Edit, Add, Appreciate

 Edit-  Two words.  More sleep.  I think about it all day long.  Gotta  happen.

Add-  Gonna throw a movie in the mix this week.  I feel like a slug when I watch a movie while sitting in a house full of things that cry for attention.  Kendra loves movies and could sit and watch them all day long, and in fact does!  Me, not so much.  But it’s just she and I this week and I know she would enjoy it so I’m going to do it.

Appreciate-  Eight years ago before C came to live with us, I signed him up to go to Camp Loucon with a group of kids from Wesley House.  Imagine his delight horror when I told him Basketball camp was full and he would be going to junior high choir camp?!! He cried and said he wasn’t going, but I put him on the bus and hoped for the best.  He hasn’t missed a year of choir camp since.  Yesterday he left for Loucon, now to be a counselor at the same junior high choir camp.

My heart is full of love and memories and great appreciation for the steadfast ministry of Camp Loucon.  I myself went there for 8 years, and even more years if you count retreats as a young adult.  It was at Camp Loucon that I learned the fruits of the spirit, and how to do the Salty Dog Rag.  I loved the familiarity of cabins where my initials were carved into the wall beside every bunk I ever slept in, and that we had spam with pineapple on top on Thursday nights for dinner.  I saw my first falling star there and had my first kiss there- this after the coaching of one of the girls in my cabin who held a little informational session for all of us saying that you just more or less put your lips on his and said PRUNE.  I got saved at Camp Loucon- every year on Thursday night. (right after that big spam dinner!)  More importantly,  Camp Loucon was the place where I began my spiritual journey.  We all have to start somewhere and it was a great place to head out from.  I’d come home with a religious zeal that would often last for…days, and with a deep yearning in my heart to grow and know more that continues to this day.

Never once did I imagine that I would have kids someday who would love Loucon as much as I did.  For years I daydreamed that I would be married there in the outdoor chapel with someone singing John Denver’s Follow Me, my groom the counselor I crushed on for years.  I never pictured myself as anything but young at Loucon, and some 30 years later when I began dropping off my own children I was astounded at how little had really changed.  They have a pool now and high ropes and ziplines, and they don’t have spam on the dinner menu at all, but so many things remain the same.  I can pretty much bet that C is doing the Salty Dog Rag tonight, that he sees a falling star, and I hope he gets saved- again and again.