Yesterday I arrived back from a week away and although I wasn’t taking physics notes from the awesome Doctor, I did spend a lot of time taking notes on talks and getting exhausted. I spent a week either in the middle of nowhere or the centre of nowhere having an awesome time.
After the epicness of seeing everyone I hadn’t seen in ages we went into the school we were staying at. It was an actual maze. We spent ages running around the place getting lost and discovering all the different corners in the place including a very randomly placed ladder which we discovered was actually a fire escape. (Thankfully it wasn’t needed and there was no reenactment of last year’s shower horror but that’s another story…) After this manic rush and room allocations we were led down to one of the many fields surround our little patch of ‘middle of nowhere’ to play the classic ‘get to know each other’ games. Running round trying to find people who have drunk Marmite and playing a strange version of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ where you go from an egg to a chick to a dinosaur to a king/queen is certainly a different way to get to know people!
Being a Christian camp, we spent a lot of time talking about God, learning about the Bible and praying. Don’t get the wrong end of the stick here: I enjoyed it. Being with other Christians my age was amazing and I wish it could be like that all the time. The only way I can describe it to non-Christians is to imagine your greatest passion in life and then imagine spending all your time being able to be with others who share that passion and talk about it whenever you want for however long you want. A week looking at the book of Daniel was a real eye-opener. This guy stood up for his God, my God, despite the risks and his friends refused to worship anything other than God even though it meant they could have died. They had such strong faith in God above all and it made me think, what do I worship in this world? Surely if I’m to call myself a Christian I should put God and telling others about him above looking ‘cool’ or not getting a fail from Terrie, above fitting in and above money, TV, internet and gadgets. I need to put everything in his hands and although some of you by this point might be thinking I’ve gone totally nuts, I tell you this. We’re all sinners. We’ve all done something wrong that damages the perfect standard that God requires from us. This means we deserve to be punished. We deserve to be punished for reject God, rejecting his laws and even rejecting he exists. However, God sent Jesus. Not just some preacher dude who did some ‘good stuff’ but God, as a man (yeah, hard to get your head around, I know) living a perfect life and dying. Not because of some tragic, uncontrollable accident but because he was taking our punishment for us. He did this for us so accepting this and putting him first is like saying thank you. We can never earn our way back to perfection, but we can show God that we believe in what he has done for us and that we accept his gift.
Although the Christian aspect of the camp was the main bit and the part I miss the most, I also had some pretty epic time doing ridiculous games and activities. Like climbing a ridiculously steep mountain (something that I rarely do voluntarily) and chasing leaders dressed up as old people around a quite village. Getting members of the public to pose for captions such as ‘Regular naps prevent old age, especially if you take them while driving.’ is certainly different although some old people are rude! One other camper got told to ‘get stuffed’… and they complain about youth of today!
I have sooo much more to talk about including quad biking, Timmy’s glow sticks, Matt’s auctioneering, our re-vamp of the 2012 Olympics campaign, Tim’s affiliation with throwing water and food at people, laser questing, great discussions, hiding in bushes… I could go on but I am totally tired from my week away so I’m hoping that Terrie will give me the benefit of the doubt and not fail me on the promise of more Easter camp news soon!
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