March was awesome and full of crazy random times. We started planning an Urban Plunge mission trip for a group of kids from Wolfe Creek Alberta, with Melissa as our fearless leader. This involved, on my end at least, a tonne of late nights spent working moderately hard to get everything done on time.
One of the high points for me this month was going to… Timberline Ranch for their middle school camp, and I was stoked to go and be a counsellor again. It was glorious. My camp name was Lotus and part of the fun was not letting the campers know what your real name is. I bombed that horribly and I think that there was only on kid at the end who remained clueless. It turned out to be a crazy week with lots of unexpected’s – and lots to learn.
I ‘taught’ riflery all week and by ‘taught’ I mean that I handed ten year old pellet guns and told them to give ‘er. Being stuck in that box was fun and I got to have lots of conversations with kids while we sat and waited. I met a super cool kid named Errol who scratched my camp name into the hut (which is covered in the names of everyone who’s ever set foot in it) for me with a rock which he made me promise to keep. I’ve still got it.
The best part with my girls was being able to lead them all in some listening prayer and introducing them to real time conversation with Jesus, which a couple of them spent the rest of the day doing.
Then Wolf Creek arrived. DUN DUN DUN!!!
Before this though, as a celebration of Sergio’s birthday and the end of all of our trip planning, we got to go, get all swanky and dressed up (we got talked out of being really extravagant which was sad) and spend a night on the town at Nicky’s old Thai restaurant and get really really delicious deep fried bananas. Afterwards we tromped around downtown Abbotsford, waltzed in a parking lot and took awkward photos with everything we could find including some very friendly men sitting on a bench.
Then Wolf Creek arrived – early. Very early. Awkward…. and we took the scariest ride of my life up the hill to the Lifehouse in this huge charter bus that was way too big for the road! I thought we were going to stall and die. If you had asked me about the week at the time, after beating around the bush I would have told you in no uncertain terms that it was one of the most horribly intense and draining weeks of my life, in the bad way. Looking back now though it was exactly what I needed at the time and probably something I will need more of in my life. There was no lying to myself about anything that usually blocks me and I needed to run to God constantly to just make it through each day.
That trip saved me from falling back into commonplace ruts again. My favourite memory was having an amazing laugh fest while sitting in the back of the huge bus with Taylor and Liz while Brian made uncomfortable faces at me and mocked every single sound that came out of my mouth. Another would have to be having a bazillion random conversation with Cody about everything and anything – including the God he said he didn’t believe in. All in all it was a fantastic exhausting month that was wonderfully perfect in its horrible crazy discord.
Natalie