I’ve been visiting Camp Cross for over 10 years. We attended a Labor Day Family Camp with our St. James’ (Pullman, WA) parishioners and I enjoyed the glorious natural beauty, but also the fellowship among the participants. Christian community in a non-parish setting is one feature of Camp Cross that has me reminding others to “keep comin’ back! “

While wading at Crescent Beach, my wife Alison relayed her metaphor for her relationship to God.  In the cool water, she floats effortlessly.  As she returns to the rocky shore, her body becomes heavy as she leaves the (holy) water and works to carry herself. It’s harder and harder to gain ones footing.  Yet, a loving arm reaches out to help her gain stability. This arm is God’s love in the form of your loving friend. Together, you can walk the journey on hot, dry land, until you once again return to refreshing water for relief.

Additionally, Camp Cross is a holy place where I have seen miracles happen.  Of course, miracles are in the eyes of the beholder and subject to perspective. This week I have seen the miracle of change. Mid-high campers arrived on Sunday, with anxiety, fears and few friends. In just a few days, I have seen them transformed. They’ve bonded with each other, shared intense experiences, been challenged in their views of faith and even improved their table manners (yes, a great miracle indeed!).  In all seriousness, the joy shared in a small group or gathered around a summer campfire is a holy miracle repeated again and again here.  I’ve noticed another transforming miracle recently.  As I look at this year’s staff members, several have spent many years coming to Camp Cross. They’ve loved being a camper with all the newness that experience brings. Camp Cross can be an intense emotional experience of faith on a young person’s own terms, far from their parish home.  It’s their mountaintop where they gain spiritual insight. Some grow into being a counselor, learning leadership skills shepherding a small group.  This is a critical stage in the faith formation of young people. Of that group, some continue serving as permanent staff members, gaining more leadership skills at the next level, long after coming to Camp Cross for the first time.  This chain of transformative experiences shapes the lifelong faith of many.

Wednesday night, we used a meditation from Taize to focus in the darkness of the cool evening, sitting on a floating dock.  Many relaxed on their backs, pondering the universe, gazing up into the vast expanse of stars. Some reported seeing up to five shooting stars and several orbiting satellites were visible.  Amid the cool breeze, surrounded by both intimate friends and endless cosmos, God is good; Very good; Always.

Caitlin Gordon buries nailheads after stripping the floor of 3 layers of flooring.

After Kurt, our United Methodist Council on Relief (UMCOR) project manager, stopped by it was clear. If we wanted to apply bleach on Thursday, we needed to get down to the original floors.  I hadn’t realized the floors were layers of previous remodeling projects. We had been working for almost three solid days on Ron’s I-Street house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  On Monday, we arrived to find a home where some things had been partially cleared, but the daunting task of gutting the house remained. Ron had come around Monday to greet us. He had a hard time seeing his life sorted into piles and left a few hours later.  Our mission team of twelve students pressed hard on the first day, each suited up with protective clothing, gloves, goggles and masks. One team started pulling frozen, wet junk from the basement. Another group ferried relatively dry things from the second story. A larger group began to tackle the main floor, where the damp structure needed to be stripped down to the stud wood skeleton.  Thankfully, March 2009 in Cedar Rapids was blessed with wonderful warm sunny weather. Mounds of materials were sorted at the curb and quickly it became difficult to see passing cars over the top.  Hammers pounded at unyielding boards until they popped and dropped. Crowbars convinced plaster to crumble. Insulation, some dry and some damp, fell out of holes in the plaster.  We went home, showered and returned Tuesday for more of the same. A city truck with a “clam arm” removed the mounds of debris from day one as we arrived.  The basement crew plunged deeper into the crawlspace, now lit by generator power and aided by the melting ice. The second story crew removed plaster from the staircase walls. We sang “Happy Birthday” to Alissa, the Methodist Campus Minister and some opted to watch the downtown St. Patrick’s parade. The main floor team went for ceilings with a vengeance, creating a cloud of fibrous gray dust.

Ron's main floor bathroom BEFORE demolition.

