Never in my life did I think I would end up in South Africa being a camp counselor at an adventure camp, but that’s what happened last month! We were working with Die Hoekie or in English – Extreme Life camp. Schools would come in during the week or on a weekend and spend 3 days at the camp where we had sessions, messy activities, and stayed up way too late on sugar highs and giggles.
I’ve been a camp counselor before, and to be completely honest, it is one of my absolute least favorite jobs in the world. Being constantly available and energized for kids 24/7 for three days in a row absolutely drains me. The day after a camp you wouldn’t be able to find me because I get so grumpy that I find a secret hole to hide in for fear that if a human tries to talk to me I might actually bite their head off. Seriously, I’ve never been so grumpy in my life.
God knew how much I dislike camp, but he still wanted to use me. Let me tell you about our second camp. This Christian school rolls up and 80 sixth graders empty out of the bus. We always play some icebreaker games right away when they get there, and in the first half hour we already saw kids crying and telling us that someone was bullying them. We assigned rooms, and there were more tears and more stories of bullying. My team could feel the spiritual heaviness around these kids right away, but we couldn’t put a finger on it.
Then, the teachers explain to us that one girl’s mom died last year and her mom’s birthday would have been the next day, plus there’s a boy who’s mom died TWO DAYS AGO. Later on some of the girls in my cabin explain just how much more death of parents and faculty they have experienced and all the heaviness and bullying starts to make sense. These kids were grieving, but didn’t know how, and it was all coming out in being nasty to each other.
The Holy Spirit started working and started to speak to us about what our spiritual sessions were going to be about the next day. Both Alexis and I have stories about losing our dads and different examples of how we didn’t know how to act or grieve before we really knew Jesus.
The next day I got up on stage and shared my story of how holding in my grief made me so emotionally closed off to the world that I too became something of a bully in school. I talked about how I just kept carrying my own burdens and it was slowly destroying me inside. I used my giant hikers pack to show what holding onto all this grief looked like, and as I explained how Jesus took all my burdens away, I dropped all the things I was holding. It was one of those strange moments where I was just as amazed at what was coming out of my mouth as everyone else because I could feel the Holy Spirit speaking, not me.
Sharing our stories opened up doors for conversations about loneliness and leadership to happen with the girls in my group. We saw beautiful things start to happen in that school, and we can only pray that those seeds keep growing.
Despite the fact that I spent the next day hiding in the forest (and getting a new good poop story) because I couldn’t handle the sight of another human… it was worth it knowing that maybe my story helped a young person experience the freedom only Christ can give.
I have this feeling that this isn’t the last time God wants to use my story to offer freedom in Christ to someone else. I might be a little annoyed at how exhausting it sounds to live a life of vulnerability, but it’s so incredibly worth giving everything I have for someone else’s freedom. How beautiful is it that God gave us each unique stories to touch the depths of someone else’s heart so uniquely?
