We started out our summer adventure by getting up at 4AM and driving straight through from Cannon Beach, OR, to Sebastapol, CA - A 12 hour drive to our first camp, Mt. Gilead. The week at Gilead was, to say the least, an exhausting and stretching week. It was a tough week. Several different factors played into why the week was so exhausting and tough. For one, Gilead is a very loud and enthusiastic camp. It is like a pep rally from high school...THAT NEVER STOPS! You are constantly screaming, yelling, making up cheers, and participating in competitions- and it never ends. It is so high energy, and being a counselor, it was my job to help get the kids all loud and screaming and cheering. This was so draining for me because I'm not an enthusiastic person. I felt pushed into a position of being someone I wasn't. I felt out of place. Along with this I felt very imprisoned. I couldn't seem to laugh, joke around, be silly, to just let loose and be real. It left me frustrated with myself, yet not knowing how to let go and be real. I realized this is the way I feel most places I go. It follows me almost everywhere I go. I have a hard time letting down my guard and letting myself be real. I just close off. I don't like it..but I don't know how to change, I don't know how to not do that. But I feel like it is selling myself short and not honoring God, because I am not being who he created me to be..it's like I'm hiding who he has made me- but doing it unintentionally.
Both of these things were factors into why it was such a tough week, but the hardest, most discouraging part for me was that every day, I felt like I tried so hard to love my girls, to talk to them, to get to know them, and in morning and evening cabin discussions to really dive in deep and talk about the Lord with them- and I felt like we got no where. Right when we would start getting into a good conversation about the Lord, about their struggles, about death, etc. something would happen, some distraction that would tear all my girls attention away, the moment would be lost..never to be seen again.
I left the camp feeling like a failure. Feeling like I failed my girls..and worst of all, feeling like I failed God. I so badly wanted to represent him well. I so badly wanted my girls to see Jesus in me. I wanted them to see and feel his love, to see who he is through me and desire to know him. But I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I still failed. Now don't get me wrong, there were lots of fun things about the camp- I got reunited with an old friend from high school who randomly was working at the camp as well (she was a huge encouragement to me!) ,we had a great time in the mud pit wrestling around, great fun playing ultimate clue, tons of fun getting crazily dressed up by my girls and doing a fashion show ending with a belly flop off the diving board into the pool...but what do those things matter..if I failed to represent God? .....what do they matter? They don't. I want to love God. I wanted my girls to know and love God..yet I failed to represent Him well. I found myself praying that I wouldn't be the only "Jesus" they ever meet. That God would bring someone into their lives who would better represent him to these girls.
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