I'm driving home from summer camp with our church youth group.  It's been a crazy week.  Good week, but crazy as camp usually is.  The music on the bus radio is Stephen Curtis Chapman... "Dancing With Cinderella".  It occurs to me that this is a rare opportunity, to "dance" with a whole group of Cinderella's, a couple of them are even mine.

  We often take kids to camp so someone can reach them for Christ... So we can insulate them from their culture or arm them for the battle they will all face when they step back into their own lives.  But maybe the real point is much more visceral, much more basic.  Maybe the real point is to simply let them stop and connect again with flesh and blood rather than with a keyboard or phone.  Maybe we take them to camp so that we get a chance to find out who they really are and so that we let them see who we really are.

  Perhaps the point of camp is the moments themselves, we saw them run obstacle courses, cheering madly for all, no matter how talented or challenged. We saw them conquer fear to scale a 30ft pole and jump off into thin air (fully harnessed and safety supervised).  One boy in particular terrified to death at only 4 ft, fought for every inch to make it to the top, the sound of the group cheering him on brought tears to my eyes... We played in the lake, worshipped around the word and enjoyed time... In the midst of all the fun the fact remains that if we wait until next year to spend this time again, we have missed the point and the kids will not be the only losers.  Because the sad fact is for some of these kids next year will be too late, for some of these kids will vanish when the world tries to steal them.  Some will just drift away when they see that we only care about them at camp, others will stay around sullenly forcing us to ask what happened to them when the real question is "what happened to us?"  What happened to our hearts to love these kids?  So consider these things and go dance with all the Cinderellas in your life.  

Grace,

Pastor e