Camps, Camps and more Camps

Like most of us, it’s a bit amazing when you start a job in a new realm how big that realm ends up being. I didn’t grow up going to camp. I spent a few summers at a camp our church Girls in Action went to for a week.  I loved it there, especially the first year, when I decided that when I was “old”, I wanted to be a counselor like Miss Becky. By the time I was all of “old” (which was nineteen), I was busy with other things. So, it wasn’t until I was twenty-six, that I spent a summer working at camp. And not as a counselor. I was afraid I would tie ten eleven or twelve-year-old girls to their beds and leave them there if I had to spend two weeks listening to how one didn’t like the other because she had brown hair. So, I wisely worked in the office of a boys camp. I enjoyed it so much, I went back the next year.

Of course, in those mountains of North Carolina, I knew there were all sorts of camps hidden away among the trees and ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains. What I’ve come to realize is that there are camps hidden all over the place. Just over the last two days, I’ve met people from over twenty such camps in Minnesota and the eastern part of the Dakotas.

I spent Monday and Tuesday with most of my co-workers at Big Sandy Camp two hours north of here. It was our sectional conference of the CCCA (Christian Camp and Conference Association). The days were full of camp related workshops, mingling with other camp staff, talking to different vendors and attending larger sessions about the CCCA. To be honest, none of the workshops were related to my line of work. If you talked about what I do, everyone would fall asleep. There’s just not much to say about data entry, phone answering and registration. So, what I learned came from other registrars or office workers who do similar tasks. We compared notes on summer registration days, health forms, care packs and on-line registration. It was very interesting to learn how other camps do things. With conversations like that…yeah, we probably all need to see therapists.

Camping ministry is an interesting area of God’s vineyard. There are more aspects to it than most people think: youth programs, women programs, buildings, maintenance, housekeeping, fund raising, volunteers, donors, guest groups, food, clothing, sports, registration. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And what most guests never know: programs, visionary fundraising and the black-and-white of numbers don’t always mingle well behind the scenes. It’s takes all kinds of people, skills and gifts to keep a camp running. But, in the end, isn’t that the way God created it? A body. All with different parts. All of them do different things. None of them are more or less important than another. And all have one Head.