Soon, another mound of materials blocked the sidewalk. With many tasks complete, we headed for home and the showers.  Wednesday morning brought new vigor amid the frosty-cold morning. The crew worked to drop the mud room structure from the rear of the house, converting it to another pile of debris. Weary students made more wheelbarrow trips to the street. The dry mid-day wind warmed the crew. A long break in the afternoon showed fatigue. Then Kurt came by for his daily look.

Caitlin and Kate: Hard work and all smiles (under their dusty masks)

What happened next was truly amazing. After some attempts to get to the lower levels of original flooring, the kitchen crew began using a system to pry and push, ripping off slats rapidly. They were supported by many students who ran liberated boards out to the street.  Soon the focus of the entire crew was the entirety of the main floor, where slats were covered with nailed plywood further covered with a layer of glued parquet.  New tools aided the strip, but the entire group pumped in a communal burst of adrenaline and ripped off sheet after sheet, section by section. Some pulled debris away, while another group followed to pound down exposed nails.  In 90 minutes, the floor was clean and piles of debris were high. Sweat poured down our foreheads. Dust masks flexed as workers panted behind them. Shoulders ached, but the task was done. No one was injured. Like a plow busting through sod at high throttle, the surge had pressed against the need and broken through. We returned to the showers and our home weary, sweat-soaked and completely spent, grinning all the way.

At the beginning of the first day, our (clean) group poses with homeowner Ron Palmer (center, dark glasses).

Youth Ministry encompasses many different things.  Depending on which web site you visit or magazine you read you are told that you can learn the absolute most important things about youth ministry.  You can discover an array of fun games, movie clips to show for a lead into a Bible study, discussion starters, prayer service, the newest songs with spiritual references and the great ways to decorate space for youth.  All these things enhance a youth program, but the truth is that none of these are the most important thing for ministry with youth.

            The most important thing for a successful youth ministry is a relational ministry.  This is where it can be tricky because relational ministry doesn’t necessarily come with the most charismatic leader or the coolest young adult.  It happens through a mutual building of trust between the youth and the leader.  There is no minimum or maximum age for a youth worker who builds a relational ministry.  Instead there is the fact that the youth worker is there to be present for the youth.  They are the person who will be there every time the youth group meets.  They are the person who listens to the youth as they talk about their hopes, fears, families, friends, schools and other interests.  The relational youth minister meets the parents of the youth building relationships with them. They let the parents know what is happening at youth group and what are the upcoming plans for the group. 

            You’ll know when relational youth ministry happens by the amount of phone calls the leader receives from the youth checking about activities.  You also know it is happening when the youth turn to their youth leader in times of distress and times of happiness.  It is happening when you receive phone calls from concerned parents asking if you can talk to their son or daughter to help them through a difficult situation.  It can also happen when the leader receives an occasional late night phone call, text messages on your day off, or a phone call during lunch from a group of youth at school to tell their youth leader that they love them.  Youth ministry can be all of these things and yet it can be as simple as sitting down with a youth and listening to what they have to say.  They pay is minimal, the hours long, but the youth are a treasure to behold.

The 30 Hour Famine icon, from their website.

Last weekend,  we had the Thirty Hour Famine at the Cathedral.  That is a youth event, where the youth learn about world hunger while fasting for thirty hours.  The fast is a fast from foods, but we could drink some broth and fruit juice.  It also involved doing some service projects.  We started fasting at 1 in the afternoon on Friday.  The kids arrived at the Cathedral around 7 in the evening.  We did some games and activities, learning about hunger, interspersed with games to goof off and relax.  The next morning, we did some more games and worked on two service projects for the Cathedral, cleaning up the Sunday School supply room and working on a banner.

We also watched The Rescue of Joseph Kony’s Child Soldiers, which is a movie about child soldiers in Uganda.  After watching the movie, some of the group went down to a rally in support of the child soldiers, held at Lewis and Clark High School.  We all went to the 5:30 service Saturday evening, and then we had dinner around 7, breaking our fast.  After dinner, we all packed up and went home.

The event was pretty good for raising awareness of world hunger.  There were a lot of stories and pictures of people suffering from hunger throughout the world, which do make the issue of world hunger more real and vivid.  That is a good way to present information to people, so they can understand it and connect to it.

