Someone I Just Met

I have really missed camp the last few months, after moving away from the one I had worked at for a long time.  I have no doubt camp is where I am called to serve, and probably to eventually once again live.  It is just a matter of which one, and when.  So I spent the weekend volunteering at another camp for a high school retreat.  I usually like working at camp, for a whole variety of reasons.  While it was interesting to see how yet another camp operates, and a fairly big one at that, I wasn't that stoked on this particular experience.  I originally agreed to help out as an effort to get more involved at my church, but it turns out this was a much larger regional event, in which my church played a fairly small role.  I don't think I met a single person from our high school group the whole time I was there.

I spent the whole weekend in the kitchen, and never even saw most of the 500 campers that we were cooking for.  I am not much of a customer service person, so playing an indirect supporting role usually doesn't bother me, but the whole reason I was there was to become more connected.  Instead I spent more of the time working with a bunch of strangers, for a bunch of strangers.  I did interact with a smaller group of about 50 Campus Life students from Grass Valley, who were also there serving.  I already knew most of their leaders, and I only got to know a couple of their students by name, but a few of them stood out.

I made it through the weekend, and got home Sunday afternoon, watched the 49ers throw away a Super Bowl, and then headed off to bed for a 6am departure to LA.  After a long day at work, I saw a message on Facebook that got my attention.  It turns out one of the girls I was working with over the weekend, one of the ones I definitely remember, got killed in a major car accident Sunday evening.  Obviously that is always a tragic situation, but I find it all the more shocking to hear, since we had just worked together that very morning.

Now it was a single car wreck, where the 17 year old driver lost control of his vehicle.  And the two girls killed weren't wearing seat belts, and legally weren't even supposed to be in the car.  So I am not sure how to feel about the fact that the entire event seems to have been totally preventable with a little common sense.  That doesn't make it any less tragic, and maybe more so from a certain perspective.

That happened February 3^rd, and the last major accident I dealt with, in a much more direct way, was December 3^rd.  I posted about that incident the day after it happened, but never updated later, to add that the guy we pulled out never recovered, and passed away in the hospital two weeks later.  There has been a serious lack of positive things happening the last few months, but no shortage of negative ones.  Hopefully we can turn that trend around in the near future, because it is getting pretty discouraging.

It is interesting to contemplate that if I had missed that post, being in LA, I never would have heard of this happening.  Would that be better or worse?  I appear to have gained nothing but sorrow from finding out, and it is fairly unlikely I ever would have seen her again anyway.  But as I all too frequently say, “better than living a lie.”  I hope that’s actually true.