Day 3- may 20th
Today is a Thursday. It was an exausting day of manual labor and I was tired enough I had very little time to think, since after supper I showered and am now writing this and about to sleep. I am looking forward to the weekend. On Saturday morning I am going to leave after breakfast and go back to jackson to pick up some stuff I forgot at my house, get my rent paid for june, and I have a date with my girlfriend, which is something I am anticipating with excitement.
Day 4- may 21st

Another hard day of manual labor. We finsihed building a small climbing wall and then it started pouring rain as we were getting all the power tools under cover along with our generator. As it was pouring, we had two more low element courses to build that didn’t require any tools that would be dammaged by rain. After 3 hours of working on building the foundations for the low element courses it stopped raining and we went to supper. I have been struggling to keep my spiriutal strength and am relying on just not thinking. There is so much work to be done here, I find myself isolating myself not from people, but from self examination. I feel like there is barrier between me and God right now. I am not sure if it is the lack of work in my relationship with jesus that is making this barrier, or if there is sin in my life I am not seeing. I am going to pray about this tonight and see what happens.

Day 5- may 22
This journal is written a few days after the weekend. Started the day off by sleeping in an hour, but at CRS you can only sleep in until you wake up sweating again in your cabin. There is no AC, so, around 9am when the sun hits the woods, you start to heat up real quick. After a late breakfast and converastions two co-workers and I left for jackson. After getting my buisness in town done I went to my house and had a quick nap, my girlfriend showed up. I have been dating her for a few months and I am still trying to figure out how to have and actively show that I have a godly relationship. How does christ function as the center of your relationship? How do you love someone as christ loves you? Over the weekend I realized that there were a lot of things I know in my head, love like christ, be willing to loose everything for Christ, nothing should bea larger priority than God, things of this nature… I realized in my relationship I had been incredibly selfish and not acted in a very godly manner. While in my head I knew I should be willing to give up a relationship if that is in gods will, I have never made that priority shift in my heart. When your priorites are not inline, somethigs that cannont bear the wieght you put on them, like relationships, begin to fall apart. God was gracious enough to me to anwer my prayers asking for me to see where I needed to change my life to show me my priorities and how they were messed up. After realizing this, I spent most of the night praying and figuring out how to explain this to my girlfriend. It all makes sense in my head, but I am not a terribly verbal person, so, I have to think awhile before I talk, otherwise it is gibberish. I hope this journal is more than gibberish, since I am usually rushed in writing it.

Day 6- may 23
It is a Sunday. I miss relaxed Sundays. Today was a good Sunday, a very good Sunday. I woke up late, since I got to sleep in my house. I was looking forward to air condition, but the AC was shot upstiars in my house and my roommate was working on fixing it ( peter sinclair. Who did this internship with you last year. I thought you would like to make the connection that I am rooming with him. Random note) so, I slept in our other roommates room, which had air conditioning. After eating a nice breakfast I went to church, enjoyed the service. It was an unlifting sermon on how we are to live by jesus alone. After church I went to lunch with my girlfriend and we talked about rearranging our priorities in our relationship and how we have not been glorifiying God in our relationship. I spent the rest of the afternoon with her, then I had to go back to CRS.

Day 7 may 24th- I got to CRS at one in the morning ( I have a habit of this) and in addition to our little band of mantience men was the head cooks son, Rodrie. We call him Rod. He is 13 years old and his mom had no healthy enviroment to keep him in, since his father left early on and only visits occasionally and day care really is not the best place for a kid to be. So, we agreed to let him work with us and to take care of him. I found my heart bitter and thinking, “it isn’t camp time. I am having to deal with kids… why is he here…” I was prideful, I was not loving. The biggest struggle at camp is not the campers, it is not the work, it is my own sinful heart. Camp is stressful, even in the pre-staff training time I am in right now. Sleep deprivation, physical stress, and then having a very stuborn kid who has been trying to pick fights and you repeated stop him, it makes all the things about your own heart that you try to hide, like my ungreatfulness, my unloving side, my judgementalness ( is that a word?) come out. As the day went on I saw this problem in my heart and started to pray for my heart. God is a god of answered prayers and he gave me the heart to love Rod. Realizing that our small little group of guys are the most christ like people in his life strage and scary thing. That God placed him around four guys who are more godly than I am, and given us the ability to love him.
Red, a fellow mantience man who volunteered, was my first counselor pair when I started working at CRS, dealt with Rod in a way that convicted my own heart. Rod started challenging and trynig to provoke Red to see how far he could push him. Red, after a few pushes and threats from Rod said, “ I am calling your bluff. You don’t want to fight any of us. We are bigger than you are, none of us want to fight you either. We want to get along, finish our work, and enjoy the day. If you want to fight, lets go, if not, lets work.” After that, Rod never tried any attempts to start a fight that openly. After the confrontation like that, Red made and effort to show Rod love and give him affirmation in the work he was doing. Red is a very loving person to kids, especially kids like Rod.

