Why We Come

In case you need a reminder of the beauty of what you’re about to do with your summer, this essay written by former counselor and Group Leader Heather Brown Holleman sums it up perfectly!

Camp stories are the hardest to tell.

All I know is that this place is pure delight – a miracle in the mountains. The days are the closest thing to heaven I can imagine. The children are happy and healthy; they laugh and actually roll down the hills for fun. They sing in the Dining Hall and climb up the apple trees to pick the apples and feed them to the horses and then to themselves. They have big eyes and small hands. They get in trouble for playing their little girl tricks. When I see them dancing, I am shown that a little girl is the most beautiful of all creations. They blush and learn to be ladies. They put their napkins in their laps and still catch frogs in the afternoon. They have such talent and goodness in them. Christ shines in their smiles and in their hugs. Here, they are alive and full of life. They get in a kayak for the first time. They learn to tap dance and to thread a needle. They are tiny lives with eternity before them.

They are special from the moment they arrive. The nametag their counselor gives them says, “See, I already knew you were coming, and I could hardly wait for you to arrive.” We’ve carved out a place for you to be safe and free for five weeks of an otherwise hard year. Here, you go to sleep to the sound of the wind and a piano and wake up to the kitchen staff baking bread and brewing coffee. It is safe – that is what I know of this place. Safe, even in the midst of the storm that seem to come like clockwork on the afternoons when camp needs rain the most.

The stories of camp cannot be told because they lie too deep. Years later a memory comes to a child and she remembers writing her name on a cabin wall; her claim that she was here, that her life matters and was transformed by a summer in the mountains. I love this place because it teaches that the spirit of a child is of infinite value. I love that people matter more than programs, that stillness is honored, that tradition is not forgotten and that at least one part of the world slows down for a few weeks and basks in the light of each other and the God who made it all.

Everyday I am struck by the value of a life. At camp, more than anywhere else, I am struck by the seeming simplicity of any life of a child and the details of her day. The simplest action suddenly takes on great meaning. A nametag has eternal significance, a seat in the Dining Hall, her name in the Green and Gold book, a bunk that is here, a trunk with her things carefully folded on opening day, and piled with ceramics projects, notes, pictures, and memories on closing day. She leaves having spent time at the Council Fire ring where for 80 years the trees have witnessed the presence of tiny lives willing to see what happens next. She has maybe prayed for the first time in her life, and was tucked in at night with the love and protection of the people who are committed to her growth and God’s perfect plan for her life. It all adds up to something in the plan of Christ – to participate in human lives, to mold and to make us into something perfect, something unexpected, and something more beautiful than we could have ever imagined.

Heather E. Brown

July 26, 1998