meaning that life had not gone as he planned since graduated from college. I remember sitting with Mike and some other people, our senior year, and discussing how living "in community" with other people might mean pooling our incomes as one bank account. Another friend likes to talk about joining a commune a lot, but then recently said that maybe it was silly.

I once told a friend, my last year of high school, that I wanted to be "an artsy-fartsy Comp Sci major" in college, and I think I did that pretty well, although I don't think I really tried hard; it just happened. If anything, I wasn't enough of a Comp Sci major, but that is another story. I went to UMBC because I applied to three schools in the area with decent Comp Sci programs, got into all three, prayed, and UMBC gave me a big scholarship. I went for Comp Sci because I thought I was good at it, and being a programmer seemed to work out well enough for my father. I turns out, I'm not all that good at it (Don't tell my boss), but that's also another story I think, and I don't enjoy it. I went on missions trips to Bulgaria and Ukraine, and both times I prayed "Well God, I think that'd be pretty cool and I think you might want me to do that, but I have no idea. So, if I'm not supposed to go, please make it really obvious." and then I ended up going.

In December, I went to a big conference out in St. Louis called "Urbana", because it used to be held in Urbana, IL, run by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. While I was there, I heard a lot of speakers say a lot of things that scared the pants off me, because I agreed with them. Sometimes, you believe things and you don't know it until someone says it. People talked about moving to foreign countries where people get shot all the time, or into cities where people get shot all the time, and how God is teaching them to love people in those places. They talked about how we waste our immense wealth on things that don't matter while people are dying. They talked about how we pursue so many of the wrong things in life, things that are not actually God.

The last night there, we had Communion (you know, the Eucharist). I knew we were going to, because it was in the schedule, and when I looked up at the stage, there stood the woman who had just finished speaking, a few minutes before, in white vestments. The bread came around, and as I held that little piece of strange, edible material (It is hard to find cheap, bread-like product for 20,000 people that isn't strange, I suspect), I thought about a lot of things. One of the things I thought about was whether it was okay to eat this bread and drink this wine when the person serving it was a woman. Then I ate the bread and I drank the wine (well, okay, it was grape juice. That's another story), and it was good.

Towards the end of college, I applied for some jobs, through a little website that my school had for finding jobs. I got an interview with a company to be a programmer, and they made me an offer and I accepted it, because, let's face it, it was the only job interview I had got, and it was getting on April, with graduation right around the bend. Then there was working at Camp and then a very long period of waiting, and then I actually started my job, and then I freaked out. Suddenly I my job was to spend every day sitting in front of a computer trying to get my brain to figure out what bizarre words to put in what order in order to get the computer to do meaningless tasks. I quickly came to the conclusion that letting life happen as it happened did not always work out for optimal results. I also regretted not pursuing becoming a teacher instead of a programmer sooner than tomorrow.

It's very easy to say you believe something is the best, but it is incredibly difficult to make good on those words sometimes. I don't know when this is wrong or when it is okay. Sometimes, after you state an ideal, your actual experiences demonstrates that the ideals you thought you had were not really the things you valued most. Sometimes, I think we violate ideals out of laziness or selfishness, but other times it just happens and it's hard to say that anyone did anything wrong. The best are when we discover the ideals we thought we had were wrong, and that something better has replaced them, but those are rare events I suspect. Many times, we simply don't hold ourselves to our own ideals, letting things slip because doing it right is too hard. If a certain thing is the best way, then it should be worth doing it that way. This can be difficult to believe sometimes.

Love, #2

2010-01-06T21:20:00.000-05:00

One of the great things about Jesus' teachings is that at the heart of it are two commands "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.", the two commands upon which he says "depend all the Law and the Prophets." He even tells one man that this is all you need to do in order to "inherit eternal life", after which he confounds everyone's idea of who their neighbors are. Now, we can probably all agree that what it means to obey these two commands is an incredibly nuanced and complicated affair. How do you love God with everything you have, so that you have no other principalities, powers, objects, people, loyalties, loves or anything else commanding your actions? How do you love people as much as you, a selfish creature, love yourself? I think he keeps his statements simple because you can not write out laws to wholly entail love for all people. You can not sum right living up in a set of rules, for right living is loving.

Love, #1

2009-12-23T15:10:00.000-05:00

Jesus says I should love God with everything in me, with everything I have. People have told me, many times, that if I fully love God, I will love the things he loves. Thankfully I am not Jewish, or I would have to love not eating bacon. Jesus then goes on to say that I should love everyone else as much as I love myself. It's a good thing that's the second command, or I might have to hate God, because maybe some people love hating God. I'm supposed to treat others how I treat myself, or maybe how I want them to treat me (though not with the actual expectation of reciprocation).

I think it's interesting to think about the fact that I might be wrong about what is the best way to treat others, but loving them only obligates me to love as I think I ought to, not as I actually should. I mean, there's no other way to do it, really, but it's still interesting. The other interesting bit is that if loving God fully means loving the things he loves, then maybe loving God more fully than I do now will cause me to love others more in the right way, instead of however I presently believe I should love them. So learning to love God more fully helps me love both God and others more fully.

Ligonier Camp, Summer of 2009

2009-11-24T01:55:00.014-05:00

I have two posts unfinished, I confess, and I might never finish them. But I recently realized that I have not written much at all about my second summer as a Camp Counselor at Ligonier Camp & Conference Center, in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. For those of you who missed it, I wrote a few posts about my first summer there, and reading them will tell you what Camp is like, generally, which might help you understand the rest of this. On the other hand, I can not guarantee that they are the most interesting posts. Also, if I don't write soon, I may forget.

Near the end of May, I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County). A few days later, I went off to camp with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and studied the first few chapters of Genesis for a week. It was excellent. A little before this, I had to fill out some paperwork for a job I was offered and accepted, and when I got back from camp with IV, this still had to be finished. Also, I needed time to recuperate from a fairly awful semester (My GPA went down a bit more than I wanted) and camp. So I called up Camp and told them that I needed a few days, I would be getting to training two days late. I didn't like doing that, but I didn't feel too awful about; I'd been through counselor training before.

The first person I met this year who I hadn't known before, was Allan Edwards. He was this year's Men's Director, he's been around Camp for years (but not much last year), and the first thing he did was say "Tim Milligan's here!" (which is how Lauren and Dana introduced me) and gave me a big hug. Later he actually said "So, I'm Allan" and we did the actual meeting each other thing. My Dad said "From the hug, I thought you knew him.." I soon went off to put my stuff in one of the cabins where guys were staying during training, and almost immediately ran into a pack of Counselors, our paths colliding as they went from some training session up to belay training, where I was to follow them shortly. This wasn't really something I was looking forward to, as I failed my belay test last year, and so started a trend. A few days later, I passed the belay test, something I had to do only twice all summer; I can't say I enjoyed any of it.

Camp was not the same this year as last year. There was a new dining hall, a new zipline, new activities sometimes, etc. We had bulldozers and dumptrucks all summer, and the dining hall didn't get approved by the State until a few days before Campers arrived. There was a Target Sports co-counselor, and yet I got to teach Archery a lot; it was later revealed that Steve was good at archery and knew little aobut guns before taking the job, yet there he was at the riflery range every day. Some of the people I got along best with last year weren't there this year. Many people from last year were there this year. Many people there this year weren't there last year, many of them having never been to Ligonier before at all. I confess, I had my misgivings about some of the folks on staff; I thought "Really? That person is going to work here at a counselor? I am not too sure." but, what a surprise, I was wrong to think that way. It was a quality group of people serving God by loving kids at Camp this summer. Or maybe it was a group of terrible people depending on God. That, I think, is a lot more true.

My first year at Camp, I often felt a bit on the outside, never quite connecting as well as I wanted to with others, never quite understanding how things worked because I was new, etc. I still didn't connect as well as I wanted to, because I am not really the best at being open and honest and loving, etc, but this year did feel different. I distinctly remember being told by folks that they were really glad I came back this year, and that took me by surprise; I didn't really know why and I don't think I do now. One day, I was told that although this was supposedly only my second summer at Ligonier, they felt "like that isn't true" and I had been there for a long time. As much as this was certainly confusing and strange to me, it was also plenty encouraging.

Camp Staff is divided into Units, which sort of roughly corresponds to the ages of the kids you work with, maybe. I was once again in Unit 2, right where I wanted to be, which meant ages 10-13 again, which was fine by me, though that didn't quite work out; more on that later. Unit 2 Guys this year had, if I do say so myself, a rather distinct personality. We'd meet together twice a week to hang out and do some Bible study with Allan, and one day we got to talking about the Pixar film "The Incredibles." From that point on, "The Incredibles" was discussed at every Discount (Discipleship/Accountability) in exactly the same fashion every time:

"THAT'S INCREDIBLE!"
"You mean like that family of Superheroes?"
"Yeah! The Incredibles! They're just like the Brady Bunch, but with superpowers!"
"Yeah! Except the incredible part is that they manage to stay together as a nuclear family in a modern world of high divorce rates!"
"And then Syndrome is all like 'I'm Syndrome!' and Frozone's like 'Where is my supa-suit!?' and then"
"And the baby, he's like 'I'm a baby, I can't decide what power I have' so he has ALL of them"
"And then that kid is like "Wooooow, that was INCREDIBLE!"

Every time. At the end of the summer, Allan fulfilled our dreams and we watched "The Incredibles" and oh it was good. There is nothing like anticipation to make a good thing even better.

I admit that a lot of the rest of this will end up being about the 2nd half of Camp. I loved the first half, really I did, but it was mostly uneventful. Except that one week I had a kid with Autism in my cabin, and an extra counselor was assigned to take care of Charles. It was difficult to know what to do sometimes, like when we turned around and found Charles naked, but it was also really Good. And Peter was back in my cabin for the 2nd year in a row, and this time he cried a lot less when not-winning, and he and I had a really interesting and I hope Good talk about all the trouble he's been having in school this year, and how Jesus wants him to react to that, and how that's not easy at all. And Riley and I combined our tribes into a super-tribe and had a really good campout.

When I was in first grade, I went on a canoe trip with my father and a bunch of others guys from church (well, Christian Service Brigade, technically), and our canoe flipped in rapids and I held on and ended up trapped underneath it briefly. This discouraged me from much participating in boating activities for years, and my aversion continues to this day. But this summer, I had to go White-Water Rafting, because I actually had campers old enough. I did not wear my glasses, because otherwise you lose them, and I was in a boat with Riley, another counselor and also half-blind, a kid who was half-blind, a raft captain kid who couldn't give correct directions on time, a kid who started out by not paddling hard enough, and a kid who alternated by not paddling hard enough and paddling two hard just to mess with us. I fell in once and it was terrifying. Then, we ate lunch on land, we started to get our act together as a raft, and I had fun. But two weeks later when I had the chance to go again, I let Steve, my co-counselor for the week, go instead.

Last year, I was glad that my oldest camper was 13; I always found myself a bit more awkward with older kids, not as good as being their counselor. Session 4 of Camp, I had a cabin full of 13 and 14 year olds, the kind that want life to be a wrestling match. This why I went rafting, this is why I did the Vomit Comet, my kids were old enough, and this is also why I went paintballing this year. Paintballing hurts like crazy, and is not fun until you figure out how to aim well, which didn't happen until the 2nd time I went. I still didn't like it a whole, whole lot. The week after I had those kids for two weeks, there was a program at Camp called The Next Step, where 16-18 year olds came and had lectures and discussions about Christianity and philosophy in the morning, and did all manner of things in the afternoon. Tyler got sick the day they were to arrive, and suddenly I found myself with even older campers, ones who were going paintballing, rafting, and even on the zipline. I didn't go rafting again, but I did the others. Also, I found myself, along with Abby, in the position of helping run a program that had never happened before, dealing with outside staff (that is to say, those not as familiar with Ligonier), and that was incredibly difficult.

The week after I had the really old kids, I got sick for a few days, and then I was a rover for a few days. Rovers take over counselors' tribes on their days off, just for a day, and then the rover is off to a different tribe. I thought this would be awful and hard, but it turned out to be a whole lot of fun. Then, after that, I had what are called "Lil Ligs", kids ages 6-8 who come to Camp for two nights. I was pretty afraid of this idea, and other than one kid throwing up at 2am on the 2nd night, and two brothers being homesick the first night, it went really well. The other counselor in the cabin that week, a guy named Chris, was great with the homesick kids, while I took other kids to the toilet. The next night, I was great at cleaning up barf while Chris took the kid to the nurse. I discovered that little kids are lots of fun to throw around in the pool, but I still don't think I'm all that good with little kids.

During Session 5, a plague swept through Camp. It was some sort of flu or something, and it generally caused you to barf and feel awful for 12 to 36 hours. I caught it just as my really old kids were leaving, and so instead of having a day off, I had a night of puking for 5 hours. Thankfully, though, I wasn't alone. That night, we had two cabins full of sick kids and counselors, with two CITs (Counselors In Training, high schoolers who love camp and do the dirty work for not enough money) who had already had the illness working most of the night exchanging trashbags of vomit for empty ones. I gave up on sleeping in a dark room full of puke-smell and sick campers and sat out on deck all night with Brian and Jeff, even sleeping a little bit, but also puking, as I said, for 5 hours. I don't know if I've ever puked so much before, and I hope I never do again; I wasn't even in the worst group of patients. In the morning, Ben and Josh read Bible stories to the kids, and then later I read the first quarter of "The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe" to everyone. After the few remaining sick kids were moved out, we scrubbed those cabins with bleach. A few days later, before Lil Ligs, we did it again. And one Lil Lig still got sick!

