Bible Camp: Week 2

0Josh • 29th Jun 2005 • blog entries, nome., travel

The second week of Bible camp was equally as amazing and fun as the first one. As the first week ended I was very tired and looking forward to some time off. We went into town around 9pm and after dropping my stuff off at the house I was going to be staying at, I went with a few others to get some pizza from Peace on Earth Pizza, one of the few restraints in the large village of Unalakleet. On our way to meet some folks at the pizza place we got invited over to a house for a bunch of crab. We had the delicious pizza, and then gorged ourselves with fresh crab until 1am.

I slept in the next morning and Jamie got up early to start picking kids up from the airport. I was set on relaxing as much as possible until as late as possible before going back to camp. Sitting in the auditorium waiting for a trip out to camp I really could have just gone home. On top of finding out I was going to be living in a Costco tent opposed to a cabin, I was still tired, missing Lydia and thought that I should just go home. I asked God for some energy and a much needed attitude adjustment. Once I stepped off the boat and back onto the camp beach God had changed my heart and I was excited to meet my new campers.

Jamie and I counseled together week number two, and it was super fun to have someone else in the cabin with the guys during devotions and it was nice for each of us to be able to take small breaks and know the other one was making sure everyone was staying in line (quite literally when we were waiting for meals). The second week of camp brought more campers and staff to Covenant Bible camp than ever before. With over 120 campers and a very large staff we struggled to fit everyone into chapel and meals.

The first night’s chapel was an interesting one, as a missions team had come from Minnesota for two weeks to present their puppet ministry. It didn’t take to long to realize that puppets probably weren’t going to be the best fit for this age group of jr. highers. Byron (the program director that week) was able to work with the team and come up with a series of testimonies and dramas that would speak to the kids more than puppets. From then on things at chapel were great.

I helped out with water during the muskox run, and was in a different spot during the eco-challenge, and it was fun to see the different parts of the race that I missed out on the week earlier.

We got lots of rain at the end of the week and it caused our tent to start flooding after a overnight plus a few hours of straight rain. We moved some of our stuff out and into a staff cabin, which was ironically the same thing that we had done for fun the day before. We wanted a great score for cabin cleanup and early in the week one of our campers had the idea of packing everything up and collapsing the tent…..really cleaning it up. We did it, got a perfect score and it was lots fun getting everyone to work together taking it down and then putting it back up again.

For our skit the second week we got one of our campers from Elim who looked a lot like Bruce Lee to come up with a “Bruce Lee goes to Bible Camp” skit and made sure we worked in a bunch of camp jokes that made the whole thing funny.
The week ended again on Sunday evening with a boat ride into Unalakleet. I was starting to feel pretty sick with a cold once we got into town and after an evening out with friends I knew my fears had been realized. I spent a very wakeless night on the church floor fighting the beginning of a cold. I was able to catch a pretty early flight back to Nome and was happy to be back home.

I had a great time at Bible Camp and am SO glad I was there, and very glad I stayed for two weeks. It was great to see God work in the lives of these kids and to realize the passion I have for camping ministry is not isolated to one particular location or set of memories that I have from cascades. I know my life has been changed because of the leadership of role models that I had while growing up at camp and the leadership opportunities that I got from working there…. these are role models and opportunities that exist at hundreds of Christian camps across the country.