Familiar Faces

Adult camp started yesterday, and it is definitely a change of pace. We immediately recognized many of the arriving campers (about 30 total) from previous English camps, and it is encouraging to see them return to the camp as adults continuing to seek fellowship and community with other believers. Pray that they would find respite from the difficulties of their home lives while at camp through the building of strong relationships with others they meet here. Like the youth, they also wrote questions anonymously at the beginning of camp, and they have asked many difficult questions about a wide range of scriptural topics – pray that those at the camp and the guest speaker Will would be given the words to Biblically and carefully answer their questions.

The atmosphere is much more laid back than English camp, and in some ways this is making the transition more difficult. We have been so busy for the past two weeks that the amount of down time is bringing unexpected stress. Camp director Tom told Chelsea that his goal for her throughout adult camp is for her to become bored and re-energized for her role running the kitchen for family camp, and I think it will take a while for us to adjust to the change and truly begin to recuperate. I spent today cleaning one of the camp’s buildings and Chelsea is hard at work reorganizing the camp’s recipe books, but within the week our roles should be reduced to simply sharing in community as the campers are doing. I was able to participate as a camper in team sports, and I found this opportunity to meet and get to know the campers to be a joy. We must keep in mind that sometimes the best ministry to others is simply to be their friend and reflect Christ through whom God has made us.

The first day of our workshops went well, with Chelsea making barbeque pork in her cooking workshop (five campers) and me making a short commercial-esque comedy in the video workshop (three campers). With only five days of workshops rather than the entire camp, we have decided to do multiple shorter projects rather than the full narrative done at English camp. Pray that God would bring about conversations with others here and help us to speak truth clearly and humbly through them.

Lastly, thank you for your prayers about our short getaway to Grenoble. It was a blessing and gave us the space we needed to grieve, take a deep breath, and enjoy each other’s company away from camp. We love you all.

God bless,
David