Camp High

I am the worst kid that I know who ever attended a church camp.

If you ever wonder why certain rules exist then look no further. I was awful. To this day I still apologize to the brave youth pastors who dared to take me along. I was a total hell raiser on so many levels. I came from a broken home and was angry. My mother and father were divorced and mostly not in the picture, so I lived like a total pagan. I was mildly quick witted and used sarcasm like a deflector shield to guard my messed up heart. I made (make) every sport more violent and competitive. I had not one honest reason for going. NOT ONE. To make matters worse, my grandparents taught me to read from the Bible. I had read through it multiple times before I was even in my teenage years, but had never met Jesus.

I can testify firsthand that lots of Bible without Jesus is dangerous.

I could eat alive your half prepared youth worker and pose impossible, irrelevant questions to your more veteran leaders.

Just for entertainment.

I was the jerk that I thought I had every excuse to be.

The truth is that I was busted and broken up on the inside because my home life was a ship wreck. I was hiding some really deep, painful stuff.

I was messed up and I did not know what to do with it.

Its crazy to think that I was so poor that people actually went out on a limp and got donors together to pay my way so that I could ruin everybody else’s kids experience. The insanity of Christian kindness towards me at that time is still hard for me to wrap my mind around. I pushed and pushed until they ran out of ways to discipline me. I debated like what I saw modeled by my parents at their worst.  I would push them just to see what they would do when their punishment did not phase me. An upbringing like mine afforded me some thick skin.

They tried every form of discipline that one can do without getting reported to child services.

I would exhaust them until they ran out of options and my goal was to still be there standing in defiance until they gave up. The final last straw was always kicking me out of Church. They hated to do this because MAYBE my only hope was hearing something that changed me while I was there. So if we got there, you knew it was bad. To say I was strong-willed is an understatement and, thus, I found myself more than once being taken home in order to protect an event or property.

Again, I am the worst youth kid that I know.

Some reading this may be shocked that I have been kicked out of both Church and Church camp on multiple occasions. I can still remember a grizzly, old, war veteran of a Deacon named Ralph who drove me home after one such expulsion. Years later after the Lord called me to Himself, it was crazy that of all the people on the planet, it was Ralph that was at my ordination.

He knew.

He wept the first time he heard me preach. I can still remember his tear filled eyes and the way he looked at me.

It is humbling to recall even to this day.

A look of contentment when something hard is finished. More than that, his eyes looked through me to something better that I did not see for myself. A Jesus version of me that I am still moving towards to this day. It strikes me to think that he prayed for more than a decade for the kid nobody wanted at their Church.

Who believes in people like that? Who with patience, grace, and consistency waits as decades pass to see the fruit of their prayer for a young punk? It is hard for me not to think if I were in his shoes, I would have cut ties with the younger me a long time ago. It is not as though I had not given him plenty of reasons. He had all the excuses in the world, but following Jesus has always been about more than just excuses.

Do not let anyone fool you into believing that faithfulness is not powerful stuff.

That all being said, I went from the hoodlum that nobody wanted to take to camp to the pastor who took the hoodlums nobody wanted to take to camp. The irony still makes me kinda chuckle to this day. When I think of where I have come from and to where the Lord has brought me I just kind of reel about improbable it is. Maybe that is why I have such a bleeding heart for the kids that have slim to no chance of making it.

Maybe I see myself in them with each misstep they make or maybe it’s the legacy of Ralph that I still carry with me, I do not know.

I understand their desire to get out of a living hell like few others they usually know. If they can get away for just a moment from all their mess and see that G-d is bigger than all that, then there may just be hope for them yet. That and I just love the idea of getting away. There are powerful things that can happen when we exit the grind of our daily lives and just hear the Gospel proclaimed over and over again to us. I think this is why I think G-d had these huge parts of the calendar blocked off in the Old Testament to just worship. It is like he wants us to not go too long without having a serious pow-wow.

It is important to remember how small our world is in light of the eternal.

In Oklahoma we do camp up serious. We maybe have the largest youth camp in the world (about 6,000 kids a week). Oddly, it is placed among the foothills and creeks of my Chickasaw ancestral lands. For as long as the summer sun lasts, this camp is turned into a full on city of youth. You could sense the anticipation as your week of camp approached. I can recall with clarity everything from the intense packing that happens the day before, to the unique smell of Church vans. I learned at Church camp how to pop a towel in such a way that it drew blood and I taught more than one kid who Jesus was for the first time. It was in those mountains that I learned what sleep deprivation was.