However, some of the information was not presented as well.  There were a lot of numbers about world hunger, without a lot of context.  For instance, they had the statistic, 862 million people are chronically hungry, which on it’s own is just a number.  It’s so big, it’s hard to have a real gut feeling for it.  It’s a lot of hungry people, but how many, really?  It would be better to put this number in perspective by, for instance, saying the population of the Earth is about 6.8 billion people, so that means about one in eight people is chronically hungry.  One in eight is the sort of number that a person can imagine.

I am not sure whether the use of fasting to make the issue of world hunger more real was helpful.  Fasting, even if you do get broth and fruit juice, is hard because it makes you tired and cranky, which does make it harder to focus and learn.  Which is good for teaching you that it is hard to learn when you’re hungry, but bad for teaching you facts about world hunger.  Also, some youth chose not to come to the event because they did not want to have to go hungry.  To that extent, the famine was counterproductive.

At the same time, it does make you really feel what being hungry is like, which hopefully makes you care more about people that are hungry.  To that extent, it is useful.
On the whole, the event deals with an important issue, and some of the way the information is presented is good, but some of it could be presented better.

snow, snow, snow!

Today as I took a short walk to clear my head from hours of staring at the computer screen, the sky was a clear vivid blue with white clouds painted sporadically throughout the scene.  Over to the west, dark clouds were starting to form, waiting to slowly move through the Spokane area with yet another storm.  This winter has been a challenge for most of the people I know, even those who enjoy winter.  The snowstorms and cabin fever of this winter have tended to create a feeling of restlessness among many who are anxiously awaiting the arrival of sunny warm weather.

One thing that I have noticed this winter is that the youth have had the best attitude about it.  They have embraced the weather, enjoying the winter sports in which they partook.  But this is not a new attitude for the youth I work with.  They approach life with a measure of hope and love of fun.  They look for opportunities to meet people from all walks of life and find new experiences.  Youth are the best teachers!  We need to spend time with them, talk to them, listen to their music, watch their videos and hear their stories.  They have so much to share! Through them we can learn a new appreciation for things we have come to take for granted. 

When we appreciate the gifts the youth offer to us then we can truly connect with them.  We can journey together to learn about our faith and explore unknown spiritual paths to God.

The Holliston Town Hall, where they were married, though it was not so decked out in Fourth of July decor at the time. Image from the Holliston Town website.

Last weekend, I was in Boston with all my friends from college because our friends Jeffrey and Julia were getting married.  The wedding was in the style of the Quakers, which means it was part of a Meeting for Worship.  If you don’t know, the way Quakers meet for worship is they all sit together in silence for a while, and if somebody is moved to speak, he does.  There is no liturgy or anything, just people sitting together.  I worshiped with the Quakers for a summer, and all the meetings I have been to were at Pendle Hill.  They were about half an hour or an hour long, and usually only one or two people would get up to speak.  (Sometimes Quakers have programmed meetings; they work differently, but I have never been to one so I don’t know what they are like).

Anyway, the way the wedding worked is, we all sat there quietly for about twenty or thirty minutes, and then Jeff and Julia got up, exchanged their vows, and exchanged rings.  After that, people began to get up and say things: about marriage, about the two of them, about growing up.  We hard stories about Jeff’s childhood, about Julia’s sister thinking Julia was crazy to get married already, and about seeing the relationship between the two of them.

This way of getting married was rather different from any wedding I had ever been to (I’ve been to a few: some of my aunts’ and uncles’ weddings, and the wedding of one of my mom’s friends; all were quite some time ago).  There was no minister, no flower girls, no readings, and no real pomp of any sort.  It was all pretty simple and low-key.  Well, that is in character for Jeff and Julia.  It was very different from anything Episcopalian, most obviously because there was no liturgy, just people getting up and speaking as they were moved.  It was different, but I think it was quite beautiful, hearing what everybody had to say to them.  Some if it might have seemed a bit inane, but it was all heartfelt.  It was particularly moving hearing my friends getting up and saying the things I felt but did not have the words for.

The tree swing we swung on.

For me and many of my friends, Jeff and Julia are the first of our friends to get married, so for us the wedding was not only a sign that the two of them were growing up, but also a sign that we were.  I remember when, the fall of our senior year, Jeff first asked us whether he ought to accept Julia’s proposal of marriage.  One or two of my friends and I ran off to the nearest tree swing to swing on it.  We were, we felt, not old enough for our friends to start getting married.  As time passed, though, it became more and more obvious that the two of them should get married, and if that meant we would all have to grow up a little, maybe that was not so bad after all.