It might seem like I did a lot of things that I didn't like this summer. It's true! But it was Good for me. God showed me that serving him isn't doing what I like. He also showed me that the the things I think will be terrible, sometimes, are not all that bad. I am thankful. By the end of it, I was exhausted, and it was good. I learned that remembering that Christ is your master is pretty important. He also showed his mercy in that I never once had to do any silly dances all summer long. Other highlights of the summer include walking through fields for part of the journey to Town, something I did several times, singing "The Mariner's Revenge (abridged/cleanedup)" with Ben at Dessert Theater, and seeing all the cool animals that Ben, our Nature Co-Counselor found. I corresponded regularly with my friend Matthew all summer and I also sent letters to several other people, including one hand-written copy of the Book of James. I suspect that my letter writing took the place of journaling in many instances, but I'm okay with that. It was a good summer. I think I learned that hard work can be very fulfilling. I think I've written enough about Camp for now.

Here are some photos

And one more, taken during a walk back from Town, this time with friends

What makes sense

2009-10-23T19:15:00.000-04:00

I can't control what I believe is true. If you walked up to me and paid me a large sum of money to believe that the sky is red, I might say "Okay, the sky is red", but inside I would be believing the sky is blue and lying to you for the money. Now, perhaps you have lots of photographs showing the sky to be red, and some sort of spectroscopy device or whatever scientific instrument you want to use (I am not a real scientist, just a computer one) saying that the sky is red. These would be some fascinating things to show me, I assure you, but then I would look up at the sky and see the color blue and I would go on believing that the sky is blue. I would also believe that you have rudimentary photo-editing skills, and your scientific instruments need recalibration.

The problem with all this is that the same story is applicable to my saying the sky is red and you saying the sky is blue. None of this has really helped us agree on the truth about the color of the sky. Additionally, if someone thinks the sky is red, I might suggest they also think that water and the two Gs in the Google logo are red. So it is really not the best example. One thing, though, that I get out of the little story I just made up, is that I am probably going to believe what I think is true, regardless of what you say is true. Could you convince me that I'm wrong? I wonder, sometimes. If everyone told me the sky was red, would I decide my eyeballs were broken? But if a doctor said my eyeballs were broken, I bet I'd believe him. But I still don't think I'd be choosing to believe something, I would be choosing to trust someone who I trust to know what they're talking about, and that choice would change my beliefs. Maybe you could give me a very convincing argument that the sky was red. You could say that the argument changed my beliefs, because it made so much sense to my mind, but I still don't think there's a lot of choice involved in that. If you claim to be actively choosing to believe something, that sounds like you're choosing that which doesn't make as much sense to you as some alternative. Maybe this is what my friend Alex calls "Intellectual Dishonesty".

At the same time, however, I can choose how much of what voices I listen to, and maybe that's related to what influences my beliefs. I think I already know this, though. Unsurprisingly, I tend to choose things which reinforce some of my views, but I also make an effort to hear the opposition too, albeit in a lesser amount. I think this is a good plan. Of course I do; it makes sense to me!

Doing Nothing

2009-10-20T14:43:00.006-04:00

For the past two months, I have had the opportunity to do absolutely nothing. I came into this experience after being a Summer Camp Counselor for two and a half months, so I certainly needed rest. Secondly, I needed a space in which to live. As I have not yet started my post-college, "real" job, I am still residing in my parents' house. After four years of moving in and out of college dorms, two of those without any real residency in this house, my room had become a complete mess of boxes, clothes and other unsorted items. This was more than just a cleaning effort; I had to reorganize and reevaluate my possessions, throwing some away. I did this at what can probably be best described as a snail's pace, my unfortunately natural laziness no longer motivated by any known timetable. After I finally put everything in its proper place and vacuumed the long-unseen floor, I began to move into other parts of the house.

My family is just as naturally lazy as I am, my family falls into the terrible pit of the internet just as easily as I do, my grandmother died, my sister started college and my other sister started High School. So I began to move through the house, cleaning and reorganizing various areas as the impulses took me. I believed I was doing a good thing, and I still do, but I am also an arrogant jerk. Can you tell someone they need to be more conscious of how they take care of their living space, when you suck at it too? Can you tell someone that you "fixed" a mess without believing terrible things about yourself? Probably not. The garage is still a mess, but I am not sure I have the power and authority to fix that.

There are many, many ways a man can distract himself. I feel like the internet has increased these ways tenfold. I have played with Desktop Tower Defense Pro more times than I know, but I still can't beat the last two Scenarios nor most of the Sprint Modes. Thankfully, eventually the vast void of entertainment and idle distraction proves fruitless, its pleasures and flashing lights no longer enjoyable but instead feeling hollow, the truth. I'm not saying that recreation doesn't have its place in life, but such things should serve as an enjoyable rest from work, and I have not been doing a whole lot of work.

When I was at Camp this summer, Allan, the Men's Director, sometimes talked about how we're meant to work six days a week and rest on a seventh, the model outlined in the very beginning of Genesis. Camp works you hard, for the most part, because kids are a handful, loving them can be very tiring, and Camp is designed to challenge the Staff as well as the kids. When your day off comes around each week (whatever day that turns out to be), you love it, you enjoy it, because you need it. You don't do nothing, either, because there are things you want to do that you haven't had time to do the rest of the week. You rest by doing things, just not the same things, not the work things. Rest is good, so good, when it is preceded by work.

There's been some progress on the whole "starting that real job" thing, lately, although I still don't actually know when that's all doing down. Until then, though, I need to work. I tried to get hired as a substitute teacher, but it seems like the nearby school districts are pretty full up on those, probably thanks to the recent events in our economy. My recently deceased grandmother's house needs a lot of work done to it, but I don't know what to do and I get a crazy headache when I go there because she smoked like crazy and it reeks. The garage isn't finished, but I already mentioned how I may be at impasse there. I don't know what to do. But I sure can't do nothing; it's neither right nor healthy.

Reasons

2009-09-21T12:15:00.001-04:00

I want to do the right things for the right reasons. It's not enough for me to just do the right thing, it's gotta have the right reasons. I want to give the homeless man money because I love him, not because I feel guilty or ashamed of having wealth when he does not. Does feeling bad about my money and his lack and the disparity between the two count as love?

It gets worse. I don't want to not do wrong things for the wrong reasons. I don't want to not have sex because I am afraid of getting the girl pregnant, but I want to not have sex because I love God, want to obey his commands, and love this hypothetical woman enough to wait 'til we're married. Does being afraid of the consequences count as love?

The Bible says we're supposed to fear God, most famously when the Psalms tell us that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. Everyone today is hasty to point out that it does not mean the sort of cowering fear that we think of, but instead a healthy awe and respect. On the other hand, I would be afraid to meet a tiger in the wild, because that thing can tear your face off, and God can do much the same.

Jesus says that all the Law can be summed up in "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." I've often been taught and taken this to mean, probably after a lot of theological inferences, that we should obey God because we love him. If you love him as your God, you will do what he says. He knows best, and you love him and his ways and his attributes, so you want to do what is best according to his instruction. Okay, so far, so good, I think. But what if I am obeying him because I am afraid he will bite my face off? Is that love?

Jesus tells us that being angry at someone is the same as murder, and lusting after someone is the same as adultery. So not having angry thoughts is a good thing. But he doesn't say we have to not have angry thoughts because we love God; he does make sure we're aware that insulting people could land us in hell. Does it matter why you do something?

Homosexuality, Gay Marriage, Christianity, etc

2009-09-07T00:00:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine recently asked me for my thoughts on "homosexuality, gay marriage, etc". This is what I wrote in reply.

No matter where one stands on the factuality of the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis in the Bible, and I am pretty sure dinosaurs and people were never around at the same time, the intention and meaning of the story is fascinating. God makes the first man out of dirt, and the first man is lonely, and needs a "helper-partner" (I've been told that the Hebrew is "ezer-konegdo" and that's what it means, but I don't speak Ancient Hebrew myself), and so God goes and makes his wife, thus completing the species. Now things get messed up a little bit later on when they start disobeying God, but that's besides the point for this discussion. My point is that I'm pretty sure one of the first things that the Bible talks about (after it makes some statements about which kinds of creatures have dominion over which parts of the planet) is that men and women are meant to be equal partners in marriage, and that's the intention for us, as humans. Lots of other things in the Scriptures agree with this, and so we have homosexuality as sin.

I have no idea why men fall in love with men and want to marry them, and likewise with women, but apparently they do it. They then raise the objection that they did not choose to be the way they are, etc, and I see no better choice but to believe them. But there are two thoughts I have about that: First off, it's not genetic, as far as I know. Second off, there are lots of things that people didn't consciously choose that aren't genetic. Furthermore, they say that because they didn't choose it, they can't change it. I, frankly, have no idea if this is true or not, but I do know that there are things about people which they didn't choose but can change, and there are things which they can't change. So that's about all I've got on that one; it is not a settled matter in the least.

Concerning "Gay Marriage", that hot political debate of our day:
First, it's going to happen. Second, I don't really care, with one exception. This is not "A Christian Nation", as if such a thing could even exist, and the majority of people in America are okay with it, so it ought to happen. That's how Democracy, or whatever our system of government is, works. The one exception is the administering of marriage or whatever you want to call it. If there comes a day when churches are not allowed to refuse performing a marriage ceremony for a homosexual couple, on the grounds that such a thing is discrimination, then we've obviously got a problem. I mean, honestly, I am not sure the government should be involved in deciding who can and can't get married at all in the first place, but that's not a very likely situation.

The other thing I've got on my mind is the way that Christians treat homosexuals. Far, far too often, we do a really horrible job of loving them, which is lousy, because Jesus tells us to love everybody. Now, if homosexuality is a sin (is it just the gay sex? is it the attraction? this gets complicated and I'm not sure anyone has the answers), then God wants to save people from that too. How the heck God does that, I don't know. How we (and by we I mean Christians) are supposed to tell people that without their thinking we hate them, I don't know if people have figured it out. But it's a big problem, you know?
A guy who makes music and is also a Christian (but don't tell him he makes Christian music; he gets angry) named Derek Webb, whose music I really like, came out with a song recently called What Matters More, and it's been on my mind a lot recently. You'll find the video below.

One of the many problems of things

2009-09-04T14:18:00.000-04:00

In my closet, on the top shelf, there is a trebuchet. It is made of wood, metal, twine and denim, and it can fling a tennis ball at least a meter, maybe even two, if memory serves me right. My father and I built it, though I think my mother cut the denim sling, for my 11th grade Physics class. It is not miniscule, and it takes up quite a lot of shelf space in my closet. It would probably be helpful to not have it taking up so much closet space, so I could put other things there. But on the other hand, I don't want to throw it away. It's not very useful; I never need to throw tennis balls with anything other than my arm. It's not very good looking; it's just a bunch of quickly cut wood attached to each other in a very sturdy fashion. It's not very impressive; any one could build it if they wanted to, although most of classmates chose simpler designs that lacked hook-release slings and swinging counterweights. But on the other hand, I don't want to throw it away.

This is not the only object of its sort which I have, of course. Somewhere in the garage is a cardboard farm, and a cardboard Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and a wood and felt Yurt. In one of my drawers you can find two wooden racing cars, one designed distinctly to resemble a Space Shuttle. There's a t-shirt covered in the signatures of Bulgarians, and a deer print cast in plaster-of-paris, and a stack of comics I drew during the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades. They're not doing anything. They will never do anything. But on the other hand, I don't want throw them away.

This wouldn't be much of an issue, except that I have more things now, things which need to be somewhere other than the middle of my floor. I can not put them on the top shelf of my closet, because there is a trebuchet and a stack of notebooks full of drawings taking up most of the space. I am not going to throw away my pots, pans, silverware and plates, because someday I hope to have a kitchen in which to use these things. But on the other hand, I don't want to throw the trebuchet away.

Family

2009-08-31T05:00:00.000-04:00

Jesus says he didn't come to bring peace to the Earth, but that instead, of all the things you might not expect, he came to bring a sword, because swords violently divide things. Have you ever read Matthew 10, verses 34 through 39? He says that my enemies will, or at least could be my own family! I don't want to be divided from my family, but there's Jesus, threatening to chop us up. When his family shows up to see him, he says they're not his family, people who do the will of God are his family. That makes sense, because then we all have one Father, but it still sucks for families. But on the other hand, if your family is more important to you than doing the will of the Father, then you're not following Jesus (he says so). So much for Jesus valuing the nuclear family! Now, for me, a good thing to keep in mind is that my family are Christians. At the same time, however, Jesus says that being a Christian redefines who my family is. So although my family may still be family, my family is not longer restricted to them.

I often wonder what it means to be family, since both the existence of adoption and the teachings of Jesus tell me it means something other than blood relation. Personal experience suggests it means the people you love best. People say you don't have to like your family, but you do have to love them; I've never been clear on how to love someone without at least not disliking them, but personal experience may help here too. At Camp, there are plenty of people who, if not for Camp, I probably would never be friends with. To be more precise, I would not consider them a friend, if not for Jesus. This, I think, is significant. Here are people I would not love except for the fact that we follow Jesus, and, indeed, I consider them my brothers and sisters, despite that we enjoy different things, think different ways, come from different places, etc. If we weren't brothers, I'd probably dislike some of them even, but instead I want to love them, despite our differences. Maybe family means that you hold in common your most important bond. For many, this is blood, DNA, relation. For Christians, this is our Father.

I'm supposed to love my neighbors, which means people who help me when I'm beat up, and I'm supposed to love my enemies too. So how do I treat my family any different? If there's no difference in how I treat them, why does it matter their family? Laying aside that complicated issue, what would it look like if I treated all Christians like family?

