Camp Food

So Young Life camps, in my opinion, have the best "camp food" ever. Not like your typical summer camp that serves hot dogs, sloppy joes, and mystery meat. Thankfully they don't serve things that look like the picture above. Just looking at it make me want to barf. We are talking full spreads of chicken (a favorite at most camps), potatoes, green beans, salad, and delicious bread. AND of course there is dessert EVERY lunch and dinner. These are meals that high school kids go home and talk about (in a good way) for weeks. Take that camp-that-must-not-be-named-near-huntsville texas. The one thing about Young Life camp food is that it has repetition. It is the same menu week in and week out during the summer. Delicious but non the less, repetitious.

So I happen to love camp food but this week I have been trying my very best to eat all the non-camp food I can. My reason being I am on "vacation." I just spent 3 weeks at Frontier Ranch eating awesome food but I will return there tomorrow to eat 6 more weeks of camp food. So this week I promised myself that I would stay away from as much camp food as possible. I did a fairly good job but in doing so I ate so much junk food it is unbelievable. Here is a list of a few things I have devoured while here at Crooked Creek Ranch:

-Ramen noodles

-gummy bears

-canned soup-

-powdered sugar donuts (whole bag by myself essentially in 3 days)

-crackers

-gummy bears

-thai food!!!

-sour patch kids

-bagels (said like Britta on the TV show Community)

-gummy bears

0k you get the picture.

I really honestly do like camp food and Stu Nelson here at Crooked Creek and Brandon Tattershall at Frontier do an amazing job serving up some delicious spreads.

I have been into Fraser everyday to grab some sort of snack to appease my junk food craving.

Like I mentioned above, I leave to go back to Frontier for the rest of the summer. I will be working in one of their 2 offices. I will be living with the interns (year long and summer). I have no idea what to expect, exactly what my job is, what it will be like to be there fore almost 2 more months, BUT I know that it is where I am being called to be.

I had hoped to spend a summer in amazing Asheville, NC but instead I have the opportunity to spend an entire summer (11 weeks) in the wonderful state of Colorado.

Speaking of being in Colorado. Being in this amazing state, floating from Young Life camp to Young Life camp, I have been able to think about things a little more and go a little deeper with God. I have obviously been thinking about John alot in good ways, something I was having a hard time doing before because I was drowning in sadness.

A few days I was flipping through Psalm and I got stuck on these verses:

"He reached down from on high and took hold of me;

He drew me out of deep waters.

He rescued me from my powerful enemy,

from my foes, who were too strong

for me.

They confronted me in the day of my disaster,

but the LORD was my support.

He brought me out into a spacious

place;

he rescued me because he delighted in me."

-Psalm 18:16-19

Favorite line "He brought me into out into a spacious place.." He certainly has brought me into a spacious place and apparently is not ready for me to leave yet. So I will go, I will continue to sit in this spacious place he has so graciously brought me to.

Back Tracking...

So much to catch up on from the past 3 weeks. In fact, I've been trying to write this blog post for 3 days now.

Frontier was amazing. I met so many awesome people and reconnected with old friends. There will be many posts about it I can assure you. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera cord at home in Asheville so I have no way to get my pictures uploaded to my computer in the moment. fail.

I am currently at Crooked Creek Ranch, a Young Life camp outside of Fraser, CO. My mother is the camp director for the month. I will be here for a week before I head back to Frontier. This was an unexpected summer plans twist. I will be working in one of the offices at Frontier for the next 4-5 weeks. Crazy and unexpected but in the past few days I have come to realize that it is what I need to do.

I promise to try to be good about updating the rest of the summer. I will put this warning out there: I will have way to many posts about Frontier and also about how much I love Colorado.

But since I'm at Crooked Creek I guess I will give you a little back history between myself and this camp. If you don't care, too bad.

Crooked Creek and I go back 10 years exactly. This makes me sound old but I was actually 10 the first time I came here. It was the first time I came to Young Life camp to just hang out. You should know that Crooked Creek was literally brand new that summer and the only buildings in existence were the dining hall, three camper dorms, the game room/office building, and one staff housing building. That may not sound that bad but it was. There was dirt EVERYWHERE. No gym, no pool/hot tub, no club room, no whiffle ball field, just buildings and dirt. But being 10 and not knowing any different I thought it was the coolest camp ever. Plus, it has views like this:

arial view of most of camp. amazing.

view from the porch of the house we are staying in

So there we were. My mother's job was a thing called Head Leader which means she made sure that all the rules were being followed and that high school kids were not sneaking out late at night to make out by the lake or other such things. Fun fact: she is actually staying in the very same room she was in 10 years ago this summer. I was 10, Mary was 8, John was 6, and Anne was 4. Ryan did not come for much time due to reasons I cannot remember. My dad unfortunately could not make it for much of the time either so we had to have "caretakers." Our good friend Emily Blair (Emily Williams at the time) came and watched us as did my grandmother, Meemaw. I didn't really need babysitting so I spent my days playing frisbee golf and fishing in the creek that runs through and around camp. The fishing was amazing but looking back was kind of sketchy because there was this moose that wondered up to camp quite often and he was large and in charge.

One of my favorite memories was from that first summer when there was not much here and most of the staff for the month had to stay on the top floor of the camper dorms. The upstairs had a lobby and all the kids would gather in the lobby on rainy days to participate in all sorts of nonsense. Most of the time it was using the extra mattresses in the building to make mattress forts. One day we decided to have world championship mattress sliding. So we lined the stairs with these very slippery camp mattresses. These are no ordinary stairs. They are so steep you almost need to a rope to climb up them (maybe a little exaggeration). Then two or three kids would climb on top of another mattress and the remaining children would push them down the stairs. It was the fastest, scariest thing ever. You might be wondering what we did when we reach the bottom. Slammed into the wall of course!! It was the front person's job to lift the paper thin mattress high above their face so that the impact into the wall was slightly cushioned. We must have spent hours that afternoon mattress sliding. It was fantastic.

That summer was the beginning of many summers that would be spent at Young Life camps, one of which thankfully ended up bringing me to Asheville, NC.

It is strange to be back in this place after 10 years. Even though I have been here many times since that first trip, I am seeing this camp with new eyes. I am remembering things that I have not thought about in years. I remember my first camp crush on a boy my age, falling into the creek multiple times, Anne sleeping in a closet, wearing shorts in 30 degree weather because we couldn't do laundry all the time, and exploring all around camp and coming back each time with so many cuts and bruises I'm sure people wandered if anyone was looking after me. These memories are so clear it feels like it was literally yesterday.

I am so grateful that I have grown up in Young Life and been given the great privilege to come to a Young Life camp every summer since I was 10 for a month to hang out and be part of God's work in high schoolers lives.

Stay tuned for more ridiculous and probably picture-less blog posts. Stinking camera cord.