The Virginia Theological Seminary campus was really beautiful. Image taken from the Virginia Theological Seminary website.

From Friday February 20th to Sunday February 22nd, there was a conference for interns in the Episcopal Church Service Corps at Virginia Theological Seminary, in the DC suburbs.  The conference was an opportunity for interns and their directors to meet together.  As part of my internship, I went to this conference, and so did my director, Bryan.  I do not know what the program for the directors involved, except for when they were with us.  The program for the interns involved chapel Friday night, extensive Bible study on Saturday, with a focus on call stories, a driving tour of DC, and church Sunday morning, which was at Trinity Episcopal Church in Northwest DC, the church with which the DC internship program is associated.

Bryan and I arrived a bit late on Friday, because it took longer to get from the airport to the seminary than anticipated, so we missed chapel on Friday night, but we were there for the rest of the program.  Also, I had the chance to see my mother some, which was nice.  I grew up in the DC area and my parents still live there, though my father was away that weekend.  My mother, in fact, drove Bryan and I to the airport Sunday afternoon, which was very convenient for us.

The conference provided an opportunity to meet other interns in the Episcopal Church, which I thought was pretty exciting because there aren’t any others here in Spokane.  It was good both to meet people in different programs, in order to see how ours here in Spokane is similar to and different from the others, and also just to meet other young people that are excited about serving in an Episcopalian context.

The program we interns experienced provided many subjects for further thought.  Our Bible study of various call stories provided a lot of material for my own thoughts about my sense of call and vocation.  Towards the end of the Bible study we talked some about the challenges of being an intern, particularly those posed by family members and friends who do not understand what interning with the church is about and why it is something in which we are engaged.

It would have been even better if the conference had provided more structured ways to process the issues it brought up, perhaps in small-group discussions or something.  It would have been particularly helpful to have had some sort of structured way to discuss how the call stories we studied related to our own senses of call.  It would also have been helpful to discuss in small groups the challenges of interning, especially if the emphasis were not just on what the challenges are, but also on how to deal with them.

One of the aims of this conference was to build connections between the interns, and having small-group discussions would have helped with that aim, too, because it would have built in program time geared toward interacting with other interns.  As it was, the program relied mostly on large-group time, alternating with completely unstructured time, neither of which provides much structural support for getting to know the interns from other programs that one does not already know.

TECers, team members, and adults pose for a photo on Sunday morning.

From Friday January 16 to Sunday January 28, the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist hosted its third Teens Encounter Christ (TEC), which is a retreat lead by youth for youth.  There were about 40 youth in attendance, approximately equally divided between TECers (youth who had not attended a TEC before) and team members (youth who had attended a previous TEC and were now helping lead this TEC).

The youth sit to listen to a talk.

The program for TEC involved ten talks, most given by the youth leaders, whose topics spanned from “Who am I?” to turning from sin to “Being an Apostle.”  The youth discussed the talks afterward, in five small groups, each lead by some of the team members.  The youth also ate together in these groups for most of the meals.

The program also involved several worship experiences, which brought the youth from the Ash Wednesday and Good Friday experience, through the Easter mystery, and into Pentecost.  Friday night ended with an Ash Wednesday/Good Friday service, which involved a writing and burning of sins, an imposition of ashes, and a form of the stations of the cross.  Saturday morning began with an Easter Vigil, and Sunday celebrated Pentecost.

The youth gather around, listening to the singer Marshall play before one of the talks.

On Saturday afternoon the Rev. Bert Marshall, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, recited the entire Gospel of Mark, which he had memorized.  He did not follow a particular translation, but rather recited it in his own words.  He recited with a certain amount of drama, in the form of oral story, which kept it interesting.  It was pretty cool, although some of the kids got bored and we were all really tired.  We had been up past one in the morning the night before, in order to get through all the talks and everything.  One of the funniest parts of the presentation of the gospel was how it ended.  The end of the Gospel of Mark is so abrupt, the women see Jesus is risen and they don’t tell anyone, and that’s it.  So he recited up through that, and then he left, and we all just sat there.  Well, then he came back and he told us, you know, that really is the end.  He then took questions.  The event was open to the public, and the questions mostly ended up being for their benefit, because those of us doing TEC had to go do other things.  The TECers had to go shower and have some free time, and we adults and team members had to get the Agape Dinner set up.