If all Christians are my family, and we're supposed to be a family that loves each other, not some kind of dysfunctional mess, then we can't just move away and stop talking if we disagree about stuff. If all Christians are my family, then I need to eat with them, I need to talk with them, I need to live with them, and I need to take care of them.

If I treated all Christians like family, I'd let them live in my house whenever they needed to (presuming I own a house, I guess). Of course, Jesus tells us to do that for people, because when we do, we're actually giving Jesus a home, somehow. I'd give them food when they needed it, and much the same comments apply here. I'd love and trust them above all, because ... well, because they're family. Trusting everyone who loves Jesus?

That really is the problem, I suppose: loving people.

Time keeps on slipping into the Future

2009-05-05T18:15:00.000-04:00

I ought to write another post, a followup to the Trash one, about how the Trash one was pretty silly, but that won't happen right now.

Some Christians often talk about being good stewards with their money, because God gave them their money. This is very Biblical; Jesus tells us the parable of the Talents to tell us to use our money wisely, and the parable of the Shrewd Manager to tell us to use our money for the Kingdom,. I will refrain from utilizing the Talents-talents homonym found in English, but I will say that God gives us Spiritual Gifts as well as not-spiritual gifts (Don't ask me what those mean!), and we should use those the same way that we use our money: for the Kingdom. Money is a material possession, even if people forget that sometimes, and the best use of it is the same. But recently I have realized that God also gave us Time, and the best use of it is the same. This may sound like I am saying that God gave us our lives and therefore we should use our lives for the Kingdom, for the glory of God, but I don't use "My Life" as a unit of Time, whereas I think about how I am spending my time pretty frequently.

Several times, people have told me that if I used a planner, I would be able to manage my time better, spend my time better, and generally make myself a better person as well as a better Christian. I won't even bother explaining that, but I can tell you unequivocally that it did not work. I never remembered to look in the thing, even if I remembered to write things down. The idea of planning out how I would spend each minute of the day was incredibly difficult for me, and I would not have stuck to such a schedule even if I had succeeded in creating one. Instead, where the pro-tight-schedule people would have had me block in time for homework, time for this thing, time for that thing, I have free-form whatever time.

This freedom is so easily abused, and so my free-time all too often becomes my lay-around time, or my read-blogs time, or my play-computer-games time. None of those things are wrong, in and of themselves, but they cease to be relaxing activities of respite and become holes in which to laze away my day, depriving me of both the joy of accomplishment after hard work and the joy of a well-earned break after hard work. The transformation of what was meant to be joyful into meaningless boredom is a good sign of sin, I think.

This makes a lot of sense, to me. The best way we can use the time God has given us is for his glory and his Kingdom, which are really one and the same, I suspect. The question, then, is whether or not I can use my free-form time properly.

Nate the Snake

2009-05-01T02:16:00.000-04:00

The deserts of New Mexico, 1953! Now, do you know what was going on in America back then? We were fighting the Cold War. Our military-industrial complex was hard at work fighting the Soviets, constantly researching new and better weapons.

Now, in the desert there lived a snake, named Nate, Nate the snake, and Nate was no ordinary snake. No, he was a talking snake! That's right, a talking snake. Nate spent most of his time doing snake things, mostly slithering around and eating small animals, but he also liked to scare strangers. If ever some unfortunate man was walking through the desert, perhaps to get gasoline for an inoperative car, Nate would pop up and say "Hello!" and scare the crap out of the guy. Then he'd slither away, laughing quietly to himself in a way that only snakes can.

Well one day, Nate slithered out of his hole and saw, coming closer, a Jeep. "Well now this is strange," thought Nate, "Jeeps usually pass by my hole, not drive towards it..." and with that he dove into his hole, so as to avoid being run over. The ground shook and his hole nearly collapsed as the Jeep came to a stop, and out stepped two men in boots. Nate couldn't see anything but their boots, because he was still under the Jeep. "Still," he thought, "I might be able to have some fun..." and he quickly slithered out from under the Jeep, dove between the two men in Army uniforms (He could see them now), and quickly turned around to face them. He smirked as they stared in shock and he said "Hello!". Before he could dart away, however, he saw the General (for one of them was a General!) break into a grin. No one had ever grinned after Nate had tried to scare them, and the shock of it made Nate come to a halt.
The general looked down at the frozen snake and said "Are you Nate the talking snake?" Nate nodded and said "Yes, I am." The lieutenant with the General said "Well sir, I guess he must be; he just talked!" and the General crouched down and looked Nate in the eye. He said "Son, your country needs you. I don't know if you're aware of this sort of thing, being a snake, but you live in the United States of America, a grand and glorious country stretching fro..." Nate interrupted "Sir, I know where I am. I voted for Eisenhower." The General chuckled "Well, well, good man...er...snake." He paused, confused, then continued. "Well anyway, as I was saying, we need you. See, we're in a state of conflict with the Soviet Union, constantly building bigger and better weapons with which to wipe those damn Commies off the face of the earth, if we should ever need to. Problem is, our engineers and scientists have really outdone themselves this time, and they've built us a weapon that would obliterate the entire Earth if ever activated. We told them to disarm it, but they said there was no way, without obliterating the Earth anyway. Construction on its final casing is nearly complete and the control lever is going to go... right about... here." and with this he pointed to the ground beside Nate's hole. "Right here, beside my hole?!" gasped Nate. "That's right, right here beside your hole."
"Well if it's going to be built, what do you need me for?" The General chuckled again "Well you see Nate, we're a little short on funds. We don't really expect the lever to ever be pulled, because even the Soviets, in all their villainy, don't want to destroy the entire planet, so we were thinking it would be a lot more cost effective to just hire you to guard the lever. What do you say? You'd just have to kill anyone that tried to pull it." Nate thought about this briefly and said "Well...I could still slither around in the area and eat small animals?" "Oh absolutely!" replied the General, "Just so long as the lever doesn't get pulled." Nate smiled and replied "Well then, I'd be happy to serve my country in this way" and with that, the General extended his hand to shake, then quickly found himsef embarrassed and confused again, for Nate had no hands. The snake smiled knowingly and said "It's traditional to shake the tail." and extended his tail into the General's waiting palm. They shook on it, and a few days later Nate dipped his tail in ink and signed a contract.

Well, time passed, and ever the lever has installed, life went back to normal for Nate. He stilled slithered around and ate small animals, he still scared the occasional passerby by saying "Hello!", and the only change was he had to look around to make sure no one was attempting to pull that lever. Life went on as normal, that is, until one day he saw another car driving towards him, not past him. At first he thought it might be the General, but then he realized that it was an expensive sedan, not an U.S. Army Jeep, and so it was with some puzzlement that Nate observed a man in a suit and sunglasses step out, look directly at Nate, and grin. "Hi there, are you Nate the talking snake!" "Yes, I am" replied our serpentine hero. "Well you guess you must be; you just talked! Nate, my name is Guy Smiley, and I'm a fabulously rich and successful Hollywood agent! I've come all this way out here, and believe me, this is way out here, to tell you that you'd like to be in pictures! Motion pictures!" Nate was taken aback "I would? I didn't know... How come?" Smiley grinned, flashing his pearly whites in the hot New Mexican sun "Well Nate, being in movies is a chance to become rich and famous, after which you can live a life of comfort, ease and pleasure. We figure that although movies starring a talking snake are a little gimmicky, we can get four or five films out before the fad dies down, and we'll all be left rich and famous, yourself included. What'd'yah say? Huh?"
Well this was quite the conundrum for Nate. The idea of becoming rich and famous was immensely appealing to a snake who had never left this particular patch of desert in New Mexico, but he still had his duty to protect the lever. He began to reply. "Well you see, Mr. Smiley, I'd like to, I really would..." "So you're coming with me!" exclaimed the exuberant agent. "No, no, no! I can't can't!" cried Nate. "You see, I have to guard this lever." "What, you mean this one?" asked Guy, and he reached for the long metal shaft protruding from the sands. Nate's instincts and Army training kicked in, and he reared up and lunged for the agent's hand. Guy drew back in fear, and Nate continued, after collecting himself. "Yes, that lever. Don't touch it." "Well, what's it do?" asked the frightened agent. "I can't tell you, Top Secret, and I can't come with you either." For the first time in his life, Guy Smiley didn't know what to say. This condition did not last long, however, and soon Guy's usual overpowering demeanor returned, albeit in a sly, subdued form "Well..Has anyone ever tried to pull the lever?" Nate nodded "You did, just now." Guy paused, rolled his eyes behind his dark sunglasses, and moved along "But before me? Anyone in all these years?" Now Nate paused, and pondered. "Well...no, I guess not... Umm..." Guy began to smile broadly again "Well then they're not likely to ever pull it in the future! So, what'd'yah say?" Nate was flummoxed in the face of this logical assault and could hardly think before the words "Yes, I'd like to come with you and be rich and famous" slid off his tongue and into the air. Guy Smiley grinned, and reached out his hand to shake, but was once again rebuffed. Nate smiled knowingly and said "It's traditional to shake the tail." and extended his tail into Guy's waiting palm. They shook on it, and a few days later, now in Hollywood, Nate dipped his tail in ink and signed a contract.

Well, life in Hollywood was pretty great for Nate the snake, even if he couldn't tap-dance, and pretty soon his face was plastered on ever theater, his name on all the marquees. His first film, "Nate the Snake!" was a smash hit, with "Nate the Snake Talks Back" following close on its heels. Nate had surprisingly little trouble fitting into the Hollywood culture, surrounding himself with beautiful women and everything else you might expect from the rich and famous. "Nate the Snake and the Tiger of Antioch" was rousing, well-received adventure, but things began to go downhill with "Nate the Snake goes to the Moon". His career, based solely on the gimmick of a talking snake, was fizzling out, just as Mr. Smiley predicted, and, after "Nate the Snake meets Grover Cleveland", he couldn't get cast anymore. What's more, life in Hollywood was beginning to bore him, and Nate found himself longing for hot sad beneath his belly and small animals in his jaws. He thought fondly of the little hole in the ground he had once lived, and remembered the lever, clearly never pulled, for the Earth still existed. The life of the rich and famous is an attractive thing, and Nate still lived a life of luxury, but his duty towards the U.S. Army began to call his heart back to the desert, and soon he returned to New Mexico, leaving the glamor and pleasure of Hollywood far behind.
Now, do you know what else was going on in our country around that time, besides the Cold War? The Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, that's what! Miles and miles of limited access highways being built from city to city, from coast to coast, to aid in the evacuation of cities and the movement of troops, should ever the Red Army choose to invade our fair shores. Lo and behold, Route 40 had been built in Nate's absence, right through little patch of desert. Nate saw the snake of asphalt laying firm upon his beloved sands from a distance and began to worry, but it was not until he got closer that he saw his deepest fears confirmed. The control lever was still there, untouched all these years, but it now stood in the median of a great divided highway, cars and trucks rushing past in opposite directions on either side. Still, there was nothing to do but return to the lever, at least to see if his old hole was till there, and then maybe later Nate would take up guarding it from a safe distance.
He approached the highway cautiously, trying to find an appropriate gap in the traffic through which to slither across, when something caught his eye. Just down the road, a truck had blown a tire, and was now careening, out of control, towards the lever. Nate, it would seem, had returned just in the nick of time, just in time to witness the obliteration of the Earth. But he was not helpless, for Nate had become quite the muscular snake, after being assigned a personal trainer for his more action-packed adventures. Coiling every muscle in his long, slender body, Nate threw himself at the semi's fender, knocking the 18-wheeler just slightly to the side, and the world was saved! The lever still stood, ever untouched, and the Earth was not obliterated. Nate, however, was killed in the act.

The U.S. Army, of course, heard about the collision, and soon the General found himself standing before a familiar rod, capped with a well-crafted handle, and that age-old temptation to perform what is forbidden, just to see if it works, filled his hand. He began to reach for it, wondering if maybe it wouldn't hurt to give it just a little tug...but he was interrupted before it was too late by his Colonel, the same man who had been a Lieutenant some fifteen years before. The Colonel spoke first "You know, it's amazing he was even here; I thought he had abandoned his duty long ago. Ever seen those films of his?" The General nodded "I particularly enjoyed the one with the Tiger of Antioch, saw it with my grandson. I guess he must have still felt some desire to uphold his word." The Colonel nodded now "It's a real shame though, his life ending like this. Still, he got here just in time, it seems." The General nodded again and looked at the body of the dead snake, then the metal rod before him, then the corpse again. "Still," he said, "better Nate than lever."

Trash

2009-04-20T15:28:00.000-04:00

Over the summer, I saw "WALL-E", the latest from Pixar, about two robots who fall in love. The titular character is a robot left on Earth to clean-up after all of humanity has abandoned the planet because they have made too much trash. He falls in love with a space-probe-robot which the humans have sent to check up on the clean-up, hijinks ensue, and humanity returns to Earth has recovered enough to be livable, apparently. The credits roll, and we are treated to a really good montage of images showing both the progression of art in the new post-exodux society as well as the utopian world they create where robots work side-by-side with humans to create an earthly paradise.

There is a problem with all this, though. The solution to trash on Earth was to have little robots called WALL-Es (Waste Allocation Load-Lifter, Earth Class) drive around and compact the trash into little cubes, because at least this way the trash is stored more efficiently as opposed to strewn about all over the place. While aboard The Axiom, the big space-ark presented in the film, Wall-E (the particular character) encounters a few WALL-As (presumably Waste Allocation Load-Lifter, Axiom Class) in the bowels of the ship, where they compact the humans' waste into big cubes and throw them out the airlock in to the void of space. There is nothing different about this solution to the waste problem other than scale. Admittedly, you won't run out of space when getting rid of trash when using the universe as your dump, unless you're somehow creating matter (in which case you will eventually become very cold and die), but I don't see this as much of a solution to the problem. If anything it's worse, because now you've no hope of ever finding all that matter and somehow using it, because it is floating away into the void.

