Taking Some Time Off

Once I was done with my week of counseling, we had a two week break in the schedule, with no camps scheduled.  While I enjoy being around camp, the list of work projects they had come up with to keep the staff busy didn’t look too entertaining to me.  Ironically I didn’t have any work to do in LA right then, but I exercised my freedom to leave, and spent a week at home.  My mom was staying out at my grandparent’s old house for the summer, taking care of my aunt, who was dealing with some health issues.  And while my brother was around a bit, it was a week spent pretty much with my dad.  But it was good to relax, and catch up on some reading and such.

 

I hadn’t had a chance to talk with P very much those first few weeks, but it had been interesting to get to know her sister a bit, to see how they were alike and different.  Our online conversation continued while I was home, and we had a good dialog about the skit she was doing with her sister.  Calling it a skit hardly did it justice.  I had missed the main campfire the first week, because I had been in LA.  So I was leading my cabin the first time I saw the program we were doing that year, and I was running the sound system as well.  The agenda they gave me just said “chain skit” before the message, and I was supposed to play a soundtrack on someone’s iPod to go with it.  I was definitely not prepared for what actually happened on stage, and it probably elicited a strong emotional response from me than anything else that I had ever seen at camp.

 

There was no dialog, just a pantomime of P and her sister being tormented by people (or “the world” or spirits) depending on how you interpreted it.  While her sister cast the resulting chains at Jesus' feet, P did not.  And they eventually built up until they basically destroyed her.  Everything from the role she played, to the look on her face, had an intense impact on me.  Seeing someone that you care so much about in that much pain, even if you know it is staged, is very hard to watch.  It took conscious effort to suppress the male protective instinct to intervene (which probably would not have been good for the skit).  Coming at the end of an exhausting week, and catching me totally by surprise may have magnified the effect, but I was pretty much traumatized by the time it was finished.

 

It impacted my campers enough that they thought they knew what I was feeling when we got back together to discuss things, but it took me some time to recover from seeing that.  And I really had to pull myself together, because there was still a lot of work to do that night, between cabin huddle, Illuminaria, and individual camper talks.  With ten of them in my cabin, each of those steps took extra long, and I was busy until at least two in the morning, and never really had time to process that all until I was back home the next day.

 

I hardly skimmed the surface of what had happened when I told P about it later, but it was a constructive conversation none the less.  And our discussion about leading one’s peers became a lot more relevant than I had anticipated when I returned to camp the next week.