.capture.

I have the answer to the question. Not any sort of important and/or significant question, but rather the question asked by a dear friend last week at church. She asked me the most important lesson I'd learned this summer. The pastor at my church finally brought this lesson to my attention: love. Love is the answer to the question. Although it seems like such a simple and extremely obvious answer, it is the most important thing that allowed me to survive the summer. :) I suppose I should have learned this from the first week of kids' camps this summer....living with eight 8-11 year old boys with Down Syndrome will TRULY test anyone's sense of patience and love. While I think about how absolutely crazy/non-stop/chaotic this week was, I can only help but think about the happy memories and the hilarious comments from our boys. For every crazy/ridiculous thing that our boys did, I can only help but to love them a little more because they are such WONDERFUL children of God. This morning at church, our pastor gave an AMAZING sermon about creating a "rebellion of compassion" in the US.
There was a skit portraying two different families' reactions to seeing another family who had a child with a disability. One family complained about the child's behaviors while the other family accepted the child and invited her to play with them. Seeing a skit like this REALLY brought to life the reality of how my campers live on a daily basis. They are the ones catching the attention with their out of ordinary behaviors. The pastor brought in the "rebellion of compassion" by relating this skit to the story of Jesus raising the widow's son, found in Luke 17. The sermon focused on finding the people who desperately NEED to be loved on and how we can do it. This week seemed to focus a little bit on individuals with special needs, as our church has a very large ministry, dedicated to children with disabilities.
The following questions were posed at the end of the sermon:
-Do these people capture our attention, or are we blind to them?
-Do these people capture our hearts?
-Are we willing to do something our of the ordinary?

AHHHHHHHH. This sermon just blew my mind. It was simply a confirmation that I needed to hear. Although this summer was MASS chaos, I wouldn't have traded it for anything. Given the opportunity to love on these children, I couldn't have asked for anything different! Learning to love like Jesus has been a lesson I've truly experienced in my summers at camp. :) I thought I would quote a lil' Chris Tomlin right here from his Hello, Love album:

Love is the answer. Love will find a way. When we love one another, it's a brighter day. <3

.emails.

God is SO good. All the time, no questions asked. Seriously, tonight I felt closer to Him than I have in quite a long time and it was just plain AMAZING. :) I'm on such a high right now and I hope and pray that this continues as I begin what could be my last year of school! So today we had to go to orientation for the first years to meet our mentees (side note: it's SO weird that I'm a second year now!!). It was the first time I had seen all of my classmates in 3 1/2 months, so it was great to see everybody again, but I'm definitely not ready to start classes again, that's for sure! This evening, I just got back from church and being reunited with my woooooooonderful church community. It was beyond words epic. I hadn't really told anyone that I was back in Indy yet, so when I showed up at church tonight, people freaked....and I felt loved! :) There was lots of hugging, smiling, giggling, and story telling. I LOVED that soooo many of my friends told me that they enjoyed my email updates but they were glad to have me back in person. I was told that no emails could compare to my actualy enthusiasm in real life. SUCH a warm fuzzy feeling. :) But it was AWESOME to be back and I honestly feel like Indy is home, more than ever now. I am just SO thankful to be back and SO blessed to have found great friends here. When talking with my friends, I was challenged with the question of "What was the most important lesson you learned this summer?" And I am still stumped on that question....more on that question later...as soon as I figure something out....hmmmmmmmm......

.round two.

So....I'm thinking about what else sticks out from this past summer and I have drawn the conclusion of the importance of confidence. NOT OVERconfidence, as displayed by the competition of my alpha male lifeguards (WHICH would require pages and pages to describe, so I will refrain), but just a recognizable amount of confidence to be an effective leader. This summer I realized the importance of being confident in your decisions and making things work, even when you have NO clue what's going on. Having people trust you even when YOU don't know what's going on is a beautiful thing in the world of camp, and I'm hoping it's semi-applicable to the real world. The "fake it 'til you make it" theory has been suggested in my OT classes, so I feel like making rational and/or irrational decisions this summer on the fly, as the person in-charge of the waterfront, can only help in my future endeavors as an OT, right?!? :) In addition to that, I have realized the insignificant value of makeup this summer. I believe that our society places such a HIGH (and unspoken) demand on women to constantly be looking "the best"/wearing makeup or whatever. I've realized that the people most important to me in my life are the ones I wear NO makeup around. Why do I need to try to cover up who I REALLY am to impress people? Shouldn't people like me for ME and not what I look like? Needless to say, going 2 1/2 months with wearing ANY sort of makeup a handful of times, is quite a free-ing experience. I DID wear makeup when I went out several weekends for kicks, but Sunday-Friday I generally went with no sort of makeup. Best of all-- I still made friends (and somehow found a boyfriend...haha) even without makeup. Learning to be confident even when I felt like I wasn't "pretty enough" or "I look like crap" was quite a lesson and I loved being able to experience it. Since being back, I've even found myself wearing it less and just being ME! :)

.round one.