When the humans return to Earth, however, they are able to create a utopian society full of fresh air and healthy animals. The film conveniently skips any explanation of what the people did with all that trash which Wall-E and his deceased cohorts had failed to finish cleaning up, nor does it explain what they did to change their ways and not produce so much trash. Did they just launch all trash into space? If so, given the way their waste-production-levels are portrayed, Earth's gravitational pull is going to have problems in the future, and Doc Brown's suspicions will have been right. It's either that or they took to dumping all their trash into a plot hole, which I guess is what happened.

The movie can be called, obviously, a great bit of environmentalist propoganda disguised as a children's film, though the producers and writers deny that the message came before the love story, never mind if kids even enjoy a love story. It got me thinking about trash. Let's say that I play with a ping-pong-paddle for a while, one of those cheap toys where the ball is on a piece of elastic, and then I throw it out or something. It sits in a dump. Hundreds of years later, Wall-E finds it and puts it into a cube which then sits around some more.That's where all those end up, because no one really wants to play with one of those things. For those of you in-the-know, it's like Jimmy Merritt's auto-return football belt.

Now I could think that I am alright, because I disdain silly trifles like elastic-ping-pong-paddles, but that is akin to the rich young ruler saying "I have kept all these commandments from my youth", because I throw lots of things out even still. What happens to the potato-chip bag when it no longer contains potoato chips? What happens to all the paper towels and paper napkins that I use? What happens to my shampoo bottle when it is empty? What about the battery in my wireless mouse when it is all out of power? I generate a lot of waste, and most of it will sit around for a long time, a waste of atoms and a waste of space.

This is not a simple problem with a simple problem with a simple solution. I would like to eat a chocolate bar, but I don't think I can get one without throwing out the wrapper. I would like to wash my hair, but I don't know if shampoo comes in bottles which are recyclable. The shampoo is a good example, I guess. I could try to buy shampoo in recyclable bottles and then actually recycle them. I could buy ingredients in recyclable containers and then make my own shampoo. I could shave my head. Shampoo companies and stores could convert their distribution model to one in which I bring a bottle to the store and pay to have it filled with shampoo from a big shampoo vat. I like this last one the most, but that's because I don't know about the costs involved in changing to that way of doing things, and it seems more old-fashioned somehow (and I like old things).

This is going to take some effort.

The Summer of 2008, Ligonier, PA - Part 5

2009-03-25T15:48:00.000-04:00

I grew up in a Presbyterian Church, going to Sunday School every week, with a pastor practicing good, exegetical preaching. I think, in terms of theology, I had a pretty good education, although theology isn't everything. In high school, NavYouth taught me a lot, but the Christian Fellowship that met weekly at my High School is what forced me to quickly learn how to lead Bible Studies. Looking back, I can see that Joy, who led the fellowship until I was in 11th grade, would pick topics and then find related verses, and attempted to teach me to do the same, but when John, Ariell and I took over, we consciously. yet with stated reasons, switched to picking a book of the Bible and going through it, learning what it had to say. Then I went to college, and InterVarsity taught me more about how to lead a Small Group Bible Study, again by examining a passage and seeing what it has to say, though IV calls it the Inductive method. But how much of this taught me how to lead kids, ages 9-12, in Bible Study?

I started out the summer with a core belief: Kids are stupid. This isn't true, and I knew it then, though less than I do now, but it was sort of a useful thing to start out with, in terms of expectations and view of discipline. On the other hand, it was also a discouraging thought; how could kids do any sort of Bible Study that I don't think is a dumb waste of time? We can talk about how that's arrogant later. I was wrong about kids, and I was wrong about the Bible Studies.

During training, the Executive Director's wife, Sandy Meyers, came in and talked us through the Bible Studies that they'd already written for us to do with the kids: A series of various stories and passages illustrating the life of the apostle Peter, tying his redemption to the redemption of the world. They did a really good job writing them, but my previous experience inclined me to not follow their questions exactly, which worked out pretty well. But being able to rephrase questions isn't everything, and Bible Study was not without its challenges.

Most kids don't like sitting down and reading and listening and thinking and talking. This isn't really all that bad, I can't fault them for wanting to run around or throw pinecones or stare into the distance, but it can be a little frustrating. This is what I expected kids to be like, really, yet there were plenty of surprises.

One time, in discussing the fact that we all sin, I said "Nobody's perfect". As soon as I did, several of the boys launched into a Hannah Montana song featuring that line. Another time, one of the kids asked "What if God hadn't made Eve?" and another said "Then being gay would be okay!" Some of the higher-ups at Camp had definitely suggested that sometimes it helps if kids act out a Bible story. This did not go well.

I feel like this is a very undirected and messy post that doesn't communicate quite what I want. Let me give it one more shot:

There is something absolutely incredible in hearing 12 year old guys make the connection between Luke 5 and John 21, or to hear them try and dig through the layers of meaning in Peter's epistles. There is something incredibly frustrating in telling kids about Jesus only to realize they're not paying attention. Even more so is watching a kid go through his week at Camp only caring about himself, hurting those around him in a struggle for dominance, or watching a kid stop and think about how his place as de facto leader of his friends impacts some of them. I say witnessing those is a better experience because you haven't lost the connection of the Gospel, but instead of words, it's deeds. One week, after we were given the job of explicitly preaching the gospel to our cabins instead of the Camp Executive Director doing it, because the threat of a tornado had messed up the entire evening's schedule, and after it seemed like they didn't listen at all, one of the Wilderness Staff, Matt, said that all we could do was pray that they heard something true about Jesus tonight and that someday it helps. Frankly, that's how it is with all of Camp.

The Summer of 2008, Ligonier, PA - Part 4

2009-01-23T11:24:00.000-05:00

One of the best ways to entertain a whole lot of kids is to play a game.

Chubba Chubba Can Can - Form a circle around a trashcan, linking arms in some fashion. If you touch the trashcan, you are out. If you are the last person not-out, you win.
The Stick Game - Form a circle around whoever's turn it is to be "It". This person then takes a stick, of a foot or a foot and a half in length, holds it high above their head, fixes their eyes upon the tip, and spins around for a prescribed amount of time, perhaps 30 seconds, perhaps more. After spinning, they place the stick flat on the ground and jump over it. Those in the circle should do their best to safeguard the spinner from death, leaving the circle, etc. Note: It is not recommended that you play this anywhere dangerous.
HPC Roof Ball - I never figured how this worked, but it involved hitting a large ball with a foam bat onto the roof of the HPC, a small building in the center of Camp. Maybe it is like Wall Ball?
Prison Dodge Ball - Played just like regular two-team Dodgeball, except that when you get out, you go behind the other team, into the end-zone-like jail. Balls can then be thrown to you by members of your team who are still in. If you catch one of these balls, you can then use it to hit a member of the opposing team from behind, at which point you and everyone else on your team currently in the jail are back in. Note: I played this at least twice, if not three or four times, each week.

The Wide Games
Played every night after dinner on The Wide Game Field, way down the hill from the rest of camp, these may have been my favorite part of camp.

Medic - Divide the playing field into two equal parts, and place a big bucket of water in the middle. Each team has a certain number of "medics", each wearing a red pinnie and holding a plastic cup. Play just like Dodgeball, with two exceptions. First, you can not move when you have the ball. Second, when you are hit out, you sti down where you were struck. Medics get water from the bucket and the pour a cup upon someone is out, to get them back in. If a medic is struck out, they are no longer a medic when brough back into play. The last team with medics still in wins. Note: We never played this with the whole camp; we divided into Units to play this.
Gold Rush - Divide the playing field into two equal parts, with "Safe Zones" behind each area, like the end zones of a football field. In each Safe Zone there should be an empty crate in one corner, and a pile of tennis balls in the other corner. The goal of the game is to get as many tennis balls, the titular "gold," from the opposing team's pile back into your team's crate before time runs out. While in the opposing team's half of the field, you may be tagged out, at which point you sit down where you were tagged, until an untagged member of your own team tags you back into play, at which point you get a free walk back to your side. You may not be tagged while in a Safe Zone, but you can not wait in the Safe Zone forever; a time limit is set on this waiting period. You can not throw gold, it is too heavy. You can not hand off gold; it is too heavy? When you tag someone carrying gold, you must take their gold back to your team's pile, but you can only carry one piece at a time; it is too heavy.
Ninja Warfare - The most popular Wide Game. Teams are divided into four roles: Ninjas, Bombers, Blockers and Medics. Each team also has a Monarch, a role filled by a Counselor, and an Armory with Armory Attendants, again Counselors, a station whose role will become apparent. Points are scored by Bombers striking the opposing King or Queen with water balloons, tossed strictly in an underhand fashion. Blockers surround their King or Queen and attempt to stop water balloons from scoring points. Ninjas run around with Ninja Sticks, flattened plastic golf tubes, and lightly strike opposing Bombers and Ninjas below the knees. When thusly struck, Bombers must place their water balloon, if they have one, upon the ground, and Ninjas must do likewise with their Ninja Stick, then go to their Armory and be re-armed. Medics run around collecting dropped Bombs and Sticks, and taking them back to their Armory. Note: Medics are often the smallest children, but never forget that having good medics is key to any successful team. It is best to start the game with an epic charge of the two lines.
Predator - Campers are given one of three roles: Herbivore, Omnivore and Carnivore. Counselors are spread around the playing area, which in this case is the Camp area, not a wide open field, and serve various roles, such as food-stations, water-stations, humans, natural disasters and disease. Each of the three kinds of animal has some amount of food or water or whatever that they need to collect. Having always been a food-station, and only actually playing twice, I am not sure how all the details work.
Spy vs. Spy - I have no idea how to play this. It was canceled every Session except Session 6, when I was no longer at Camp. It is similar to Capture The Flag, but with frisbees, I think.
Siege - I would call this the mother of all wide games, but it is really more like the child of several, and it was brand new during Session 4 this year. It bears a lot of resemblance to Ninja Warfare, so I will start with the Armories, which are placed in the center of the field, not on the edges as in Ninja Warfare. Armories dispense Bombs as before, and also Swords, which are suspiciously identical to Ninja Sticks. Points are scored by collecting tennis balls, now called Treasure, from a crate surrounded by a rope in a circle on the ground, called the Castle, and taking them back to your Castle. Armories and Castles are both Safe Zones. The team with the most Treasures in their Castle at the end of the allotted game-time wins. Teams are divided into three roles: Knights, Infantry and Blockers. Infantry attempt to steal Treasures from their opponent's Castle and take them to their own castle, but they also can get Bombs from the Armory to lob into their opponent's Jail. When a Bomb successfully detonates in a Jail, everyone in that Jail is freed. Blockers surround the Jail, attempting to stop Bombs and thus keep the captives within. Knights run around with Swords and strike opposing Infantry and Knights below the knees, at which point the stricken player must go to the proper Jail. Knights who strike Knights must take their Sword back to the Armory, and likewise with Bombs carried by Infantry, because there are no Medics in this game. Note: This is the most complicated Wide Game. It is also the most awesome.

Most of the Wide Games only allow for simple strategy, but Siege allowed for a surprisingly effective and unforeseen tactic. Raiding parties in Ninja Warfare are always a group of Bombers, with a few Ninjas guarding, and maybe a Medic or two for cleanup. However, in Siege, there are really two kinds of Infantry, those with Bombs and those without. By placing a group of Infantry carrying Bombs at the head of a Raiding Party, great victory may be achieved. Opposing Knights strike the Bomb-carriers first, but are then forced to return those Bombs back to the Armory, allowing the rest of the Infantry to continue to the castle relatively unopposed. It works brilliantly.

Sometimes we would also play Campers vs. Counselors soccer. 30 vs. 200 is a hilarious game.

The Summer of 2008, Ligonier, PA - Part 3

2009-01-14T17:13:00.000-05:00

A humongous part of being a Summer Camp Counselor is performance. Another word for performance might be "lying" but it is hard to say that this is the bad kind. Jokes are lies too, so it all gets a bit confusing.

I remember during training that we were told that we'd probably have to do things that we're uncomfortable with, or at least make us look like idiots, but it is fun for the kids, and something about how Paul says we should be "fools for Christ", though that probably is a misappropriation of that scripture. Two of the big days involving painting your face and other tomfoolery were The Fourth of July, and also Christmas in July, but I had both of those as my day off, and I somehow escaped The Big Hair Olympics unscathed. Putting crap (aka hairspray) in my hair to make it big and hilarious freaks me out; I do not know why.

But on the other hand, my day off never fell on Big Relay days, in which the campers (in their Color Teams) would complete a ridiculous relay race, and I ended up helping out with cheering for The Pierogies during The Terrific Tater-Tot Triathalon, which wasn't the same as a Big Relay, but was related. I can't remember now. In the process of cheering for our Water-Polo team, I jumped into the pool fully clothed. This was actually a big deal for me; I am not normally willing to jump into water fully clothed, yet in that moment I did not care about how ridiculous I would look, how uncomfortable wet underwear is, or anything else, just that jumping in was important to Camp being awesome. We made a big letter P with our bodies, for "Pierogies!", and then shouted a lot about how we had made P in the Pool, which most everyone thought was hilarious. I wonder if Leeanne, the Camp Director, thought so. Afterwards, I put my blue raincoat back on, because The Pierogies color was blue, and the raincoat was the only dry thing on my body, and I thought it was hilarious.

