Creed 2010

A special part of my teenage years involved attending a summer camp which my church organized with other like-minded churches. I had wonderful experiences all four years I went, and am so grateful for the teaching, fellowship, and life experience opportunities the camp provided. 2010 was my second favorite year of camp, and the fun started on the van ride. I sat with a crowd of different ages, genders, and personalities, and we played mafia. Ricky, a youth leader I had just met, narrated a story by starting out, "Today, a great tragedy struck. The sweetest girl in the world... died."

I knew that the girl was me, and sure enough, it was. Adults unfailingly assumed upon meeting me that I was incredibly sweet, innocent, and kind, and this confused me, because I felt evil on the inside.

Later, Ricky said, "Today was a joyous day!" Calvin must have died, I thought, not because this fellow wasn't likable, but because he was an easy person to pick on. Ricky continued, "Today is joyous... well, because we know this young man was a Christian, and will spend eternity in heaven!"

"I died, didn't I?" Calvin asked. Sure enough. He died because his big toe erupted.

Another student, Drew, was the best storyteller of all. He would often take over someone's narrative when they trailed off and couldn't think what to do next, and in one of his stories, my friend Laura was strangled by a pizza crust. In another, Morgan was killed by his father while playing undersea ping pong. I was jealous of this spontaneous creativity.

Later, Claire and I talked about writing and Lord of the Rings, and Jenae and I lamented how atrocious the Prince Caspian movie adaptation was. Later, they, Drew, and Calvin raved about Toy Story 3 and persuaded me to watch it. (I saw it later that summer. And cried.) Then Claire, Drew, and I had a nuanced, thoughtful discussion about gender differences in mental processing. It was a truly exceptional youth retreat van ride.

Camp met at a college in Anderson, South Carolina. (I later learned that my maternal grandmother taught voice there in the early 1900s and almost died there in a flu epidemic. I'm so glad she didn't.) I shared a suite with my friends Laura, Natalie, and Jenae, and even though I spent lots of time with them, I also hung out with others throughout the day. Because I didn't have a set group of friends, I would drift around and have fun experiences with lots of different people.

Neal, one of the kids we'd met the previous year from a church in Florida, was an intriguing character. When I played a game with him and friends Victoria and Natalie, he said, "Whenever I play Rummy, I feel hungry. Rummy reminds me of gummy bears." While we hung out in the long hallway between the guy's and girl's sides of the housing unit, he taught us his favorite game. Only, he didn't actually teach us, because the first rule of the game was not to tell anyone the rules. I wrote in my journal, "He says it's a real game, but I have my doubts."

To make matters worse for me, he had previously shared the rules with Natalie and Victoria. When I pointed out that he had explained it to them, he rolled his eyes and said, "I only told the rules once my life was in SERIOUS JEOPARDY." I groused that I was too nice to make threats.

We had worship and teaching sessions, breakout groups, organized sports that I never participated in, a slip 'n' slide on Wednesday, and vast amounts of free time. One afternoon, when I was reading in the hallway, a popular twelfth grade guy from another youth group sat down next to me, introduced himself, and struck up a conversation about reading. This challenged my belief that older students were inherently snobbish, and made a lasting positive impression.  Also, this quote from him makes me laugh: "My sister read all four Twilight books in eight days, and dreamed about vampires for weeks. I refused to dream about sparkly men, so I'm not going to read those books!"

Another memorable impression is that when I was holding the door for people to flood through and go to small groups, my fellow youth group member Tim took the door from me and encouraged me to go on. I greatly appreciated his awareness and courtesy. Also, speaking of small group evenings, I greatly enjoyed my experiences in a group led by Laura's mom and Tim's mom. Ironically, even though I failed to journal about any of the small group meetings, the final one was legendary and unforgettable, becoming one of my most hilarious and enduring youth group memories. I am so grateful for how blessed I have been to have the right people in my life at the right times to provide personal moral examples that explain and illustrate the "whys" behind Christian beliefs. It has been much easier for me to remain consistent with what I was taught because mature, adult Christians shared about their personal lives and convictions, inviting me to follow Jesus both in what they said and what they did.

Earlier that day, I had gone looking for people to hang out with and joined Jenae, Natalie, Laura, Melissa, my sister, Maddy, and Victoria in one of the dorm rooms. “What are you all doing in here?” I asked.

Melissa exclaimed, "We're throwing marshmallows up on the ceiling!"

"How did you get them to stick?"

"We lick them!" Victoria said, flinging her licked marshmallow onto the ceiling. It stuck to the popcorn paint with a squishy plop, joining four others.

Everyone else was down at the field for organized sports, and we said that if anyone asked us where we had been, we would answer, "We're waiting for the marshmallows to fall!" We decided that this sounded like a song, and wrote the following:

Sugar High

We found a bag of fluffy cloud

Ripped it open and laughed out loud

Anticipation fills the air

We'll throw white blobs everywhere

We licked 'em, we sticked 'em

And threw them up high

Like puffy white clouds hanging up in the sky

We're waiting for the marshmallows to fall

(Down, down, down)

We're waiting for the marshmallows to fall

Squishy and soft, hanging opposite the floor,

Watch your head when you walk in the door

Sneaky little snowmen perch in wait

You'd better watch out before it's too late

(Chorus)

There's a snowball fight in the room tonight

Sugar high by glowstick light

(Chorus)

We were very proud of ourselves. After that, we walked around campus and hung out in the air conditioned student center, where Jenae told us a story about the time her dad accidentally got her high on Benadryl. Also, we got to hang out with Cory, a hilarious guy from another church. I have two main memories of him from this year of Creed camp. One is that when a group was playing Apples to Apples, the card 'sultry' came up. Sarah L. asked us to please only play for the oppressively warm definition, but Cory chuckled and said, "Um, I'm gonna play for the other!" His card was 'hula dancers.' "There is nothing sultrier than that! They're wearing grass for skirts!" 

The other memory is that during the student center hangout, he said, "When I was younger and transitioned from regular public school to a more advanced, private school, I got to skip all that useless stuff they teach you in third grade. I never had to learn about homonyms, synonyms, and MnMs."

We laughed, and my sister corrected, "Antonyms."

"No!" Cory cried. "MnMs!"

On the way home, the vans headed to my church stopped at a mall for lunch at the food court. It was Chickfila's annual Dress Like a Cow Day, so that restaurant was extra busy, and had a little boy and a little girl cow there as costumed mascots. The girl cow had a giant bow on its head, and teens hugged it and took pictures with it. Natalie strongly and repeatedly encouraged Tim to hug the cow, but he declined even more strongly.

I rode in a different van on the way home. For a long time, people slept and I journaled, but then people awoke and started passing around snacks. Maddy had peanut MnMs, and while she was eating them, one broke open. The entire peanut section fell out of the shell, and she held it up to show us. Moments later, she said, "I think it's so cool that you keep a journal!" Then she added, "If your grandchildren never heard that the peanut section came out of my MnM, that would be sad."

Melissa nodded emphatically. "Very sad!"

"You should totally publish your journals someday," Maddy said. "It would be awesome to read them and see life from your perspective."

Hopefully this blog post will suffice.