At the Agape Dinner.

The Agape Dinner was the dinner on Saturday night.  It was a formal sit-down dinner that was a surprise for the TECers.  All the youth, both team members and TECers got served by us adults.  After the dinner, the TECers were led on a trust walk which led them to the crypt.  While they were on the walk, we set up the big community room in the crypt for a dance, with music, cool lights, and a fog machine.  We also set up the smaller youth room as a quiet room with board games, for people who didn’t want to dance.

Decorating bags for wheat.

After the dance, we all went back upstairs to the cathedral and the TECers were given their wheat.  In TEC, wheat is a term that means a sign of God’s love.  All the team members made wheat for all the TECers.  For instance, one made cookies for everyone, and another made little bags with Hershey’s kisses and a poem.  The most important wheat is a letter each TECer receives from his parents, about how much they love him. Our youth director, Michelle, tells the parents to write the letter.  Since I knew my parents did not know about this, I was not expecting to get any wheat letters.  I was, therefore, quite surprised to get letters from the people I work with, like my priest and the people at the diocesan office.  It was quite unexpected. I suppose that’s the point.

TEC was pretty different from anything I’d ever seen.  In the church I grew up in, we did not do much in the way of youth retreats.  I think the closest I had ever experienced was a lock-in at my church in sixth grade, but the only part I really remember about that was playing hide-and-go-seek in the sanctuary.  TEC was a lot more religious.  It was a good experience, but also really intense.  It was difficult because Michelle was trying to give me some of the TEC experience while I was simultaneously doing the adult helper thing.  That combination meant seeing most of the talks and getting the wheat letters, but also having to do adult things, which generally meant getting things ready for the next event.  It was alright having to do that except that it ended up meaning that, unlike the TECers, I didn’t really have any time to process anything that happened.  On the whole, though, TEC was a very good experience and one I was glad to have helped with.

Shepherds and sheep in the pageant

I was in my first ever Christmas pageant a couple weeks ago, as part of the Cathedral’s pageant.  I was a shepherd.

It was about the first Christmas pageant I can remember even remember seeing, and certainly the first one I had ever been a part of.  I grew up Unitarian Universalist, and I suppose the Christmas pageant is not something UUs do that much.  In any event, as far as I can remember, we never had a Christmas pageant in my church when I was a kid.  The Episcopal church I was going to in college had a pageant, but it was always close enough to Christmas that it was after our semester was over and we’d gone home for the holidays.

One of the three kings comes

So there I was, grown up and an intern and everything, and I suddenly had to learn all these mysteries about exactly who all the people in the Christmas pageant are, and what shepherds wear, and whether they can wear their shoes or not.  Being a shepherd is fortunately not difficult.  I am not exactly sure what happened before we got on the scene, but by the time we arrived, Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus were already there in Bethlehem.  We came in and sat at some distance until the angels came.  Once they came and stood behind the scene, we followed them to the holy family.  We then waited while the three kings came with their gifts, concluding the pageant.

Crosswalk asked us to bake pie for about 80 people, so we baked six pumpkin pies and six apple pies.  Because it had snowed the night before and the roads continued to be rather treacherous, we had not been sure that any of the youth would be able to come.  As it turned out, we had about six kids when we started baking the pies, around one in the afternoon, and another six or so trickled in over the course of the afternoon.

It took us about three hours to make the pies and clean up.  Michelle and Pia showed a couple of the kids how to make pie dough and I helped some others prepare the apples for the apple pies.  By about four in the afternoon, we had finished cleaning up and all the pies were either baking in the oven or were done.  We then had our present exchange.  Everybody brought a present and everyone had a turn to either open a present or steal a present someone else had opened.  I brought a card game and ended up with a set of really cool magnetic rocks.

After the present exchange, we had an early dinner, so the kids could leave before the roads all froze, and the kids trickled back home.  After we finished cleaning up, we went to the wholesale grocery store to buy eggnog and whipped cream, which we took to Crosswalk along with the pies.