Our week at camp is well underway, and it is again full of God's blessings! This year we left home with 13 campers and our family. This year we road in comfort! Thank you Jesus for our bus!!!
We left church at 10am and arrived at Lake Ann Camp in Michigan around 5 pm. It was a ride full of laughter. We did a quick introduction of names before we left since we were taking such a wide range of ages and some of them did not know one another. As I was introduced as Amanda, Noah promptly and strongly protested and declared, "No! That is Mama!" So, I am now "mama" to everyone. Although I still have some sweetie girls who very respectfully call me "Mrs. Drietz" which I will never get used to no matter how old I am! I think that name still belongs to my mother in law;).
It was nice to arrive earlier in the evening this year, it gave us a chance to hang out as a group before the week of camp began in the morning. The guys made a b-line to the octaball court of course and pretty much spent there time there the rest of the night. The girls had fun walking around and talking, visiting the farm and helping my wee ones find tent worms(fuzzy caterpillars), which are an interesting creature. Here is a worm that destroys trees by eating all their leaves, it leaves anyone trying to preserve the beauty of nature intact, frustrated, and yet, to children, they are captivating, gentle, and harmless and worthy of naming individually. Bell has a bucket full of them already and she gets distressed to think of any harm coming to them!
Instead of stopping for fast food again, we decided to wait and order pizza after we settled into our cabins for the night. Matt and I have a favorite little pizza place up here that came to the rescue for us hungry travelers.
Here is our group this year. We have almost every age group for camp this week. Matt and I are praying for the Lord to stir these kids hearts this week and draw them closer to himself.
We are sure they will also have a blast as well! We continue to thank the Lord for the awesome job all the staff at Lake Ann does each year. They care deeply for the students and want desperately for them to know the love of Christ and they want to present this to them in a way that gives them an experience unlike any other.
We parted ways with the guys for the night and headed back to our cabin for some "girl fun" ! Now I may be a youth pastor's wife, but at this stage in our life, I am not on the trips like I used to be when our family had just started. I am usually at home holding down the fort while Matt runs the crazy pace of the youth ministry at church. So, it has been awhile since I have experienced the "energy" of very excited teenage girls! I think I will sleep for the rest of the week! haha! I am so thankful for the night with the girls! It was fun to play games with them, laugh with them, and get to know who they are. I maybe had to use my "mom" voice once or twice to get the giggles out of them while we laid in the dark after lights out. And I still smile when I think about how they begged me to let me get up at 6:30 to go for a jog, and then when all 6 alarms went off in the morning, not one of them even heard the alarm;). Funny!
Well, it is now Tuesday morning, the kids are all in their 2nd day of camp. We got all of them registered with no problem, met all of their counselors and got settled in our own family cabin for the week! We will see the kids off and on throughout the week in chapel and activities we go to watch, but we are now spending some slow time together with other ministry families who have brought campers up for the week. We were so excited to find out we were neighbors with friends from back home who are ministering at a church in our area. This is the second year we have bunked next to each other and our kids are enjoying playing together again. Well, I should take a break for lunch, but I will share some more later.
