Leadership Camp - 45 Student Leaders Camp in Tents

Three and a half days of leadership camp left me simply desperate for God, desperate for answers, and desperate for a bed!

It was incredibly fulfilling to work with these young leaders and help to provide guidance and instruction during these few days.

The weekend started with an intense challenge that would rival Survivor because of its more than two hour length! Students were put into groups of 5 and were given laminated maps, two inner tubes, 3 sticks and a rope. They were then sent into a gently moving river of varying depths to take their team and their raft upstream.

Several stops along the way had them searching for flags and working as a team. But easily the greatest challenge was the fact that of 45 students, at least 20 were not at all comfortable with water! Some could not swim at all and one of my own students said later that it was her first time being in a body of water of any kind! (It was great fun to watch her learn to swim in the pool throughout the weekend.)

“Going against the flow” was a common theme over the next few days as students grappled with issues of their identity, the effect that Apartheid has on how they value themselves, and forgiveness. Huge topics for a huge weekend.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t really want to go. Just the idea of taking a long weekend and spending it in tents was not that appealing to me. But man was I glad I was there!

The weekend really brought me back to the heart of what I do – and it connected me with students that I wouldn’t otherwise have known.

The weekend made me desperate to find all the answers in the bible to every question they have.

The weekend reduced to me tears as conversations about forgiveness led one young girl to speak about how rape had left her pregnant at 15. Through tears she told me about the blessing of that little girl’s life, even in such turmoil and hardship.

Days later I was struck with this picture of what happens when we don't strive after forgiveness as people who have been forgiven so much. I'm sure the analogy stems from so much talk about who is able to swim and who is not...Our feet are shackled to the bottom of a pool and the water is filling up around us, but we have the key to unlock our chains in our hand. But it's just too scary to put our face under the water, dive down and begin the process of unlocking ourselves. So instead we settle for drowning slowly.