Children’s Church Camp

As you are reading these words, I am at children’s camp. We have taken eight of our boys and girls to Brewton Parker College for a time of Bible study, games, and I don’t know what all we will do. I would imagine that by the time you read this, I will be exhausted. I’m not sure home much sleep I will get. But I am also expecting to have a great time.

Why would I, now in my sixties, go off to children’s camp? Have I lost my mind? Well, there are those who would debate if I ever had a mind to lose in the first place, so I won’t address that. But I have to tell you why I agreed to this adventure.

First, I have always enjoyed church camp. As a boy, into my teens, my church went to a whole church weekend camp several years in a row. I remember swimming in the lake, eating burgers and dogs cooked over a campfire, and late-night Bible studies and testimony times that made an impact on my life.

I also remember diving in the lake, making contact head-to-head with L.C., a good friend and high school baseball teammate, and going to the emergency room with a split head and concussion. Good times indeed.

But over the years I have taken several groups to camps at: Jekyll Island, Georgia; Roscommon, Michigan, and Toccoa, Georgia. And I have seen lives changed because we had the full attention of those young people for several days in a row. There is something about a camp setting that calls us to listen more attentively. Even a camp at Ridgecrest, North Carolina when I was in college was a time when God spoke to me in a powerful manner.

So, this week as I am not eating my wife’s wonderful cooking, as I sleep in a twin bed with a lumpy mattress, as I play games and attempt things I should have stopped doing twenty years ago, I am hopeful that God will work in the hearts and lives of five boys and three girls from Shellman Bluff, and hundreds more from across the state of Georgia. Won’t you pray for us? Pray that God will change the lives of children. And pray that I will survive.