Everyday, after lunch, someone would make the afternoon announcements, which included our daily reminder to take care of our Duty Areas, the portion of Camp that you had been instructed to patrol for litter. Everyday we would laugh, because they said "doody", which means poop. By the end of the Summer, this was funnier to the Counselors than it was to the kids. Everday, after dinner, the Indiana Jones theme would play over the Dining Hall speakers, and in would run Indiana Groans and his sidekick Marcus, always incorrectly referred to as Mucus due to his sniveling nose. They were searching for a treasure... The Legend of the Crystal Flamingo (*Gasp!*)(After hearing the words, "The Crystal Flamingo"(*Gasp!*), everyone would gasp really loudly), but the evil Queen Angora was after The Crystal Flamingo (*Gasp!*) too. The purpose of these skits was to introduce that evening's Wide Game, but they were also just a funny bit of entertainment. As near as I could tell, the kids loved gasping and loved cheering for Indy and booing Queen Angora, and so the Run-On Skits served their purpose, but one thing sticks significantly in my memory: The first skit of Session 5, all the Counselors not involved in these skits were pretty curious, because Jinks would not be playing Indy for the first time all summer; the role instead would be filled by Ian, a big guy in the Marines who would leave every now and then to do training, and Mucus would be played by Clayton. Well, Indy ran in, but for some reason announced himself as "Indiana Joe", and it just got stranger from there. At one point, Mucus announced that one of the runes on the map seemed to reference some kind of precious metal, and Indy exclaimed "Like cinnamon!" I don't think that the kids got the joke, but we Counselors were in stitches.

There's a hill on the other side of the valley and down a ways from Camp that is covered in cars, because it is a junkyard. When kids ask what it is, we tell them it is a Brittney Spears Concert, or maybe a Jonas Brothers Concert if we are feeling particularly hip. Some kids, if they're young enough, believe us. Others half-believe us, others know we are lying, and still others knew that Brittney had no concerts scheduled this summer and they probably knew exactly where the Jonas Brothers were scheduled to appear on any given day. We also tell them that if they misbehave enough, they will have to meet the Unit Chief, who is a big, mean, angry and scary man, a story the kids eventually evolved into the belief that the Unit Chief has a large axe in his car. We tell them that all the guys on staff are brothers, or at least the Wilderness guys are, and some of them really believed us. We lie a lot to the kids, but never about stuff that we think matters. Is this okay? I don't know, but I never felt like it was wrong.

We had to dance sometimes at Camp. I am pretty bad at it. Yet there I was, waving my arms around and doing some ridiculous movements to some song about some parable, because a lady going by "Rev. Kim" from New Jersey said it was a good way to teach kids about the Bible, and Camp agrees. I am not going to write much about that woman, because people that actually know her have a much better opinion of her than I who met her for a day, but I will say this: Most of the "Scripture Skits" she comes up with are pretty stupid, and I am not sure that the kids learned anything from them; they just liked seeing their counselors act dumb. The one about Jesus dying and rising again, that skit is incredible.

A lot of other things went on at Camp. On Christmas in July, Jon and Ben burst into the Dining Hall with guitars and sombreros and fake mustaches and lip synced to "Feliz Navidad". Earlier, Jon and Eric ran into the Dining Hall to the tune of Yakety Sax, then ran around chasing each other, and ripped some phonebooks in half. They also did some crazy Japanese dance. Matt Lightfoot and I performed "Be A Man" from Mulan at two or three Coffee Houses. Several times, we got to see a performance of "A Million Ways" by OK Go, and twice we saw a production of Jack Handy's "The Zombies vs The Bees". I leave you with those, via youtube. The two "A Million Ways" videos are from two different Sessions, but see how we can do the same thing over and over and it's okay because it's different kids watching. It always amuses me how "A Million Ways" is definitely not a Camp Appropriate Song, but it's okay because the dancing is the point and really fun to watch. The last one is sort of inexplicably wonderful, and it caused Pat Meyers, Camp Executive Director, to say "...What just happened?"

Photos by Maggie Frick & Brian Jackson
Videos by Julia Swieson & Heather Flowers

The Summer of 2008, Ligonier, PA - Part 2

2009-01-02T20:25:00.000-05:00

Being in charge of a bunch of kids is really tough at first. Soon you learn how to do it, when to yell and when not to, that sort of thing. But even when you feel like you have the hang of it, they will exasperate you. I'm sure any parents reading this are laughing and saying "Oh, I know all this already." My least favorite Session was Session 2, because of this very issue. I had a Tribe of pretty good kids, Session 1, and two incredible CITs to help me through that first week as a Counselor. Session 2 I had the standard one incredible CIT to help me, and that Tribe was not full of good kids. There were these two kids, Austin and Avery, and one of them was really good, and the other was not, and I can not remember which name goes to which kid. They both had blonde hair and funky names starting with an A; once I got their names confused and the not-as-well-behaved kid did not let me forget this, repeatedly trying to trick me, which is why I now can't remember which name goes to which kid. The well-behaved one was incredibly forgiving of my mistakes in name-use, but that sort of thing is very difficult to deal with no matter what. On a similar note, there was a kid who, as near as I could tell, was able to injure kids he didn't like, and then make it look like an accident. I did not love that kid the way Jesus wants me to, and I reall wish I had.

On the other hand, it was not all difficult discipline, you know. During Session 5, I taught the Guitar Elective, which was an older group of kids, aged 12-15, and maybe that is why they were easier to handle. Additional factors include the fact that they wanted to be there, learning to play guitar, and also that things were a lot less structured here. A few years ago, Eric Anderson taught a Guitar Elective, but he had a bunch of troublemaker kids, and vowed never to teach that thing again. He then went ahead and wrote down Guitar Elective as a possible elective on the Elective Proposal list, and then got me to teach it. Little did he know, it would be awesome this time. I had never really had to do this before, so I had to quickly draw up some lesson plans, based on Eric's ideas. Next, I discovered that half of the Guitar kids already knew how to play just fine and shouldn't have signed up. I ended up teaching them basic music theory with a guitar slant, an important field of knowledge that they hadn't touched at all. Helping me through all this was a Sharpie and the Camp Cardboard Recycling Pile, from which I produced several practice fret-boards, chord charts and all manner of useful introductory music and guitar diagrams. Because the structure was loose, and because they knew what was okay and what wasn't, we were able to goof off sometimes, and suddenly Electives was a joy and not a chore. By the end of the week, they were able to play "One Name", a Christian song I've only ever heard at Camp, and did so at the "A Night At The Theater" performance event. Also, Nick and Henry sang a song they wrote about the KYBO*.

Photos by Julie Lewis and Dale Weyman

*KYBO - The Bathroom. Stands for "Keep Your Bowels Open". A beautiful, terrible place.

The Summer of 2008, Ligonier, PA - Part 1

2008-12-31T01:26:00.001-05:00

Being an introductory post to this topic, this may be a little dry.

This summer, I was a Summer Camp Counselor at Ligonier Camp & Conference Center in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. It's a Christian Summer Camp of the traditional summer camp variety, if that makes any sense, and it is a pretty awesome place. I ended up there for the summer because a friend of a friend said they needed more guys, and I needed a summer job. They really did need more guys, and I am incredibly glad that I was there.

LCCC, as it is called, is actually a fairly complicated operation. There are three Camps: Summer Camp, which runs all summer; Next Level, which is more intense/extreme, exclusive to older campers, and only runs the first third of the summer; and On The Edge which is outside groups like church youth groups coming to Camp. There are Summer Camp Counselors, Next Level Counselors, Wilderness Staff who run all kinds of activities, Counselors In Training (CITs) who are High Schoolers who love Camp so much that they'll clean the toilets, Next Level CITs whose job remains a mystery to me (not that they are idle, I just don't know what they do), and a whole bunch of other staff, some of whom live and work at Camp year-round. I was a Summer Camp Counselor, and this meant that every Session I was placed in a cabin with at lesat one CIT or Co-Counselor and up 10 boys, and collectively we were a "Tribe". I was specifically a "Unit 2" Counselor, and this meant that my youngest was 8 years old and my oldest 13, but mostly they fell in the 10-12 range.

Camp is divided into "Sessions", which are either one or two week, and kids come to Camp for a Session. Sometimes kids stay for more than one Session, but that is rare. Anyways, two-week Sessions are less popular than they used to be, but a lot better than one-week Sessions, because there is just a lot more time to do awesome stuff. Camp is, as you might expect, very structured; a typical day at Camp runs something like this:

Staff Meeting in the Dining Hall. Sometimes this closed with singing, other times with a little devotion or sermon type thing from someone.
The kids come down for breakfast, having been woken by their CIT.
At the end of morning announcements, we disperse for our morning rotations, which were decided at the staff meeting. This might mean...
Bible Study!
Prison Dodgeball against at least one other Tribe. The best games involved as many Tribes as possible.
A "Skill", such as Archery, Riflery, Frisbee, Swimming, Volleyball, Hockey, Basketball, the Craft Hall, etc. When it's Skill time, counselors trade tribes and teach kids they don't know very well.
Now we would all return to the Dining Hall for lunch!
After afternoon annoucements, we all go to our Duty Areas (haha, I said doody!), which meant cleaning up some section of Camp.
Rest Hour. Oh we love Rest Hour.
If this is a one-week Session, it's time for another Skill. If this is a two-week Session, it's usually time for Electives! Electives are little classes, such as Target Sports, Guitar (which I taught), Boom Whackers & Stomp, Gospel Choir, Drama, Fitness, Swimming, etc. Sometimes in a two-week Session, it would just be extended Action Options. What does that mean? See below.
Now it's time for Action Options. Many kids believe Action Options to be Free Time, but many Counselors have called it, in jest, Calvinist Free Time. This is to say, you only think you have a choice. The kids get to choose what they're gonna do, but it's from a limited set of options, such as The Rec Deck (Foosball, Ping-Pong, Chess, & more), The Pavilion (Basketball, 4-Square), The Pool, The Hub (the Camp Store), The Craft Hall, and maybe something special, like Chubba-Chubba-Can-Can (a game which I will not explain at this time).
Dinner! Yum. Dinner also closes with the Run-On Skit, which introduces that evening's Wide Game. This year, the skits were all about Indiana Groans and the Legend of the Crystal Flamingo (Gasp!)
After Dinner, everyone descends down a massive hill to a flat field to play a Wide Game, which means a field game. Selections include: Gold Rush, Medic, Ninja Warfare, Spy vs Spy, Predator, and (new this year) Siege. I do not have the space to explain them here.
After Wide Game, there's a little bit of downtime, which means a trip to the KYBO ("Keep Your Bowels Open", aka the bathroom).
Then it's time for Club, which is a lot of loud music (generally about Jesus), jumping up and down, hand motions, maybe a Silly Skit, maybe a Scripture Skit, or maybe Club Talk.
Bed. Finally. Well no, first, evening devotions. One time I was able to give a little talk/sermon in which I connected Judges 3 to 1st Corinthians 12. Look them up.
Now the kids would go to sleep, or else get in trouble and lose some priveleges, and we Counselors would sit out on the decks and chat quietly, or go to the KYBO and brush our teeth or take a shower.
Bed. Finally.

Now, not every day was like this, but that's a standard day. I woke up at 6:30, cause Staff meeting was 7:30 and I am really, really slow in the mornings, and I'd get to bed around 10 or 11 I think. It's not like it's easy to stay up when there are hardly any lights around.

I will be writing a lot more about this, that's for sure.

I don't do what I want to do

2008-12-14T00:45:00.000-05:00

I have had a lot of schoolwork to do this past semester, and a lot of extracurricular activities to accomplish as well. Some of these extracurricular activities are things like leading a Bible Study, and that involves Jesus, and I try and put Jesus-related-things at the top, never mind the confusion of what is Jesus-related, what isn't, and how everything really is and ought to be. This has, however, left me with even less time to do my schoolwork than I normally have. To make matters worse, I have frequently found myself lazing about, talking to people, playing computer games or doing other things, instead of doing my schoolwork, which really does need doing. My Biology TA and my Russian Professor can attest to this, as I have not turned in a whole lot of homework in those classes. One of my friends has been constantly talking about terrible this semester has been, and I am apt to agree, at least on this front.

I said that I try to put Jesus-things at the top. Yet at the same time, how often do I read the Bible? Let me explain, for those not in the know. Christians think that regularly reading the Scriptures is a good idea. We think that "all Scripture is God-breathed, and thus useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness." God says to Joshua, after Moses dies, that he should meditate on "The Book of the Law" day and night, and it should never depart from his mouth, and he should be careful to do what it says, so that he will be prosperous and successful. Jesus says we should build our lives on the foundations of his teachings, like a wise man builds his house on firm rock, not on shifting sands. We take things like this to mean that reading the Scriptures regularly is a good idea.

The thing is, I don't read the Scriptures regularly, but I say that I want to. The same goes for all kinds of things. I say that Jesus is right, I should pray, fast and give to the poor, but I only do one of those with any frequency, and that's because praying is easy. (If praying is easy, am I doing it wrong?) These are all very concrete things, almost a check-list. Let me go on, then. I'm supposed to love God above all things, then love everyone else, even my enemies. I agree that this is how I should live, yet my deeds do not match up with this. There are definitely people in this world that I dislike, there are even people I like to some extent that I don't treat the way I should. I look to other things for satisfaction; I don't find satisfaction in God. I don't live the way he wants me to live, I don't love the things he loves, and in general I find that I do not love God with all my heart, soul and might. But I say that I believe that I should.

Do I not believe, then? They say that actions speak louder than words, and I think it's true that your actions betray what you truly believe. If you ever find a church that says all the right things, then acts in a lot of wrong ways, you might want to think about leaving. They might say the right words, but that doesn't mean they believe the right things in their hearts. The problem here is that sometimes I do the right thing, so it is not as if I can claim to clearly be believing the opposite of what the Bible teaches. The very fact that I care what the Scriptures teach might be a good indication that my belief is not all a lie, a sham to trick Christian girls into dating me or something.

