surfing

First of all, Mike recently sent me a copy of our Program Team photo, so I decided to share it here with all of you so that you could understand a little part of why I love camp so much. Here we all are in our Duck Dynasty finest, channeling our inner red necks for everything we are worth: Wynd-it, Parker, Narwhal, Rogue and Stitch. We are the dream team. One for the ages.

I am currently half-way through my two weeks of couch surfing before I fly off to the great unknown that is the next year of my life in Rwanda. I spent the najority of this past week in Pickering, Ontario with my dear, dear friends, Tober and D’Brev, or Allyson and Jaclyn and their awesome mother. Ally and I were roommates this summer and Jac was the Discovery Mayor, so she lived above us in the lodge. The magic that was the three of us continued into this week. We mostly slept, watched movies and TV, read books, and slept some more. I reserve the right to sleep for a few days after the end of a long summer at camp. Sleep and get a pedicure.

One night, we had some of other staff from AC over for dinner.

Aren’t they a sight to see! It was such a joy to hang out and talk with them outside of camp. Since I always had to leave to get home, and early at that, I never got the chance to hang out with camp people in the weeks and months that followed camp. It has been such a blessing to spend time with my camp friends after the summer has ended and talk/laugh/debrief. It’s so wonderful to know that there are a host of people who understand the language and the memories that I have when I’m talking about this past summer.

I have now transitioned to the Hamilton, Ontario portion of this couch surfing tour. I am spending a few days with AC’s fearless leader, O captain our captain, Temp (or Carrie). Fun Fact, Carrie has known me since I was 14 because she was an LIT in my chalet the summer I was 14. That’s nuts. Carrie and her roommate are participating in something called Move In, a movement of people who decide to move into a low-income or neglected neighborhood with the intention of being good neighbors. The two of them literally moved into this apartment a few days ago and are saints for already hosting someone even though they aren’t even fully settled themselves. What’s also cool is that they are doing the exact same thing that I did last summer with CHAT, only they are staying here indefinitely and I was only in Church Hill for a summer (though CHAT is there year-round, so it’s the same thing).

It blows my mind how good God is and how global. Yeah, Canada isn’t super foreign or anything, but the fact that people in Richmond, Virginia and people in Hamilton, Ontario are making decisions and praying for similar things and serving a good a loving God who calls us to be good neighbors is amazing to me. They are fairly far away and don’t know that each other exist, and yet they have the same purpose and the same drive to see positive change in their neighborhoods and to God be the glory. I’ve thought a lot about it in the past year, and, while I can’t say where I will be living in my future, I know that something like Move In or what’s happening in Church Hill is what I want to do. I just have to figure out where…