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.