I used to only think about Romans 7 in the context of lust and, in particular, pornography. This is understandable, because that is a big issue to try and think about and deal with, and one that sometimes seems to have no hope. But if that is all I was applying it to, I was missing out on a lot. The Apostle Paul is wordy, as usual, but here he's talking about how Christ purifies our hearts, yet we still sin. In verses 15 through 23, he says the following.

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

Well now. That is pretty much a description of the problem I outlined above. As much as it seems a little thing, I really do think it is wrong of me to not get the work done that I'm supposed to get done. Sloth is one of the traditional seven capital sins, and for good reason; it's easy. Furthermore, it's easier in today's society, as I can attest. Paul, however, does not leave the issue here. He, and I read this as a cry of desperation, says:

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

That is quite a statement, I think, calling himself "wretched", but I also think it's accurate. To find yourself doing the things you do not want to do and to find yourself not doing the things you want to do is pretty shocking, worrisome, gut-wrenching, etc. It feels awful.

One time, I talked with my friend Alex about this. I don't remember why, the context, or anything like that. I think we were in his car, maybe. Either way, we did talk about how long Paul goes on and on about his problem, the problem of sin, yet doesn't provide a very lengthy explanation of the solution. He says one sentence in answer to his cry for deliverance, then moves on. Alex said that Paul does this because the solution is very simple, at least in the basics, the part that you really need to know. So who will save me and you and Paul from this body of death?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

That is a great comfort, and it's true too.

Home

2008-07-08T21:16:00.000-04:00

Although my family lived in two different apartments for the first two years of my life, and although we lived in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England from when I was 3 til I was 6, the earliest firm memories that I have associated with the term "home" are of our row house in Woodlawn, Maryland, about 3 blocks away from the official city, where we lived for a little before England and then afterwards until October 2002, my 10th grade year. Despite being residents of Woodlawn, though maybe the Post Office was confused about this, we always wished we lived at least in Catonsville just to the south, home of a lower crime rate, or, better yet, Howard County, the next county to the south-west of Baltimore County. Howard County contains Ellicott City and Elkridge, where my Mom lived during her High School years, and thus my gradnmother's house; as well as Columbia Presbyterian Church, in Columbia, and thus the majority of our closest friends. We tried to move away for years, but it never really came together until 2002, when we ended up in a single-family home in the southern end of Columbia, right in the very midst of some of the people we had been friends with since before even England. Despite having wanted to leave Woodlawn for years, I distinctly remember sitting alone in the tiny room I had called my own since sometime in middle school, still painted a pastel yellow from when my sister, Elizabeth, picked its color at a very young age, and, on the day of our moving out, crying.

After we moved out, we lived with our friends, the Springs, for a week, waiting for the contract on our new house to be finalized. This sticks in my mind as an incredible act of love and hospitality, allowing a second family to share their home with them for a week, and a really good example of how Christians ought to treat each other.

Then we moved to Columbia, as I said, where my family still resides to this day. This was where I first became really aware of my issues with comfort in new situations. When I first arrived at Atholton High School, as well as at my simultaneous introduction to NavYouth, a Christian youth group and High School ministry of The Navigators in Columbia, I was very quiet. Three years later, by the time of my High School Graduation, this was not nearly as true, and I was generally a much friendlier person for it. I guess it took a long time, but I had become a lot more comfortable in Columbia.

In August of 2005, I became a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), living in Patapsco Hall, among a lot of people I had never met. Though incredibly near to the familiar places of my youth, it was still assuredly a place I had never been before, and I found myself, for the most part, just as quiet and seemingly unfriendly as when I moved to Columbia. It took me a year and a half, or thereabouts, to find myself comfortable, talkative and at home at UMBC.

This summer, I am a Summer Camp Counselor at Ligonier Camp & Conference Center, in the Ligonier Valley, 40 miles east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I remember, just 5 weeks ago, moving into a cabin in a place I had never been before, among people I had never met, and being very quiet. This past Saturday, at the Staff Say-So, a time, after the kids leave, for the Staff to stand up and tell stories about the past week, I told about a revelation I had had concerning my attitude and the nature of what we do here, and a lot of other things. I had this realization while sitting on the toilet, so I made sure to tell them this, and that that place is where I get some of my best thinking done. This was the Next Level Counselor's final week here, Next Level being a semi-simultaneous camp run out of the Lodge, and later someone told me that that was how the Next Level crew would remember me, as talking about the toilet. Though I'm not sure this is true, as I hung out with them several times, I realized I wouldn't be disappointed if this turned out to be the case. My standing and telling them story in such as fashion is a pretty good indicator that I am comfortable here. But unlike UMBC, I am not sure I would call this "home".

Living as a Counselor here means that I'll only have slept in Columbia, Maryland for 12 nights this summer, if my count is accurate. Though many of my possessions still reside there, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of it as home. The dishes aren't even kept in the same places anymore, making it incredibly frustrating any time I am asked to help unstack the dishwasher. When the few other staff from Maryland ask where I'm from, I tell them that I grew up in Woodlawn, my parents live in Columbia, and I live at UMBC most of the year. Sometimes I feel like a nomad, like Abraham, other times I feel a permanent resident of a college campus. The latter is clearly not true, as my approaching graduation will no doubt reveal. American Christians have been known to affix trite bumper stickers to their cars, warning you that the rapture will severely impede traffic, or that their home is a mysterious place called "heaven". While I think the theology behind the first is wrong, the second is a lot truer. We, as Christians, are told to live as foreigners in this world, in it but not of it, something like Israel those 40 years in the Wilderness. While I suspect the more accurate term for our proper dwelling place is the New Jerusalem, while will descend from Heaven (the third one, if we go with the old and wrong understanding of celestial spheres which Paul held) onto the New Earth, this is not of much importance. Why is this place, which I suppose Jesus is preparing right now, and has been for some time it would seem, to which I have never been, my home?

One of the reasons I am able to think of UMBC as home is because it contains a sizable collection of people I know well and love, who have become something like family to me. I have only known many of them for two years, three at the most, yet it feels like much longer, and I will be grieved at the parting of our ways.

That which chiefly holds me back from calling Ligonier home is familiarity. Despite being on staff for several weeks, there are many places on Property to which I have never been, and simply so many things which I do not know. Maybe this will change by the end of the summer, and though I can walk around to many places in teh dark of night, it still carries that air of unfamiliarity which repulses the name "home".

The issue of why it becomes increasingly difficult to refer to the home of my parents as "home" is a tricky one. Are there not people whom I know well and love? There are: my family. Is it not familiar? Admittedly less and less so, as the example of my mother rearranging the kitchen cabinets demonstrates, but it is still no foreign land. I think, instead, that the difficulty arises in the amount of time I actually live there each year, a decreasing number to be sure, and the amount of time that I anticipate living there in the future. A few days after Camp but before School, Winter Break, Spring Break, and then I graduate, shortly after which I really ought to depart.

These three, then, may reveal just how I can call heaven (or the New Jerusalem, rather) my home. The place will be packed full of those whom I know and love, for we are all grafted into one vine, adopted into one family, heirs of the King, our Great and Glorious Father. It will be familiar, I believe, as God will make all things new, the world free of sin, how it ought to be. Lastly, the days we will live there are countless, and not just because it becomes difficult to count days when there is no more night, thanks to the light of the Lord God dwelling among his people.

Let me tell you, "home" is a tricky and meaningful term.

I don't know anything

2008-04-27T18:40:00.000-04:00

At the risk of sounding a little bit like Donald Rumsfeld, I want to tell you about the things I knew that I don't know, the things I thought I knew but I don't know, and how I don't know anything.

There's a lot of things that I definitely don't know. I don't know what grades I'm going to get this semester. I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. I don't know who I'm going to marry, and that assumes that I will. But worse than all those things, I don't know how to make myself do what's right, and that assumes I know what the right thing to do is.

When I was a child, I would not eat red fruit, whether or not I had actually ever tried them. A few weeks ago, I had some strawberries, and they were pretty good. I used to be confident that I was really smart, and really good at Computer Science on top of that. I have a GPA of 3.28, which, while not bad, is less than I used to have, I assure you, and I rarely get As in CompSci classes anymore. It's hard for me to admit, but I thought that I had a lot of things all figured out, that I knew what to do, when to do things, and all about myself and the people around me. When I am alone, walking to and from various places, or on the toilet, or in the shower, I will frequently imagine future conversations I might have with my friends, even predicting what they will say and coming up with responses, so that I can come across as eloquent and clever when we do talk. Sometimes I'm right about what they'll say, I won't deny it, but I'm never all right and my predictions are pretty weak to begin with, never mind that it says some pretty weird and potentially bad things about myself that I do this. I like to think that I have my closest friends all figured out, and I put the people I don't know as well into neat little categories, stereotypes, which strongly affect how I think about them and how I treat them. Not only do I suspect that this is morally wrong, but it doesn't work. I don't know everything about the people I think I've got all figured out, and they constantly surprise me with revelations about themselves, and I am surprised even more so with the process of opening my eyes to the people that I've filed away into stereotypes. I went for a long time not realizing this, and that's the way it goes with lots of the things I do that are wrong, and even some of the things I think are right; I don't know that they're wrong. I don't know all of what is right or wrong, all of what is good or bad, or anything even close to that. I thought I knew, but I've become convinced that, when you get down to it, I don't know anything.

I have, for better or for worse, in my mind, an idea of what is my ideal future. In my ideal future, I am married to some beautiful woman with whom I make several babies, and I suppose this is all well and good in the eyes of the Noahic covenant. Most importantly, however, is that I own a farm, most likely a potato farm. A discerning mind will guess that my ideal future is me in the idealized world of my ancestors, the old Ireland which is apparently after we've gotten potatoes from America, but before there was a Pototao Famine, and definitely not the Ireland that existed with high infant mortality rates and low life expectancy. I'm sure it's not entirely Ireland, I really like Maryland, but that's the image that I've got in my head. I also have ideas about other ideal versions of things. I think that if the history of the Church had gone how it should have, there would have been no Catholic-Protestant schism in the 1500s, and there would have been no East-West schism in 1054, and we would have a parish system with bishops and all, with a whole bunch of patriarchs, and every Sunday I would go for a liturgy that had a time for prayer where everyone in the church prayed all at once, out loud, for awhile. But why stop there, with church history? Why not just dictate how the entirety of history should have gone? If I had my way, sin would have never entered the world.

Can I say that that's wrong? Sin is wrong, and the cause of many evils. Wishing that it had never happened, how can that be wrong? But on the other hand, God is sovereign over everything, not just over the here and the now, but He has been sovereign since before there was time. He allowed sin to happen, and none of his deeds are ever wrong. A paradox? Maybe. I don't really understand why God allows bad things to happen, though I've heard some people say that it's so that he can fully demonstrate his love through the death and resurrection of Christ, and that starts to make some sense, sometimes.

I am not going to own a farm in the future, or at least it is not looking likely. We Christians talk a lot about what God is calling us to do, even if some of us are really terrible at listening. Terrible at listening though I may be, I don't think God is calling me to own a farm and all the rest of that idyllic, agrarian fantasy. I do not know what he is calling me to do with my life, though I wish he would tell me, but I don't think I'm called to own a farm. Now, I could go off on my desires and do all the right things that would result in me owning a farm, but that's not the point. People in the Church did what they wanted and look where we've ended up. Adam did what he wanted, and look where that's gotten all of us. My desires, though sometimes rooted in good motivations, do not always yield good results. Wanting to provide food for others is good, but that doesn't necessarily imply that I should go own a farm. I hope you don't think I'm saying that all my desires are good, that all my motivations are good. I'm only realizing that even the good motivations don't always yield good actions.

This has gotten way too long, so I'm going to wrap it up. What I've been trying to get across is this: I do not always know what is the right thing to do. I am fully capable of tricking myself into using good reasons and intentions to support wrong actions. I don't like this, because I still want to do the right thing, but this implies that someone has got to tell me what to do, and I don't want that at all. This is where those bad motivations start becoming really apparent. I don't want to listen to God, because I want to do whatever the heck I want to do. It's my life, who is He to tell me how to live it? This is starting to sound awfully familiar, like one of those sermons where they talk about why Adam and Eve ate the fruit, or like C.S. Lewis's Perelandra, which is the same thing. I think that doing what is right is really important, and not doing what is wrong equally so, so the idea that I don't know how to do that is frightening. If I don't even know how to do that, I don't know anything! Thanks be to God, then, that He is willing to tell me. The next trick is remember to ask Him, and then listen, but that is not something I am prepared to write about yet.

Transportation in Ukraine, summer 2006

2008-03-22T18:39:00.001-04:00

We went a lot of places while we were in Ukraine, and this meant we did a lot of traveling. Some of our means of transportation were quite standard and expected, others were not.

In order to get to Ukraine, we flew, with Lufthansa, by way of Frankfurt. Upon reaching the airport, we got into a large blue van owned by Randy. When going to and from Vasiliy's house and the rest of the city, we generally took the Metro, though one time Valentin drove. We also used the buses once, and the trams as well. In formerly-Soviet countries, these have these awesome trams that roll around on tracks, getting power from overhead lines. You get onboard, and a lady sells you a ticket. You then have to take your ticket and stamp it in a little metal stamping device, so that the ticket is known to have been used. They also have electric buses that run off of the tram-power-lines, while still retaining the ability to change lanes. We took a little boat tour of the Dnieper, so that Dick could sit down and have a meeting with a friend, and, strangest of all, we took a little trip on the funicular. I am pretty sure that this last one was just so that we could have the experience, not that we really needed to. Dick does that kind of thing.