Day 8-may 25th
Today was a a tiring day. I woke up still sleepy, not just waking up sleepy, but groggy sleepy all day. Still, at the end of the day, I am ready to go to bed and it is only 6pm. So, I plan to sleep early tonight. The day started out with Rod coming into our cabin yelling, “ you all are lazy. Wake up.” Then Red saying, “ Rod… it is 6:30.” Rod waited a few more minute and then yelled again. So, we got up and started working until breakfast. Rod is opening up more to us and is more willing to work, but not very willing yet. It has only been two days, but it feels like a much longer time than that. After praying for the ability to love Rod, it is becoming much easier to show him love. I am realizing everyday that my heart is numb and heart by my own choosing, since it is easier to ignore than to deal with something. Slowly, very slowly, my heart is waking up and I am changing. Hopefully this process will speed up.

Day 1- may 18th
It is the end of the day as I write this. I arrived at camp very happy to be here, since it was 1:30am and I was ready to sleep and stop driving and bed down for the night. After five hours of sleep I woke up to a fellow counselor who was returning for another year of camp who had gotten up early to have a bible study before the work day started. Slowly more people came into the dining hall, where I slept, and conversations and greetings were very welcoming and made me feel like I made the right decision to come back to CRS for a third summer. I struggled to sign my contract for a third summer, since I was not sure if I should go back to summer camp for yet another year. Part of the struggle is that people contantly talk about finding real jobs, growing up, doing grown up things, ect. Summer camp is never in the list of things they talk about doing as grown ups and is usually looked down upon by the adult community. Atleast it is in the community of adults I grew up with and a lot of the adults I am still around. None-the-less, I am here for another summer.
The struggle I found myself in at the end of the day is that I am good at working at CRS. I have grown up coming here and I have grown up loning to work here. My first year I was hysterical when I got to sign my contract, since this was always my summer escape and now I got to be a bigger part of it than just a participant. I got to CRS and I knew exactly what all needed to be done in preparation for campers to get here and even the other staff gets here. I am running on cruise control. I know what to do when, what to say, how to act. There isn’t anything really challenging me right now and I know my heart is not in the place where it needs to be. I am prideful right now. I am not entirely sure how to handel this, but tonight I am going to pray about it and see what happens.
Day 2- may 19
I got a small nights sleep, second night in a row, since I stayed up getting to know the new staff and catching up with some of the old staff. I came two weeks early before staff training to volunteer and there are several staff members here taking a lifeguard certifacation course, so, I have met roughly half the guys at camp and no girls showed up for lifeguard training that I have seen around camp. They might be here and I haven’t seen them. I spent the entire day building a low elements ropes course with two other guys and have another halfs day work ahead of me tomorrow. It is very satisfying to work all day with your hands and then see what you made and to be able to play and climb on it. We are all excited to see the project coming to an end and to move onto the next one.
I am realizing more and more that my heart is growing numb and is numb. Rather than examining my own heart any or actually spending time in the word, I surroud myself with things to do and people to talk to. I know myself well enough to know that when I do this, I have a problem. Retreating and not thinking is how I have always dealt with problems instead of confronting them. I am quickly realizing that this summer my struggle is not going to be camp, rather it is going to be myself. This is somewhat unique to me, before I wasn’t familiar enough with my job to see my heart as much, since I was so preoccupied with my job and how I needed to preform my job.