No one has ever slept as good as a youth pastor does after a long week of camp.

It is a glorious thing that post camp sleep. An epic crash after the camp high. The ‘camp high’ is a real thing. I used to knock it and try to make camp out to be something else entirely, more cold and logical, but the truth is that emotion is a part of what it means to be human. There is nothing we do that is void of emotion and sentimental connections. Sometimes I wish we were all cold and logical as Spock from Star Trek, but that is not how G-d created us.

In truth it is better this way, even with all the inevitable pain and danger we must go through with emotions figured into the equation.

It is also worth mentioning that it would be strange if we could be completely unmoved when someone detoxes us from the media we have running into our bloodstream like an IV. When we step away from it all and catch our breath for a few days, it should not surprise us when we walk away feeling better.

Sabbath is just too good for us to skip.

We need periodic times of rest and rejuvenation where we reconnect with our Creator all over again. It elevates us in all the best ways. It is essential to health.

Maybe that is why I saw a unique phenomenon happen again and again when it comes to going to camp. The troubling reality is that there would always be some kid who made a decision to follow Christ at the camp the year before who would come to make the same decision again the next year. At first this seems like heresy, but I think there is more going on than meets the eye. I mean sure, some are not genuinely Christian and some are all over the place as to their walks with the Lord, but stay with me.

I think a chunk of it has to do with our weak doctrine of repentance.

We do not repent with any regularity. Many do not know how to repent and others who do are often surprised to find days or weeks pass without having done so. It seems to be a throw away element of the invitation at the end of the service doesn’t it? We have such low views of repentance. We do not know where it fits into the rest of things. Maybe we wrongly think it is just that thing we did that one time when we got saved or possibly in the back of our mind we almost think we have outgrown it.

Repentance in the Bible looks much more like a lifestyle than it does an event on the calendar. Ask David.

This is not the way we think about it though, is it? This became apparent to me as I served at a youth camp recently here in France. It made me think about all the kids back home who only repent during the one week a year that they come to camp. They bottle up their junk all year and then come to camp feeling like they are lost all over again. They live from event to event to unload all their sin and do their seasonal visit to the throne of G-d. Most of the year they live with a front that they are some kind of person that they really are not.

It takes so much energy to try to be the ‘good kid’ that the Bible says doesn’t exist.

They learn to cope. They learn to hide. At least until the next event when the altar is open to lay down their junk. What is missing in this equation is a million experiences with Jesus in between the camps and events. What’s missing is confession. What’s missing is repentance and belief in the Gospel that would constantly reorient them to the way of Jesus.

Maybe they have a flickering desire for G-d buried deep under a garbage truck full of their sin, but they have nearly no clue how to grow that into something brilliant.

How to walk with Him and pray without ceasing. They have not seen the way of repentance as the way to know Him more daily. Grace is not meant to be tapped, its meant to be swam in. Nevertheless, some of them live from camp high to camp high. That is the only time they freely come back to Him. That, in their mind, is when He is accessible. As I ponder this reality, it breaks my heart. It is sad to think there are people so close to joy, but keep themselves at arms length in order to guard some version of themselves.

They confuse the event for the Person and before long find themselves not coming to either.

Years maybe have passed and without repentance they discover their feet on a path far from where they hoped they end up. To go back now would feel too humbling, too humiliating. Though in truth they have moved forward so little, if at all. This is maybe why I have tried over and again to kill the myth of the ‘good kid’ because I know how toxic it has been to young hearts.

Nobody's kid can bear that weight.

I have come to value much higher the kid that is honest and the kid that can repent. That kid is going somewhere. The kid who can confess will know Jesus in ways the ‘good kid' never will. Honestly, I want to be that kid. I want to be the one constantly adjusting my life to get back to His path. I want to be honest about the broken places that I still need Jesus and honest about all the ways that I cannot fix myself.

I am thankful for the deacons like Ralph that never stopped seeing me in light of the Gospel.

I am grateful for his prayers continuing to usher me down that isle. I am thankful for the camp highs and the grace to figure out that repentance is a lifestyle that collides me frequently into Jesus. I just want to tell myself over and over again that my life is a sinner’s prayer and my death, the great ‘amen.’ I want to invite you to pray with me.