I have already written plenty about the trains that we took, so I won't talk any more about those. Once we got to Sevastopol, Kostia met us at the train station, to take us all to the Camp. How did he do this? With a UPS truck, of course! Big, brown, and possessing plenty of room for people and their baggage, this truck took us to and from the train station, to and from church, and into Sevastopol to see the city on Sunday as well. It was hot, it was sweaty, but it was also pretty cool to be able to say "I am riding in the back of a UPS truck!" I have no idea where Kostia got it, or why he had it, but it had a German slogan on the side. The return trip from Camp was way more crowded, because we had a bunch Ukrainians with us, and our ridiculous American baggage seemed to have grown. It was incredible.

To get to camp, you had to get to the beach. To get to the beach, you have to take a ferry from Balaklava. There are two ferries, owned by the same people, named Jupiter (well, Yupiter) and Mercury. They're pretty good ferries, I thought, and they weren't usually too crowded. I haven't talked nearly enough about Kostia, so I will tell you that every day he would hike/run over the mountains into town, buy lots of food, and then bring it all back on the ferry. It was a lot of food to keep all us campers fed. The ferry was not the only boat we used, as we did get a tour of the Submarine Base Tunnel in a little motorboat. It was a pretty small boat though, and it almost doesn't count.

There are only two other forms of transportation, besides the obvious use of our legs, that I can think of. To get from Balaklava to Yalta to see the Botanical Garden, we took what they call a Marshrutka, a mini-bus taxi. On our way back from Ukraine, we had a several hour lay-over in Munich, where we hung out with Paul's friend Dominik, ate delicious sausage, and saw a big Catholic cathedral with lots of statues and no paint but white. To get from the airport into the city, we took the S-Bahn, which turned out to be a very nice commuter train/subway. Once, while waiting at the station, a lady came up to Adam and asked him about why the #6 train was delayed. Despite his half-forgotten knowledge of German, Adam was unable to answer. Thankfully, Dominik and Dick were there to inform the lady both that Adam did not speak German, and the reasons for the delay, which had just been announced.

This is what we looked like after traveling. I mean, really, it's after a long hike, but we felt like this a lot. Except Paul, who is almost never too tired to not be able to do that thing in photos. Oh man.

I think this might be the end of my Ukraine posts. I don't have much else to say about it, that I can think of, and the videos we took, upon further inspection, are not likely to be of much interest to the casual reader. I hope these were good posts, and I might be writing more in the future, about other things, but only if I feel like it.

Lviv and church art, Ukraine, summer 2006

2008-03-20T12:52:00.000-04:00

Ukraine is a country with a weird problem: Russians. No that's not fair. Ukraine is a country split down the middle. In its eastern half, everyone speaks Russian. In its western half, everyone speaks Ukrainian. Should the country be European or Russian? It's a big question, as exhibited by that famous Orange Revolution.

The city of Lviv has been known as L'vov, Lwow, and Lemberg in its history, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and German. Lviv is the big city in the far west of the country, having even been part of Poland before the Second World War, and is sometimes called Ukraine's Western Capital. Everyone speaks Ukrainian there, which was strange for us, because Russian is quite commonplace in Kyiv, is the overly dominant language in Crimea, was the defacto common language of the Camp, and is the one of the two languages that Dick speaks. When Yulian gave sermons at Camp, Dick had to guess at the meaning, because Yulian is from Lviv and only speaks Ukrainian.

We went to Lviv for a day, by train of course, with Vera and Tanya, who had never been to Lviv themselves. Yulian met us at the train station, later rendezvousing with his mother, who then proceeded to give us a tour of the city. Yulian's mom was really happy to have foreigners to take around and show her city to, and was probably more excited about the whole thing than we were at some points. Her narration was delivered in Ukrainian, and Yulian would translate into broken-English, or Dick would guess at the meaning, or maybe Vera and Tanya would do some Ukrainian->Russian translation and then Dick would translate to English. I'm not sure which of those methods took place, but we got the basic information well enough.

Yulian's mom took us to a lot of churches. I mean, yes, we saw the Opera House, and, for some unknown reason, a pharmaceutical museum, but I mostly just remember churches. Ukraine is, as you might expect, mostly East Orthodox. They actually have two rival churches, one loyal to the Moscow Patriarch, and one not, and it only gets messier from there. Yulian himself is a deacon, at least I think that's what you might call a priest-in-training, in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. As best as I understand, the "Ukrainian" means that it's centered in Ukraine, and "Greek Catholic" means that it's in full communion with the Pope (You know, the Bishop of Rome) but with Eastern style rites, not Western like most Catholic Churches. It's quite the mouthful of a name.

Anyway, the first church we saw was St. George's Cathedral, a very important church in the UGCC (as Wikipedia so handily abbreviates it). Architecturally and art-wise it was a bit much for my tastes, with a lot of gold and stuff, but that's often the way it goes over there. Inside they have one of the few official copies of the Shroud of Turin, so that was cool to see, whether or not I'm convinced on the Shroud's authenticity, which I sometimes am. I do not know what order we saw things after that. We saw the exterior of another big Catholic church, which had a plaque in Latin, Ukrainian and Polish commemorating when Pope John Paul II came and visited. We went to an Orthodox church which, instead of having lots of fancy carvings, had been painted to look as if it had fancy carvings everywhere. We also saw an Armenian church, whose murals, while all over every possible surface as in other churches, were noticeably darker than others we had seen. Adding to this the Protestant church in Kyiv, the Lavra, St. Andrew's, the really old church in Kyiv, the little chapel on the mountainside on the way back from Yalta, the big one in Sevastopol by the Roman ruins of Chersonesos and the Protestant church meeting in the former-Soviet-school in Sevastopol, and I think it can be said that we saw a lot of churches in Ukraine.

Orthodox churches have a lot of thin candles on circular wooden holders, and people light these as they pray. Sometimes they require pants for men, skirts and head-coverings for women, and sometimes they don't. They seem to understand that tourists want to see these things, so they tolerate us, but they don't let you take pictures. This makes me sad, even though I guess I understand, because the art is beautiful. Adding the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, and a monastery near Melnik (but not the really famous one), both in Bulgaria, and I've seen quite a lot of Eastern-style Church Art, and I am thankful. This is an art that never went through the Renaissance, so even though the artists, at least at the rebuilt and restored cathedrals, probably know how to paint photo-realistically, they do not. Common things to paint included the Trinity, the Apostles, the Gospel Writers, Archangels, and Seraphim. God the Father was depicted as a stern looking old man with a tremendous white beard. God the Son, Jesus, sometimes had his cross with him. God the Spirit was generally shown as a dove, I think. Sometimes the gospel writers had their traditional symbols with them, sometimes not. My favorite was the Seraphim, shown as six magnificent wings, two stretched upwards, two inward over the center of the hidden figure, two downwards over the hidden feet, and sometimes a face might peek out. I am sure I am not going to be able to convey this fully, but entering a church and seeing all these things painted on the ceiling and walls is incredible. I am definitely against the veneration of icons, because I fail to grasp how that isn't worship and thus idolatry, but at the same time I can see how the beauty of these paintings surrounding you reminds you of the beauty and majesty of God.

Sleeping on trains in Ukraine, summer 2006

2008-03-19T01:36:00.000-04:00

While in Ukraine, we traveled by train 4 times. We went from Kyiv to Sevastopol, back to Kyiv a week later, from Kyiv to Lviv the next night, and back again the night after that. There might have been a night in between returning from Sevastopol and going to Lviv, a night spent sleeping on wood floors, but I am not so sure. Either way, we took a lot of train journeys, for a man who had never done so before in his memory.

The thing about train journeys that take anything more than a few hours in Ukraine is that they like to do them with sleep. The way Dick tells it, it is their custom to get on a train, go to bed, wake up, get off at their destination, and that's the way they like it. I can't say it's a bad idea, honestly, in terms of efficiency and making sense, but trains are not the easiest place to sleep, I found.

In first class, you have two beds per cabin. In second class, you have four beds per cabin. In third class, which Dick called "karnye platz", you have a whole lot of beds in a train-car and no security. He stressed that we, as foreigners, were not even considering traveling that way, period. We were okay with this. There were 9 of us, so sleeping arrangements were as follows: Randy, Nick, Kendyl & Nicole in one cabin; Linda, Adam, Paul & myself in the next; and Dick with some Ukrainians which we didn't know in the next. For the Lviv trip, we had Vera and Tanya with us, instead of Randy & Nick, so that was an easy sleeping situation to work out.

Cabins are small affairs, as you might expect, but you can cram a lot of people into those things. Thus, we were quite capable of fitting as many of ourselves all into one room if we really wanted to, and there was much Uno playing. Nick, who I guess was probably somewhere in elementary or middle school, I really can't tell, hung out with us, and Randy, Dick & Linda sat in the other room and talked about whatever it is that they wanted to talk about.

Food is available on the train, of course. On one of the trips, we ate dinner in a Dining Car, and I don't really remember what we ate, but it was okay. There was beer to be had, though I didn't have any. Randy, a Southern Baptist, definitely did not have any. I remember Dick telling us that he wasn't going to drink if Randy was in the room, out of respect, like Paul says to do with meat and vegetarians. So he waited til Randy left the room to order beers. But then Randy came back later, and Dick offered him some. So I have never quite known what to think about that. Also readily available was tea, and we had a lot of that. But the funniest thing I remember is eating breakfast. It's not like they had breakfast for us. But along the way to Sevastopol, there are a lot of stops to make at little train stations in other towns and cities. So what you do, after you're all woke up, is you get off the train real quick, buy some food from one of the vendors waiting to sell you your breakfast, and then jump back on. We had corn on the cob and some kind of melon for breakfast.

I know some of you are going to give me grief for talking about toilets, but it's an integral and unique part of the train experience. I'll try and make this quick. When you hit the flush lever, the metal bottom of the toilet opens up on a hinge, and your excrement falls away onto the tracks. Yes, that's right, the tracks. You can hold the lever down, thus holding the bottom of the toilet open, and look down and watch the tracks and gravel rushing by beneath the train. They lock the bathroom for some distance on either side of visiting a station, to prevent you from making the area around the station smell really awful.

Once night comes, you want to sleep, because you've walking all over a foreign country and not sleeping in comfortable places. So you fold down the top beds, put the sheets on all 4, and go to sleep. The thing is, it's really not all that easy to sleep, even then, at least not for me. These are not quiet, smooth trains. They're pretty bumpy, and go thunkity-thunk a lot, and I really did have a hard time getting some shut-eye. On the other hand, we were all pretty tired.

I never did mention how dishes were washed at camp, but it wasn't entirely satisfactory. It was just a series of tubs of water, with varying strengths of bleach in each, and some scrubbing. Maybe this worked okay for the first half of the dishes, but by the end of a meal that water was pretty disgusting and not very cleansing. The women-folk brought their own personal dishes, which they washed with their own cleaning cloths, but we men ate from the communal pile of bowls. We men also all got sick. Paul got sick in his stomach while at camp, Dick was sick in his bowels when we got back home, I was sick in my bowels (Yes, I mean more than is normal) when we got back home, but Adam was sick in his stomach on the train. I can not remember which train ride this was, probably the one back from Sevastopol. It is not easy to sleep when one of your friends keeps going to the bathroom to vomit, and then gets a little bit on your pillow. Just a really tiny bit though. I was so tired that I looked at it, noted that I should not move my head in that direction, and closed my eyes.

I want to close by just making sure that I say that I really liked the whole Train Experience. I would recommend it. I would do it again. But it wasn't easy or comfortable.

That is actually a remarkably accurate and good description for the entire Ukraine trip.

Mostly about Kyiv, summer 2006

2008-03-17T12:36:00.001-04:00

I didn't finish telling you about Ukraine, you know. But I'm going to start at the beginning this time.

I can't remember when it was that we started hearing that there would be another trip to Ukraine, but I knew I wanted to go. So when I was asked if I wanted to go, I admit, the decision wasn't very hard to make. I prayed about it, sure, but it was one of those situations where you pray about it already hoping he doesn't say No. I'm not sure that that's a good thing, but I don't know.

We flew out of Dulles to Frankfurt, where we had coffee. I had never had coffee before, this was dark German stuff, and I didn't particularly like it. But we needed the caffeine to keep us going. We then flew from Frankfurt to Kyiv, where we were picked up at the Airport by Randy, a Baptist missionary, and Valentin, one of the MCF (Military Christian Fellowship) guys. Valentin is Vasiliy's assistant, and Vasiliy is the president of the MCF or something. They took us all to Vasiliy's apartment, I think, where Vera and Tanya, Vasiliy's secretaries, fed us. Oooh that was good food. There was borshch, and some sort of dish made from cabbage. Before Ukraine, I didn't like cabbage, but that food changed my mind completely. Then Kendyl and Nicole went off to Randy and Helen's house, Helen being Randy's wife, where they would be sleeping. Dick and Linda either slept on Vasiliy's bed, or on some sort of guest bed, and Paul, Adam and I had the floor of the living room, or whatever you call the room with lots of books, a sofa and chairs, and the television. I didn't bring any kind of ground-pad or air-mattress, so it was just my very thin sleeping bag between me and the hardwood floor, but I found that I am quite capable of sleeping like that, even if I do ache in the morning. This was particularly good news, given how I'd sleep in Crimea.

We mostly just walked around Kyiv for the next day or two. I'm pretty sure we did some tourism that first day also, come to think of it. We saw Independence Square, where the Orange Revolution took place, which was pretty cool to get to see. Unsurprisingly, there were political speeches being made, trying to convince people to vote for this candidate or another. We saw St. Andrew's Church, which, to be quite honest, is pretty ugly and not worth the effort that it takes to get all the way up the hill. We saw a very, very old church building, which may or not be a reconstruction, and was a lot better looking than St. Andrew's. Unfortunately, I don't think we went inside either of those. At some point, it all begins to run together with what we did after camp, so I might as well tell you about that too.

