THEY'RE COMING!

Campers are coming tomorrow! Campers campers campers campers CAMPERS!!!!!

We're going to have so much fun! : )

I got my first worksite today

I'll be working at the home of a woman named Thomasina Robinson and her family. And I'll be all by myself with the campers, no other staff around to help me. This freaks me out a little bit, but I'm feeling much more confident about it than I thought I would. I thank God for that. It's much more responsibility than I had last summer, when I had no worksite of my own and just bounced around from site to site throughout the summer, aiding whoever needed the most help that week. Since I was usually only on a worksite temporarily, I was never a part of any of the planning, so my only real function was to make sure the camper stayed happy, hydrated, and unharmed and to know where to locate the staff member who had all the answers. Since this was all the experience I had, I initially felt really intimidated at the thought of managing a worksite alone, but Joe (one of our camp directors) is really great about helping us plan and making sure we have a very good understanding of what we're doing, and that made me feel better. Also, I know that God will be helping me manage this site, so I won't be alone, and that's the best comfort of all.

Today we went around to each person's job site, meeting the home owners and looking at the homes to see what jobs needed to be done. I don't think it would be unsafe to say that the Robinson's home is the worst. The live in a trailer onto which someone added another room a few years ago, but whoever built it made a serious mistake, because the roof of this extension slants inwards towards the rest of the house, meaning that when it rains water cannot run off the roof and instead pools in the middle of their roof and stays there until it evaporates, resulting in a rapidly rotting roof so leaky there's no point trying to patch any of them, because more will just spring up to replace them. I was on their roof today, and from the look of it I'm surprised it even functions as well as it does. I'll try to post a picture at some point. The thing is, Joe and Glenn (a local contractor who will be helping us out this summer) aren't sure there's anything we can do about it. First of all, we certainly cannot put campers on this roof. It's just too weak; we can't take the risk, so any work on it we'd have to do ourselves on the weekends or something. Also, the rest of the house is so weak that if we put much more weight onto the roof it might not be able to hold it, and the city codes restricting roofing work like this are very limiting. They're going to keep thinking about it, but at the moment they say it's likely there's nothing we can do about their roof and that we should just do what we can for them, because there are some things we just can't do anything about. I refuse to accept this. I absolutely refuse to accept that there is not a single thing we can do for this family to help the fact that their roof is about to cave in. God is smarter than all of us, and he is creative, and he is the authority over the authorities and is bigger than all the city ordinances and the people that make them, and I believe whole heartedly that he can give us a solution to this problem and a way to help this poor family. Please pray with me that he will provide us with an answer.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that they have pitbulls. Oh yeah. Two of them, and puppies, which are cute, but the big ones like to bark. A lot. Those of you who know me well know my fear of big dogs, and while these ones are in cages they still really freak me out. But I will be working at the Robinson home for three weeks at least. This is a good opportunity for me. I will be brave by the end of my time there.

I Enjoy People's Different Stories

On Saturday I walked to the Starbucks near our hotel with Emily and Natalia (they're on my staff). We got our drinks, and we were heading for the door when suddenly Natalia turned around and started asking the barista about her tattoos. I'm thinking, "Yeah, she has tattoos, so do a whole ton of other people. Why are you just randomly talking to this girl?", but once I stopped to look at the tatoos that covered her arms I was glad I did. Across her forearms she had written "I am fearfully" (left) "and wonderfully made" (right). That made me happy, and I inferred from the fact that she had Scripture tattooed on her body that she was a Christian, which also made me happy. I would have been content to stop the conversation there at tattoos and walk away pleased to have seen her lovely arms and smile, but then Natalia asked the question I never would have asked. She looked at the girls arms and said "Cool, so are you a Christian?" I was shocked at her boldness. I am not so outgoing that I would ever even think of asking a complete stranger such a personal question, which my be a little bit silly, I don't know. But anyway, Natalia's outgoing nature led to this girl (who we learned was named Savannah) inviting us to her church, where she leads worship. We should go some time soon though, she told us, because in a few weeks she's leaving to go to Australia for a year, where she will be attending Hillsong Leadership College. She's really excited about going, though nervous about leaving everyone and everything she knows.

I would never even have started a conversation with this girl. This experience has taught me that I need to be more outgoing and not afraid to strike up conversations with random people. You never know how they'll turn out. The worst they can do is walk away right? I also just enjoy the situation as a whole, that this random girl who made my coffee for me has this great story. My barista is also a worship leader, who God has called to leave her life and spend a year in Australia, where she'll learn to be a better leader so that she can use those skills to do something amazing for God's glory. We only get glimpses of people, like that cliche about the iceburgs, but everyone has their own unique and amazing life story, and I enjoy getting to hear them.

