I wrote this last Wednesday night, halfway through my week at Royal Family Kids Camp, which is a camp for Foster Care children.
There’s no greater emotional confusion in my life than when I’m at this camp. So many completely different things hit me at once, and continue to hit me non-stop for five days. Good things and bad things. Little things and big things.
Being away from home and that which is familiar. Forgetting about all the things that usually feel so important and impossible to escape. Things like news, school, work, bills, sports, Twitter, relational difficulties, comic books, and even my cell phone become irrelevant, if not altogether forgotten. Singing worship with nothing but a campfire, nature, and the voices of God’s saints (Amazing Grace never ceases to bring tears to my eyes). Exercising all day every day. Sleeping for only a few hours a night. Reading nothing but The Word and a daily Spurgeon Devotional. Clinging to that Word like the Bread of Life that it is. Realizing, yet again, how much I love kids, and how comfortable I am with them. Also realizing…yet again…how uncomfortable I am meeting and interacting with adults that I don’t know. Camp pushes all of my boundaries in all the right ways.
This week of camp is just a lot. It makes me feel more comfortable and at home than I’ve ever been before, while simultaneously making me feel more lonely than I could ever imagine. This camp makes me feel tons of different things, which is really saying something for a guy who doesn’t possess a very wide emotional range. All of the different emotions are just not something I can easily process.
In the end, I don’t know if this camp truly changes my life on the day to day basis. Not in any major way. A couple weeks after camp, things will just go back to normal, almost as if none of this ever happened. So, in one sense, you might say that this camp doesn’t really matter at all in the grand scheme of my own life. And if I’m honest that’d probably be true.
But right now, on Wednesday night halfway through the week of camp, I can tell you with certainty that this camp is all that matters. These kids are all that matter.
And that’s the funny thing about it all. Despite everything I’m feeling, I realize that it’s not actually about how this camp affects me. Sure, all of this I’ve expressed is important and good. But it’s not the point. Not even close.
The kids are the point. And as stressful as it is to keep track of these crazy little boys running around all over the place, it’s oddly peaceful knowing that with a million different things going on in life right now, for just one week the only job I have – the only job that matters – is caring for these kids. For the week of RFKC, they are everything.