After camp, we returned to Kyiv, and at some point were given a tour of the Lavra, a very old and very large monastery and cathedral. Some of the art in this place was incredible, like the things we saw in Lviv, which I haven't talked about yet. Apparently the Lavra, or at least parts of it, were torn down by the Soviets, but it's all been rebuilt in the short amount of time since then. Once you get inside, every wall and ceiling is painted, great big paintings of God, Angels, Apostles, Saints, etc. When I was in Sofia, Bulgaria, back in 2004, in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, I was impressed, but on this trip to Ukraine I really got to see a lot of this amazing art hidden within Orthodox churches. I will talk a lot more about this later, I assure you.

Now, Vasiliy's house is not in the center of the city. It's farther out, but Kyiv has a very useful metro system, so every day that we were just wandering around Kyiv, we'd get on at the Poziaky station, on the Green Line, and head into the city. You buy little tokens at a booth, a job always handled by Dick or one of the Ukrainians, and that token admits you to the Metro, one flat rate for no matter how far you're riding. You then put the token into a little turnstile, which is always open, but will snap shut on you if you try and go through without putting a token in. In rush hour, this part was pretty awful, with masses of people all packing through these little gates. That's where Dick got his wallet stolen. Then, at least at all the underground stations, you get on an escalator and descend. Some of these stations are incredibly deep, deeper than the stop near the Zoo on the DC Metro, so the escalator ride can take a very long time, passing by plenty of advertisements as you go. The train cars are blue, and don't necessarily stay in the station very long, but we never lost anyone, though I did have to push Kendyl in once, as she hesitated seeing how packed the car was. I should mention now that while in the metro system, and really you should stick by this rule as much as possible in Kyiv, you don't smile. Just don't do it. You probably look like an American, or at least a foreigner, already, and smiling is only going to make it worse. Stand still on the metro, don't really look at anyone, and make sure you look disinterested and stern at all times. This is a difficult feat, but I got pretty good at it. You just have to think about people dying. Paul was okay at it, but he would laugh when he looked at Adam. Adam was good at it, but Dick said that he still didn't look right, because his eyes "danced." Kendyl and Nicole were pretty bad at this, and kept giggling. I am pretty sure Dick and Linda were pros at it, certainly Dick. I never checked.

I often found myself taking the rear-guard position for these metro journeys, with Dick leading of course. I've never decided if this is because I knew that it needed to be done, or because it eased my nerves knowing that I could be sure that no one was getting lost behind me. Probably a little bit of both.

We ate at a restaurant called "Puzata Hata", which means "Fat House", several times. It's one of those places that is half way between fast-food and slow-food, and it advertises itself as being traditional Ukrainian food. Their borshch wasn't very good, but the rest was fine. McDonald's happened once, of course, because it was convenient, and there were a few other places we ate at that I've forgotten the names of.

There was one Sunday that we were in Kyiv, and we visited an English-speaking church in the city, that met in some other church's sanctuary when it wasn't being used. It was tiny, and pretty boring, I thought. But it gave foreigners of all kinds a place where they could worship in some sort of common language, so it's good that it exists. The church we visited in Sevastopol seemed a lot more alive, but I couldn't understand a word they said.

Leaving Kyiv to come back to Maryland was quite the trick. We had to be at the airport at 4am or 5am or some equally awful hour. But it was okay, because there was Randy with his van, despite the hour, and there was Valentin to help us, I think, but maybe not because his wife had just given birth, and we all got out the door just fine. Without their help, we couldn't have gotten anywhere, ever, I suspect. Valentin, in particular, would help us carry bags wherever we went, helped us get to the pharmacy to buy some sudafed, drove us here and there a few times, and more. We were very thankful for him.

On the way back from Ukraine, we had a long layover in Munich, which I'll talk about some other time. Eventually we got back to Dulles though, and then I slept a lot.

Camping in Ukraine, 2006

2008-03-16T23:09:00.000-04:00

Let me tell you about Ukraine.

I went to Ukraine in the summer of 2006, which is almost two years ago, and I was only there for two weeks, but I talk about it all the time like it was yesterday, and like I was there for months and months. It was fun, because I got to read signs in Cyrillic all the time, and I love that.

We stayed in Kyiv, the capital, for a few days; camped near Balaklava, in Crimea, for a week; only one day in Lviv, sleeping on the train on both nights for that visit; and little times in Kyiv to fill in the gaps. We also spent five hours in Munich, but that isn't much. The camp in Crimea was the main thing, so I'll explain about that.

Every summer, the Ukrainian Military Christian Fellowship has a camp in Crimea, where whole families, whose fathers are in the Army (I'm not sure how their armed forces are structured, really) and are usually Christians, come and live in tents. Most people live there for a few weeks, some for the whole summer; we were only there for a week. This guy at my church, Dick Barnes, is heavily involved with ACCTS, which co-ordinates Military Christian Fellowships, and does a lot of work with the Ukrainians. He took his wife, Linda; one of the college guys from church, Ryan; and Ryan's cousin to the camp one year. And so in 2006, he took his wife and five of us. My friend Adam and I lived in my little two-man tent along with all our bags and my guitar, and it was smelly. This was either the fault of my laundry, my guitar case, or both.

Every morning at the camp, we'd wake up to the sound of someone chopping wood, because the wood-chopping area was right next to our tent. The idea that Kostia is swinging a large axe with an insecure handle is one heck of a way to wake up, I assure you. Next, I would stir, the guitar case would fall over and hit me in the head, I'd groan in pain and Adam would chuckle. Then Dick would come around to tell us to wake up. I think he knew that Adam and I didn't need much reminder. The girls, Kendyl and Nicole, he would tell sweetly, because Dick is like that. Then he'd get over to Paul's tent, which honestly should have held all three guys, but that is another issue mostly stemming from the over-concern of parents and their air-mattress purchasing habits. Anyway, Dick would go over to Paul's tent, and sing "Goooodmorning Paul" a few times, and then shake the tent. Sometimes it worked, but never within several minutes. One time Paul was sick, so that was a-whole-nother can of worms. Not long afterwards, we'd hear Vasiliy walking around, shouting into his megaphone, telling everyone to get up, breakfast would be soon.

Breakfast most mornings was kasha, I think, which meant some sort of porridge-like-substance, with some kind of fruit thrown in here and there for flavor. Also, tea. Kasha and tea were the staples of most every meal, and I'm glad of it. The tea was often lemon, and delicious, while the kasha was sure to fill your belly. Lunches had more food I think, some kind of sandwich maybe. Dinner had meat patties on time, and varenyky another time, which was amazing. At night, a snack time would be had, of which I chiefly remember bananas. They eat a lot of those in Ukraine, actually. In Kyiv, nearly every street vendor stored his wares in boxes which were clearly labeled for the shipment of bananas. I can't blame them, really; bananas are delicious.

I can't remember what order we did things at the camp. At some point in the day, we would do a Bible study. I feel like we read one of the Peters, or James. I wish I could remember where I've put the composition book that contains the meager journaling that got done while there, as it might help with some of the details, but such is life. Dick led our studies, seeing as we don't speak Russian or Ukrainian, and so it was the seven Marylanders, plus Randy and his son Nick, Baptist missionaries from Tennessee. We sat under the same tree nearly every time, I think, and it was nice to have the chance to sit among only people that you could understand, and nice to have the chance just to sit, and nice to have the chance to read the Bible together too.

Swimming in the Black Sea every day was a must. If you didn't swim every day, and there was one day in which we didn't, you felt really dirty and gross the next day. So swimming it was, and thankfully the beach was a five-minute walk from camp, at the most. We could see some ships out on the sea sometimes, and there was always the ferry going to and from town to watch, as the beach was best accessible by boat, but mostly we swam around and threw jellyfish at each other. The Ukrainians were nice and would play with us even if we couldn't talk to most of them, and so it was good to have something we could do together. I was and still am pale and bad at swimming, but I had a good time anyway. Two or three times while at the camp, we used shampoo on our hair while swimming, but mostly we just let the Sea wash us. It's not a real bath I guess, but it worked well enough for our purposes.

We would also go on what was referred to as Excursions. This is either one of those funny words that Dick uses because he used to be in the Army and is involved with the Boy Scouts, or one of those funny words that you use because it's a cognate with Russian. I'm better on the latter. Excursions were fun, and always involved lots of walking. The Black Sea is geologically young, as far as I understand, and so the mountains nearly run straight down into the water, with just little beaches made of rocks at the bottom sometimes. Consequently, we went hiking twice, once up to an overlook with an incredible view to the East of camp, the other time to a fortress that had been used in both World Wars, to the West of camp, right on the mouth of the harbor. This was a longer hike, to be sure, but worth it once we got to go poking around inside an old Soviet bunker, complete with machine gun bullet marks. It had everything you could want except for dead Nazis. We took pretty clearly marked paths to get there, but Vasiliy decided to take a shortcut back. This ended up being more of bushwhacking down steep inclines, and I'm pretty sure Vasiliy was just making it up most of the way, but we eventually popped out onto our beach and made our way back to camp, quite tired.

Another time, we went to the botanical gardens in Yalta, with a bunch of the Ukrainians, which meant a long bus trip and then a lot of walking around to see interesting plants, statues of Lenin and other famous people, and many group photos at Dick's insistence. That was an alright trip. The best excursion, probably, was to the formerly-secret, former-Soviet Submarine Base. Literally carved out of the inside of the mountain, this giant network of tunnels had room for several submarines, even the ability to repair them in dry-dock. They're getting funding to slowly fix the place up, repairing things and repainting things, so that the very small section you can currently walk through looks quite nice with warning stripes and labels, while the tunnel itself, which is accessible by boat tour, is quite dirty and could probably do with some maintenance. It's amazing how big the thing is. If you're even near Sevastopol, the big city near Balaklava, make sure you see this.

Every night, there was campfire time, or the equivalent thereof, since the fire was fairly well bound within a clay hearth. Everyone would sit around like at a meal time, and there would be singing, and some sort of testimony or sermon or something of that sort. Twice, we did skits that Adam knew from working at Camp Hemlock. When we first got there, there was this big guy leading worship. I feel like his name may have been Aleksei, but I am probably completely wrong. They invited me to play guitar with him and the other guy, whose name I have definitely forgotten. Even though I was unable to decipher their Ukrainian guitar chord notation, the chords were the same once you went to finger them, and so I was able to just barely keep up with them, sometimes. It was incredible, being invited to play with them just hours after getting to the camp, and he was killed in a car accident just a week later. When we found out, I didn't know what to do, other than to just be sad and pray.

It was frustrating to be surrounded by all these people you couldn't really talk to. When people gave sermons, we got whatever rushed translation Dick passed our way, if we got anything. When Yulian, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic deacon, did morning chants and liturgy, we had no idea what the meaning of his singing was, only that it woke us up before Kostia even got started on the wood. The only songs we could all sing together were the ones that exist in both languages, and these were primarily songs that I would bring up, not the ones they were picking. This is most definitely why I'm now in my second semester of Russian classes.

We were not without friends. Roman and Svyeta were two folks our own age who spoke English, and the Army officer whose name we always forgot also spoke English. Really, anyone who spoke English was plenty friendly, and even some of those with whom we had to have translators and gestures. In particular, for me at least, was Sergei, who played the violin. He could play "The House of the Rising Sun", and I could play the chords, or sometimes we would just jam, and so we performed at Camp Fire Time at least once. That was really cool, to be able to hang out with him. Roman taught Adam and I how to say "Я плаваю", which sounds like "Ya plavayu", and means "I swim", but it is hard enough to learn Russian in a class, much less while swimming. Svyeta taught me some things about their alphabet, and was just generally really good at being our friend and aide in crossing the language barrier. One little girl, Rita, who did not speak English, was sometimes annoying in her desire to follow us around, but was also willing to be our friend from the moment we arrived, a rarity, and taught us words like "кошка" (koshka), which means cat. Our other good friend was a kid named Taras, and I can't really say much about him, other than he was willing to hang out with us, and that was enough.

One night, after camp fire, we went out into the woods with some of the other "young people", as Dick would call us, and sat on blankets by a cliff, overlooking the sea. We sat around and talked, as best we could. After we sufficiently made moves against one of the Ukrainians that looked ready to put the moves on Kendyl, they asked us what we thought about what Yulian had preached about that night. Apparently he had talked about the evils of mini-skirts, or something. It was really difficult to try and explain what I think about modesty, never mind that whatever I had said had to be translated.

One of the most remarkable things, I think, was that the camp had Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants present. I am pretty sure it was mostly Protestants, but all three were definitely present. A few times, we even had visitors from some other Bible camp, teenagers that were hanging out with a missionary from New York. Despite these differences, I can only think of one time when I sense any ill-will across denomination lines, when an old lady visiting from another camp started making loud comments at Yulian about something that Catholics and Orthodox disagree on, and Vasiliy had to step in and talk about how we are united in the love of Christ. That was really good to see happening somewhere.

I never really figured out why we went. I am sure that God had his reasons, but he's never told me. We shared our testimonies, sang a few songs, and did some skits. We hung out with some people, sometimes, and talked with them about whatever or nothing at all, when we were able. We saw one of the ministries going on there. I am never sure if we were there as observers or assistants or what. But I am sure that it was Good, I am just not able to articulate the particulars maybe.

I will have to write about the rest of the trip, some time, because this only covered camp. I have, included, below, a video we made while we were packing up, giving a tour of the camp.