"In Christ's name, we play"

I'm taking a few of my students to summer camp in July.  Yes, I'm voluntarily choosing to spend six out of about thirty free summer days with my students. Currently three are on board for a full or partial scholarship, and I'm working on a fourth. This isn't an academic camp. It is a messy, sweaty, paint-covered, oar-rowing, rope-swinging, lunch song singing, fire-building, prayerful, mosquito-bitten camp. That's exactly where I want to take four of my creative, outgoing students who are generally under appreciated by their peers. I've spent all year insisting that they stay on topic and sit quietly in their seats unless I call on them or give them permission to stand. Now I want to see them smear food on each others' faces and march on tables. I want to see them rolling around in a mud pit playing tug-of-war. I really want to see them dancing and being as loud and WEIRD as their hearts desire. I want to see them talking to other kids who also speculate whether the skunk ape is really real.

My camp students are so excited. Pretty much daily all of them will ask me a question about camp or just exclaim knowingly, "I'm so excited about this summer!" They are excited by the prospect of staying in real camp cabins with bunk beds "like in the movies." They are especially interested in and excited about the ropes course. They open their eyes widely when I tell them that, no, they won't be able to use a phone or mp3 player for six days. The respite from technology is a sacrifice they will share with other campers.

Camp Bratton-Green is a place very dear to my husband's heart and, more recently, to mine. Lloyd has attended the camp since he was a third grader and has worked there since high school, spending two college summers on the Permanent Staff as the head of Nature programming. I went there on several middle school retreats and still remember dancing to "Leaving on a Jet Plane" in the rec hall with my sixth-grade crush at a school dance. Eleven years later I mailed weekly or bi-weekly letters to Lloyd there as he worked on the Permanent Staff. A year after that Lloyd asked me to marry him there during a talent show while we were staffing a high school winter session. Seven months after that we got married there in a chapel that shares grounds and ties with the camp. Lloyd cites Camp Bratton-Green as his favorite place on earth.

Staring contests, catching carpenter ants for ant fondue, sixth grade boys dressing in drag, eating ice cream off the table with no hands or utensils, night hikes with people dressed up as monsters and jumping out at kids, lunchtime speed singing competitions--these are all things I want my kids to see and participate in. They need to. Their lives depend on it. I must do this for their future.

Here are some engagement shot glimpses of camp (in a much more serene state than when campers are present):