The theme for this year's Easter Camp, "All My Life," was easy to fit with into the passion message in general. I think this is good, as I am told it is not always the case at the camp. But the passion week is so huge! It can never be spoken of too much. Praise God for the cross. Praise God for the Resurrection.
Good Friday started out with Jon Joyce's sermon on giving our whole life in light of God's sacrifice of His. I think, combined with the tone of the day, it made a good impression and got the kids to put that sacrifice in perspective. After this, we met with our life group to discuss the message. My life group had a bunch of familiar faces and quite a few new ones. They were all a blessing though. Justin (the rock-climbing stud) and his gf, Rikki, were my co-leaders. I let them do a lot of the talking :-).
Most of the afternoon I spent prepping my sermon (which I was to give the next day) and organizing the evening activities (of which I was in charge). I took a break to go for a walk with a bunch of people to the cliffs on the other side of the river. This was a good time. To get to the other side, we had to jump on a government, sponsored ferry. After the ferry ride, we hiked up the road and eventually hopped over the guard rail, starting to walk toward the cliff. Every year a group makes this walk to put up a cross on the cliffs across from the campsite. The view from the top of the cliffs was amazing. The swollen river stretched forever. Large paddle boats navigated up and down it. The cliff walls were stark and the height overwhelming. I am such a sucker with heights! Anyways. Enjoy the pictures
from that days adventure.After dinner, the group joined me in the meeting hall for a night of "theater sports." These are basically improvisational games a la "Whose Line is it Anyways?" or something like it. Jon had asked me a few weeks prior if I had ideas to spend a couple of hours for an evening. I told him that I had led these improv nights before to great success and he told me to plan on one for the camp. I was nervous about doing this, however, as Australian humor seems a lot different from American humor. Americans don't mind doing silly things and our humor can be rather base and low-brow. Australians are not so quick to emote. So I was really concerned the night would fail. But it didn't! I hosted through a number of games and everybody seemed to have a really good time. The only negative side was that the jokes got a bit crude at points. Such is the case with improv humor though.
After the improv session, I was scheduled to teach Swing Dancing to whomever wanted to learn.
Apart from our theme of "All My Life," the fun theme of camp was "Retro." So, in that spirit, I volunteered to teach everyone swing dancing. I love it! The problem was: no guys wanted to learn and a TON of girls did. Teaching ladies how to dance with another lady is not ideal. But it had to be done and I just stepped in wherever I could. I was absolutely exhausted, but I ended up dancing well into the night with girl after girl. Soon the cooks found out that I was giving lessons and I even had the adults coming in to have a turn. I was soaked through with sweat and unbelievably gross. But I think everyone still had a lot of fun! I hope! Some of the girls were really quite good even after only a quick introduction. I promised to teach more the next day.
Finally, just before bed, we played a game of night capture the flag which I had organized. We played with glow stick flags. It was fun enough, but the small size of the camp made the game a bit too hard and mostly frustrating. Had I known how big the camp was prior to this, I might not have suggested the game. But you win some and lose some :-). The younger kids got to run off some steam and that is all that matters.
Shower.
I stayed up late into the night putting the finishing touches on my sermon.
Bed.
In Christ
Chris
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