Can you remember when you attended kids camp? The anticipation of going away independently? Sleeping in bunk beds in rooms with other kids? The uncertainty of what the week would hold but the certainty that you would have fun and do something more exciting than if you were at home with the parents?
We do a thousand activities at kids camp. There are low-ropes courses, night hikes, games with balloons, scooting on bathmats on one’s bottom, making towers of cups, acting, drawing, and not being spotted as you crawl up a hill.
There is sharing—in song, around a campfire, in grace before meals, and in times of gathering. We learn a little scripture, meet the woman at the well, and gain the courage to share the love of God with people who haven’t been kind.
There’s the sense of safety for kids to be authentically themselves.
We do a science experiment that mirrors the ways God’s love can change us, even if it is really only an exothermic, catalytic reaction. We do crafts and show others gratitude. And there are junior leaders, learning how they, too, can serve. There is the maturity of night games and looking after oneself a little, but also the expectations of helping the community through washing dishes, sweeping floors, and cleaning bathrooms.
But the most special time is between activities.
There’s the sense of safety for kids to be authentically themselves. To learn personal identity and what they want to represent to the wider world. The value of vulnerability that enables the depth of friendships built with people they didn’t know two days earlier. There are the continuing links to friendships built year after year that will be maintained into adulthood and reflected on twenty years later, when bringing their own kids to camp for similar experiences.
Yes, the Victorian kids camp was four days, three nights, with sixteen kids and eight staff members in the bushland of regional Victoria, Australia. But it is always so much more!