Learning

I took a job last minute at a camp in Pennsylvania. Last minute because I heard about the camp for the first time only 36 hours before I was on a plane headed for New Jersey. I sat on the runway at the airport in Charlotte for 6 hours joking to myself about how, if I hadn’t believed in total depravity before that moment, being trapped on a plane beside a 45 year-old woman that doesn’t know how to communicate without complaining assured me that it was true. Now I see that those 6 hours on a delayed flight was a teaser for what was coming.

The camp is 7 weeks long. Campers come and stay for the whole summer. I live in a bunk with eleven fifth grade girls and two awesome co-counselors from Chicago. I teach six periods of photography every day and when I’m not doing that I’m with the girls from my bunk.

The last seven days have been the hardest I remember having in a long time. Who knew a fifth grade girl could make you feel worthless? I guess I like to think that at twenty-three I am secure enough in who the Lord has made me into that someone’s negative opinion of me won’t shake me. I was wrong.

But I think I can survive this. And yes, that sounds dramatic. But today was the first day I had the strength to stick this out. The strength to be ridiculed and torn down by a group of girls I am dying to break through to. The strength to come up with creative and fun photo projects for kids who refuse to admit that anything is good enough for their time. The strength to love people that I struggle to find any good in.

But as my mom reminded me today – the Lord did that. I don’t think I have been given an opportunity like this before. An opportunity to love because I’m called to and not at all because of the way someone loves me back. With privileged 10-year olds who have never gone without anything they’ve wanted, I struggle to find any reason to treat them better than they treat me. And then … I remember the reason. And it hurts, but its real. And it’s evidence of the Lord’s love in my life and his hand in my story. Or my hand in His.

I got a chance to pray over all the girls’ beds the morning before they came. I prayed over the girls by name. And a couple times a day, usually in a discouraging moment when I consider hopping a plane back to GA, I really look at them and think about how, maybe, no one has ever prayed over them by name. And maybe that is why I’m here.