Campy Thoughts

I have a lot of different thoughts tumbling around in my head right now. Not sure where to start....

Camp. It was a great week. I know there are people who think I'm crazy for taking a week of vacation to go work at camp, but I can't think of a better way to spend vacation. It was physically exhausting (I came home and slept 12 hours Friday night and another 12 hours Saturday night), but it was spiritually refreshing. And it was just fun. It was great to see old friends again and to play with them. We even had a mini-reunion Thursday night when the Neuhaus's & Goeke's came to visit. It was very cool...there were about 15 of us, and the last time we'd all worked together was 1999, and most of the counselors on staff were our campers.

I started reading Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk while I was at camp. It's one of the few non-fiction books I've ever read that has drawn me in so much that it's hard to put it down. In it, she talks a lot about community and communal living, which makes sense since she's living in a monastary as she's writing the book. Reading it at camp made me draw some parallels. Camp certainly isn't a monastary, but it is the same kind of cloistered, God-saturated community full of individuals working towards a common purpose. That's one of the things I always loved about camp and that I find myself missing.

The book has yielded many good quotes...I love a book that makes me pull out my pen and underline passages and write in the margins. There are only a couple that I've ever done that with. Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water and Philip Yancey's Reaching for the Invisible God.

Speaking of books...I read Harry Potter #6 over the weekend. Simply shocking. I found myself loving and hating it simultaneously. And now I'm waiting for #7 to see how the story ends. In the meantime, I'm intensely jealous of J.K. Rowling and hope that one day I'll write something that's even a quarter as popular and widely-read as Harry.

Last night I went to my women's Bible study group for the first time since mid-May. We've started a new study on prayer...we're reading Stormie Omartian's The Power of a Praying Woman. (They had originally planned to read The Power of a Praying Wife but chose the other, for which I'm grateful.) Realization: My prayer life needs some work. I've decided to read the Psalms. They are, after all, prayers. I'm reading Psalm 8 today. It's one I've always associated with camp: "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens....When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you created him?" I can't look at the night sky at camp and not think of those verses.

There are still other thoughts rolling around, other realizations I've come to recently. But I think this is enough for today. I'll save the others for another time.