Myrtle Beach!

Not gonna lie y'all, I'm so tired I don't really want to write this and would much rather take a nap, but I don't know when I'll have enough free time later and I promised I'd keep you all informed.

So today is Sunday, and I'm having a really hard time believing that I just met my staff on Tuesday. We're already really close. I was afraid that since I was showing up a week late that I would feel left out or just not as close to everyone, but they welcomed me in with open arms and easy explanations of all their inside jokes. It's hard to believe that with 11 people we would all get along and have no cliques of subgroups within our staff, but that's the way it's happening, and it's amazing. I was really worried about there being division among my staff this summer, but this, this is fantastic. Everyone here is wonderful and very sweet, and we all just love spending time together. I really think we have one of the best Teameffort staff this summer. It's truly exceptional how close we all are, and to say I'm excited about it seems like a major understatement. They make my heart feel warm and fuzzy. We're going to have a great summer together.

I think we were here about ten minutes before I solidified my reputation as the happy and excited one on the staff. I couldn't help it! I was so excited to be here (and I still am!) that I just couldn't stop expressing my joy. I'm normally a very joyful person, but it was just overflowing out of me like never before. Me being excited about something isn't exactly noteworthy, but I'm telling you about this because when we stopped and prayed for the summer before we began to unpack, oh man, it was the coolest thing, I could literally feel God SMILING at me. He was excited because I was so excited, and He was pleased to see the gift of joy that He gave me spilling out of me like that. It was like He was saying, "Look at her! Look at my daughter, she's so excited! I made her to be like that! Isn't it great?". I could literally feel my creator taking delight in me, and it was so revealing of how God loves us and enjoys it when we use the gifts He gave us. So wonderful : )

No campers until next week : / Apparently only one group signed up for the first week of camp, which would have been beginning today, so they called them an asked them to come the following week. I wish we were getting campers now, but I've been waiting since July so I guess another week won't hurt. Besides, that means the last few days and this next week will be very relaxed, because we have so much extra time to set up camp. It's nice.

So far, an excellent beginning to what I hope will be an even more excellent summer.

And So It Begins

It's 1:30 in the morning. We went to Walmart around 10:30 for the summer-opening-walmart-run and got back about 45 minutes ago. We're just finishing up settling into our room, because we have 5 girls in a room with 3 bunk beds and absolutely no storage space, so we had to buy some of those plastic drawer sets at Walmart before we could really finish unpacking. I just finished. Got up at 9 and spent the day building bunk beds for the campers before going from there to dinner and to Walmart after that. I meant to write today about how awesome my staff is and how beautiful a summer it's going to be, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, well, technically later today.

As crazy, jam-packed, and exhausting a day as that might sound, it's actually been a pretty typical Teameffort day, right up to bed much after midnight, and I have to say, I love every exhausting second of it.

Teameffort summer has begun.

Never Be Afraid To Speak

I have never heard my dad say the words "I love you". Not to anyone. Not even me. The same goes for the entire rest of his family, my aunts, my uncle, my grandparents, for some reason none of them ever say those words. I think this is terribly sad, and it goes against all my ideas of how life should be lived. So I decided to break the cycle. When we left my grandmother's hospital room for what we all knew would be the last time, I have her a hug and said, "I love you grandma". She looked up at me and smiled broadly, obviously quite pleased, patted my hand and said, "Thank you for saying that to people". To some that may seem like a horribly disappointing response to telling someone you love them, but it works for me. I hardly expected that after an entire lifetime to not telling people she loves them my grandmother would suddenly, at age 91, say it to me just because I said it to her. Her obvious happiness in that moment was quite enough for me.

The reason I'm writing about this is because of my grandma's words, "Thank you for saying that to people". I find it tragic that in her life being told that she is loved is exceptional enough that she thanked me just for saying it to "people", that the general concept of verbal expression of love, not just to her, but to anybody, has been so foreign to her life. True, it is likely that my dad doesn't tell me he loves me because she never said she loves him, but somebody never told her they loved her as well. It's such an awful cycle, but it's so easily broken. Telling somebody that you care about them and that they are special to you is never something we should hesitate to do, not because of the cheesy adage "You never know what will happen" (though that is true, my best friend may get in a car wreck tomorrow and I'd be happy to know I told her how much she meant to me), but simply because it's important that they know. It says something about how much you care about someone that you want to make sure they know it, that you refuse to leave it up to chance that they understand the implication of your actions or assume it because of the nature of your relationship. How much can you care about someone if you don't care that they know how you feel? Never hesitate to tell somebody that you love them. Love is a good thing. Very rarely does anyone dislike being told that they are loved, and you're more likely to regret not saying it than saying it. Don't hold back.

"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth." - Benjamin Disraeli