Monday, April 26, 2010

The First Month

I’ve been in Germany now for almost a month. I’m sorry I haven’t updated before this. About a week and a half ago I had a blog post written, but never had the time to edit it well enough to post… and considering It was sort of time sensitive it would kind of be silly for me to post this late.

The truth is that my life has been crazy since landing. I had a day to unpack, repack, and then the next morning I drove out to where we held our annual Easter camp… where there was no internet connection and the only sure way to “call out” was to use a pay phone in the building we were in… translation… for almost the first half of my time here I was disconnected to the world. In a way it was kind of beautiful.

I spent the first few days of my time in Germany helping to set up for kids camp and making “semi-legal” van trips through the German countryside to either pick people or supplies up, sweating the whole time hoping my three months out of the country was enough time to reset the validity of my Ohio license in Germany. In retrospect it wasn’t, but that was always floating at the back of my mind. To quote Junior Bevel from Cool Runnings “Sometimes a man has gotta do what a man has gotta do.” In retrospect I found out it definitely wasn’t legal for me to be driving… oops.

Kids camp went well, overall… It wasn’t my best performance at a camp, but God got me through the tough times – I hate when people make a bland vanilla statement like that. As a former “English Major” it screams “I don’t want to tell you more, divulge my dark secrets, and get into the ‘interesting stuff.’”

So here goes on the interesting stuff. My German definitely got left behind in the States for at least half the camp. The other half of the camp I was sick. I was a counselor for a group of ten hyperactive boys. They weren’t bad kids necessarily, mostly normal pre-teen and early teen energy, not to mention they had about the attention span of an overly caffeinated squirrel. Translation --- my German skills lagging behind and kids with a short attention span: all too often chaos. There were times I honestly felt like a fool sitting or standing in front of the group, and there were honestly times I didn’t even know how to explain what I was thinking in English; that doesn’t happen often. So the truth is I ended up strongly feeling my own limitations at camp whether that be fatigue, a nasty cold I picked up from a camper, the yips during room time.

But like I said, God is good. At times I’m sure despite my weakness he ended up reaching kids with the Gospel. And that’s more important than whether or not I had a “good outing.” And the guilty truth is despite struggling, I personally had a really good time at the camp. Between some really cool campers and having the privilege to be part of a wonderful staff I’d go back, get sick, and struggle any day.

Since then I’ve been back in the office, trying to settle in before the summer blitz comes. Preparing for summer is like knowing there’s a hurricane coming: you know it is going to make landfall, you know you’ll be subject to high winds, and torrential downpours so all you can really do is put up sandbags, board up your windows, and if you can get to higher ground. That’s kind of what my summer is like, the storm of work is riding out on the horizon somewhere and we all know it’s coming. All of us on the English camp team have experienced it, more than once. But again, knowing what happens in the lives of the teens who come every summer make the long days more than worth it.