Ehhh....well I'm struggling with this blogging thing over the summer. Oops. Guess it's because I'm not on the computer all that often, unlike the school year.
I don't think it would be possible for me to sit down and collect all of my thoughts from my 2 1/2 month adventure at camp. This post has been designated at "Round One" since this will probably only cover the most basic lesson that Our Wonderful Creator pounded into my head over the summer. The biggest lesson I learned this summer was DEFINITELY on judgment. It is SO easy for us to look at people different than us and label them as weird, different, less than us.....SO EASY. Even when living in a community where judging others' abilities/differences is at an extreme minimum, it still happens. One of my favorite memories from the summer was during one of our first Challenge Days. One camper, who APPEARED to communicate non-verbally and only use a wheelchair, just ABSOLUTELY blew my mind throughout the week. Long story short, by the end of the week I had multiple verbal, humorous conversations with this camper AND on his Challenge Day, he walked 150 steps with his walker. AMAZING!!! Between 4 staff members and 25 minutes, our camper walked from the dining hall to the health center to cross his "finish line". Looking up and seeing his accomplishment (and the tears of all the other staff members) was just AMAZING. Definitely a moment I won't forget. I was able to help measure his walk with yarn.......150 is put into perspective when you are rolling it up around your hand!! SOOOO cool...and just to think that upon meeting him, I never would have guessed he was capable of that. That's one of the things I love about camp...people CONSTANTLY surprising you of their capabilities. And not only with campers....
I have been blessed this summer with getting to know an AWESOME guy at camp (who is "officially" my boyfriend at the time of this post)!! We worked together last summer at camp; although we hardly talked last summer, we had hung out a bit at camp throughout the school year. Naturally, we started conversation easily during CHIPS training. The more we talked, the more we realized we had in common. Things just kept going so well as we continued to talk all summer, followed by several dates, and ta-da! But honestly, I still sometimes am in disbelief that someone I have known for over a year has SO much in common with me once I started talking to him and actually getting to know him. Although he looks very different and has quite a different set of interests than any guy I've dated before, this is something VERY cool. :) A year ago, if you told me I'd be dating this guy, I would have probably laughed, but after actually getting to know him, there's no surprise that I am! :) <--- Pathetically cheesy I know, but I suppose that's how I get after being single for awhile.....:)

.communication.

Well, I'm not sure if anyone has the slightest interest in what's been happening in my life the past 2 1/2 months, but I have now left "the camp bubble" and have unfortunately returned to a place we call "the real world". That means that my communication (or stalking) will resume over the next couple weeks, and then we'll see what happens when my POTENTIAL last year of school starts! Mass craziness...
Regardless, I don't think I could fit into one entry the changes in my life and the lessons learned in the last 2 1/2 months; I've decided to break it down week by week to TRY to explain how I witnessed His work through the lives of our campers, staff, and situations/incidents of Summer 2010.
I suppose to put things into a short summary, I learned the importance of communication this summer. A majority of the problems from this summer came from a lack of communication between staff members, but there is SO much more to be learned here than just the mass chaos of 10 weeks at camp. I neglected to take my designated "2 hour a day breaks" because my job simply didn't allow me to do that and be around my campers as well. Since I didn't take my breaks, I didn't make any phone calls except an occasional one to the parentals on the weekend. Relationships suffer without communication. For sure. Not only between people, but between myself and Christ. I know that I fell away from devotions/alone time this summer MUCH more than I should, but given the circumstances of the summer and needing to find time to seek physical rest overtook the importance of spending time in the Word, in my mind. Bad choice. Although I feel that some areas of my life are disconnected right now (and trying to return to "normal"), learning to communicate with campers was AMAZING. Seriously, as much as I complained about my job, I LOVED it. Learning to communicate non-verbally with so many different people has been such a cool learning experience and it makes me more excited to go back to school to take my AAC class!!!!
Regardless of whether or not this post made sense, I am back in the blogging world and trying to reflect on how I made praising Him a habit this summer. <3