Magoo keeps complaining I haven’t posted lately. I’ve been a bit busy.
We took the youth group (59 kids, 8 chaperones) to Miracle Camp in Michigan this weekend for Ice Camp 2009 – an incredibly jam packed 48 hours of activity that is so frenetic I’m generally unable to function or speak coherently for a month following. It is an incredible mixture of pure fun, getting to know new people, and intense spiritual introspection. It is way cool, both literally and figuratively.
We had a high of about 15 degrees this year, which was a great improvement over the past two years.
Here are my personal highlights of the weekend. As always, since I can’t be forced to think too much, they are not necessarily in any order:
- It’s Magoo’s Senior year. She has an awesome close-knit group of senior friends – a dozen or so guys and gals. Nearly every one of them made it to Ice Camp. It’s so neat to see the natural easy-going relationship they all have.
- DustMeister is part of that group. But, because of the small problem of living in Singapore the last couple of years, he hasn’t been able to attend Ice Camp. He is back home, and it was SO EXCELLENT to have him there. Even though he failed to capture the gross banana consumption contest:
- I was in a cabin with eight girls. Six of them I had already known pretty well. Two I had maybe only met once. These two, Ali and Amanda, were hilarious, for real. Amanda is non stop funny and incredibly sweet and competitive and inclusive. And she says “for real” or “for real?” all the time. I liked it so much I am going to start using it myself all the time, for real. Ali is so much fun, so introspective, and so sweet. And these best friends play off each other perfectly. They added SO much to the weekend. I plan on stalking them and making them be my friends forever, because I like them so much. The cabin was full of girls with a wide variety of interests, activities, and friends, yet by the way they acted and got along, you’d have thought they’d all been rooming together for years.
- Now that Emmy lives in our area, she got to go to Miracle Camp! You’d think a girl that was at a new school, and attending a function she’s never attended before would kind of hang back and tag along with her cousin and good friends. Not Emmy. She met new people, did all kinds of activities, and became famous as the single girl on the epic broomball team. It helped that she got kicked in the face, jumped up, and said “I’m fine.” Guys totally respect that. And, really, many women pay big bucks to get nice full lips. One kick in the face and Emmy got that for free. You’re welcome.
- An excellent band named Hello Industry. Check them out. They were PERFECT! Bud and Magoo make fun of me because I usually barely play my music loud enough to even make out what is playing. But for whatever reason the louder the better at Ice Camp. Hello Industry delivered. Oh, and they spent endless amounts of time with the students, which was pretty awesome of them. DustMeister even learned a few new bass techniques from them. (Sorry, I didn’t get a picture of the band.)
- Deep spiritual discussions. What’s wrong. What can we fix. How can we do better. These are the kids talking. Teenagers. Unbelievably impressive teenagers.
- Our cabin was connected to another cabin, much like a hotel room has a locked door to an adjoining room. Only the locked door in this case was half inch thick plywood witha vent in it. It wasn’t such a good sound insulator. Nor was the massive heating vent system that crossed through both rooms creating a nice megaphone sound amplifier between the two rooms. The other room contained unseen, but not unheard, girls from a group unknown to us. Instead of getting irked at the sound generated by the other cabin, our girls took advantage of it. A completely impromptu round of VBS songs broke out between the two cabins one afternoon. The other cabin sang “Jesus loves the little children”. We sang “This little light of mine”. They sang “B-I-B-L-E” and we sang “Zaccheus”. Before it was over we’d moved onto Disney songs and the big finale of “So Long, Farewell” from the Sound of Music. I can’t tell you how much fun that was. We never saw or spoke to those girls. But, we had a blast singing with them.
- Watching two of our girls and one of our youth leaders beat an all guys team in 3 on 3 b-ball.
- One of our leaders taking our broomball team through an entire comical practice before their game. It included drills and straight out of Braveheart speeches to the participants. His final rallying call before their friendly church camp broomball game, you ask? “Let’s never forget this MEN, and woman, WINNING IS EVERYTHING!! Oh, and making money too.” They lost.
- Standing outside on a 15 degree snowy day in the middle of a massive field of white, watching at least 100 teenagers oblivious to the cold, sans iPods & cell phones & mind altering substances, have the time of their life throwing snowballs, burying each other in the snow, playing broomball, tackling each other and smiling non-stop for hours on end.
- A speaker and worship session on Saturday night and renewed commitments to the Lord that make every second of work it takes to prepare for this weekend worth it a thousand times over.
- Watching Da Kaff make snow angels in his shorts and t-shirt after playing basketball. Magoo accused me of being evil because I goaded him into it by suggesting he was a wuss if he didn’t do it. I suppose she has a point. Nevertheless, he did prove his lack of wuss-ness, that’s for SURE:
- Smiles, smiles, and a few more smiles. You can check out the whole gallery by clicking HERE.
What a weekend. Thanks to the Lord. Thanks to those who prayed. Thanks to the Miracle Camp staff, speaker, and band. Thanks to the chaperones. And thanks to the most awesomest group of high school students ever, for REAL!
