Busy, busy couple of weeks! I honestly haven't had the time to sit down and write a post in a while because I have just been on the go 24/7. Car shopping (I bought a car!), babysitting, leading youth group, getting projects done around the house, and prepping for camp have been all I’ve thought about for the last few weeks! Unfortunately I got sick because of my crazy schedule about a two weeks ago and it took forever to shake! I started feeling a lot better at the beginning of last week and finally got rid of the sore throat and stuffiness by the end of it, but in a crude twist of fate I ended spending all of Saturday and Sunday working on my car in the 90+ degree weather and now I’m healing from a bad sunburn. But on the bright side (no pun intended) my Dad and I got a lot of things accomplished on my car and it's soon to be in top shape. Which will be nice seeing as my to do list has been building up like crazy in anticipation for camp.
I started working for a camp called Forest Home in 2017. Forest Home is a Christian camp based in the San Bernardino Mountains whose mission statement is “Encounter Jesus. Experience Transformation. Engage the World.” They run camp for all different ages at their main campus in the mountains, and they have a VBS program called
Neighborhood Day Camp which was designed to take the fun of camp down the mountain to get communities plugged into their local church. I’ve been working with NDC as a counselor for the past two summers. It’s a ton of work but incredibly worth it! This will be my first summer leading counselors as a Crew Lead, and I am both crazy excited and crazy nervous. I’ve done tons of leadership as a teenager through 4-H, but nothing at this scale.
I’ll be in charge of a setup/tear down crew in the mornings and afternoons as well as a group of the counselors and kids during the day while they go to all of their activities. We have tons of fun activities like inflatable water slides, a climbing wall, and all kinds of games and songs as we teach kids about our amazing God. It’s a ton of work but an absolute blast! The camp goes for about ten weeks in the summer, and has previously had two teams, each of them at a different location each week. This will be our first year with our third team, which I am so pumped for! I honestly can’t wait for the summer to start but there is still so much to do for me to be ready to go. I leave near the end of May which means I have less than two months to get everything ready to go, but I’m hoping not to leave many thing to the last minute. I just bought a few books that I'm going to start reading through for bible studies, and I'm going to be bringing the Thrive leadership curriculum I used in 4-H to do some fun team building and leadership activities as well. I've never done a daily devotional outside of a mission trip program I did in 6th grade, so I was unsure of which one to pick. I know some of them, especially the women's devotionals, can be sappy and I really didn't want to go down that path. I'm not into that, and I find it really unhelpful when leading others, so I decided to just pick something that I could do my own mix on. I decided to go with
Trusting God Day by Day by Joyce Meyer because it seemed to be more of a quick lesson with a verse and a few questions, which is more my cup of tea. I know Joyce Meyer is a well known author of books on faith for women, but I've never read any of her work, so I figured I'd try it out and if it's not my jam I can alter it with the Thrive curriculum.
The other book I picked up is one I've been wanting to read for a while now but never went out and bought.
Teen Wisdom and Other Oxymorons by Zoe Rose Harness is an account of Zoe's family's goal to visit every US state. In Teen Wisdom Zoe shares the adventure they had and the lessons they learned through their trip as well as through her experience in working with service organizations. I knew Zoe in high school for a time and have been wanting to read her book for a while but never got the chance, so I'm super excited to jump into this one. I figured I could use all three books to make my own thing, and see where it goes. I don't want to just be winging it because I have had Crew Leads that do that before and I didn't really get a lot out of it, but I don't want it to feel like a sermon.
Babysitting and youth group have been going well lately. I babysit once a week for a small group from my church, and the kids are all rambunctious but super fun and we all have a blast just running about and playing games, or watching many
many hours of Spirit on Netflix (That show guys... there's a reason I wasn't into horses when I was a kid). But it's been going good. I also have a group of girls in Jr. High that I have been working with for the past two years through my church's youth group, Remnant. We've been doing well, and we'll be finishing out the year by the end of spring. It's been a really great experience because I have never been all that great with older kids and teens, but I'm actually doing pretty well. Fifth grade is about where I max out on being a good teacher, teens and preteens just find me embarrassing, I'm not that great at relating to them. I was really nervous when I started working with this group, but I've got a good bunch and we seem to be getting on pretty well. My sister Grace is in my group and she'll be going into eighth grade this autumn, which is crazy to think about! It's really weird and silly to see her be a little teenager with her friends and think about the fact that she'll be 13 this June!
That's about everything I've been doing lately, it's just a lot of car maintenance and a lot of late nights out working with church. In the next few weeks I'll be getting the rest of my shopping done for camp, because I still have some things I want to get for my car before I leave so I will be very busy in the next coming weeks.
As I get closer to the trip I'm going to write a post on the tips and tricks on packing light that I've learned from doing NDC, because it's all information I wish I had when I started camp, and it's useful when travelling in general because I now know how to pack a ton of stuff really efficiently. I start on May 21st, so I'll be keeping you posted on things as I get closer to that date! I'm super excited and also really nervous, but I just can't wait to get started! The only other upcoming thing is the spring
Dewey Readathon on April 28th. I would love to participate but I might not get a chance because the week following it is going to be crazy busy and I don't know if I'll have time, but I did just get a Litsy account a few weeks ago, and I'm trying to use it more often so if you are of the bookish variety you should head over there and add me (coffeecakeandbooks), it's basically Instagram for book people.
Let me know how your week's been going in the comments and I'll talk to you soon!
~Delaney
