Bob's Island Getaway: The Recap.

BLECK! This weekend. Long--interesting--full of stories to share. Here is a very lengthy recap--but it's full of some funny moments, interesting characters and good stories, so, if you have ten minutes today, stop and read. If you have one minute today, then just read this: everything went well, all of my kids (and myself) returned fully intact and with all of our limbs, and everyone liked the T-shirts.


Group Shot.

Friday
At 1:30pm on Friday Afternoon, we loaded up three vans full of kids at the Arlington Chevron and headed north to Anacortes to catch the ferry to San Juan Island. The kids were nervous and excited. The music was blaring. The energy level was high (most noted by vans full of boys testing the swaying power of the shocks on the 15-passenger vans.) We were leaving for Bob's Island Getaway.

In my particular vehicle, there were two nervous 8th graders who were clinging to each other as human security blankets (and checking their eyeliner every five minutes) and one VERY enthusiastic sophomore, who had made 12 new best friends within 20 minutes of arriving in the ferry line. I sighed with relief as my friend Esther hopped in the Suburban with me, and we made tactical plans to combine our two groups (I had recruited her to help out as a small group leader with Skagit Valley YD, but there was only one girl coming from Skagit Valley, so they had a group of 2).




Friday night was full of getting oriented--meeting our host family for the weekend (The Kitchen Family), eating dinner, hearing a brief word from our speaker, Rusty Van Deusen, and a few songs from our musician, John Van Deusen. We trekked back to the Kitchen home, got settled into the camper where we were staying, and awkwardly tried to go about having a group discussion with these two insecure Arlington 8th graders, this enthusiastic Arlington sophomore, the two Kitchen girls (who have grown up on San Juan Island and are homeschooled) and now a brand-new face--our new friend from Esther's group, who loves the military and practices survival training in the woods with Army retirees.

Saturday
We were up early, only to find Mrs. Kitchen had prepared us homemade pancakes and sausage! Woohoo! It was raining--but it was bound to be a great day when there are beautiful pancakes to start it off with.

My stomach was churning, because I was going to be sharing a devotional with the entire camp before we headed off for morning activities, and I was pretty convinced I was going to be boring, non-entertaining, and irrelevant.


Brian Williams, from Oak Harbor YD introduced me as "recently moved from Ohio, likes Strawberry-Banana Yogurt, lived in Africa, and wears Secret Ultra Dry." And that being said--I launched into telling some humorous descriptions of childhood, shared the most shameful thing I've ever done, and talked about Jonah's apathy hiding in the belly of a fish, saying that "he evidently preferred sitting inside intestines with seaweed wrapped around his head to saying that he was wrong." It was all very heart-wrenching to share, and afterwards, staff and kids were approaching me saying, "Heather. I felt like you were talking right to me. You were up there, and it felt like you were just having a conversation with me. You have a gift." It was so refreshing to have my YD family know and respect me as a public speaker, because it's something I love doing.

After praying for our day, the girls and I (now up to seven girls and two leaders with the addition of the two Kitchen girls and another Friday Harbor teen) went to our daily activities of Sailing on a 38-foot Sailing Yacht and playing paintball with the boys from Moses Lake YD. There was a moment during the sailing, when Esther and two of the girls and I were all scrunched up on the very front of the bow crying out "I'm flying," and straddling the boat for dear life as the sails filled and we were pushed violently to the right. We discussed the question I had left them with during the morning devotion, "What do you really care about?" and laughed as we smacked onto the waves like we were riding a roller coaster.



Paintball was a very humorous experience, and I actually only lasted about five minutes, before I was so un-entertained by the whole thing that I returned to the hat I was knitting. I did proudly commend all of my girls' welts and snap photos when they returned with paint splattered across their foreheads and through their hair. And later on, I watched the jaws of the Arlington boys drop to the floor when I reavealed that I had found paintball boring.

(The boys who can't believe I find paintball boring.)

By Saturday night, after hearing a great message from Rusty and great music from John, we returned as a group of nine girls to Esther's host family to talk about whether we cope with pain and emptiness by filling our lives with stuff (like King Solomon) or retreating from it (like Kurt Cobain). Some of our girls were retreaters, some were fillers, but we all became very aware that we try to fill up voids in our lives that only God can fill.

(Main Session with John and Rusty.)

Sunday
I literally dragged the girls out of bed, cursing the man who decided Daylight Savings Time was a good idea, dragged them into the Suburban and dragged them to the Fairgrounds, where we heard an amazing devotional from my friend Jade, who shared the deepest struggles of her heart. Another poignant start to a morning.

Our morning activity was rappelling at a State Park, and while I was excited, the cold, the rain, and the lack of sleep had the girls pretty discouraged and cranky. In fact--one of the girls from the Island put her foot down and refused to ascend the hill, demanding that she would stay in the parking lot until her mother arrived to pick her up. I was extremely frustrated at this apparent temper tantrum, and even more frustrated because I had been looking forward to rappelling with the girls for two months...

God--evidently--had other purposes for me.

I sat with the Island girl and with Liz, one of the Rock guides, in the Suburban for an hour and a half, talking about life and God, giving off the impression that we were in no rush and could stay in the Suburban all day. After a few hours of talking and sharing with each other, building a relationship and connecting, I finally asked her if we could please go up the hill because it had stopped raining, and I really needed to take some photos of my kids.

She conceded, and when we got up the hill, she conceded to putting on a harness, and when we got to the top of the rock, she even conceded to helping belay other rappellers down the rock. It was a very small victory, but at the time, getting that girl to walk up the hill and put on a harness made me feel like I had just completed some epic quest, and that at any moment, the people who judge Youth Ministry victories were going to leap from the bushes, crown my head with laurels, and hoist me onto their shoulders crying out, "Praise God for you! You amazing embodiment of Christ's amazing love and character!"




This did not happen, obviously, and by lunchtime, the rain had five of the remaining six girls getting whiney. Esther and I looked at each other and sighed--launching into a backup plan of skipping Kayaking to go shopping and sit in a coffee shop.

It turned out that dry clothes, the appearance of the afternoon sun, and the opportunity to buy really expensive designer clothing is all one needs to lift the spirits of a few cranky teenage girls. By dinner time, it was on par to being quote "one of the best days of their lives."



At our evening session (during which I dismissed our girls to go to the bathroom at least 27 separate times, chased down some Motrin, found them bottled water, helped them clean up spilled bottle water, and fended off the advances of several boys who found worship time and listening time to be the appointed time to distract/tease/impress my girls), Rusty shared about the power of Christ's ability to heal us and offerred students the opportunity to make a new commitment or a recommitment if they had been living apart from Him.

The amazing part of Sunday evening, though, was returning back to the Kitchens, our mismatched group of seven girls and Esther and myself, and launching into a long, heartfelt discussion and exploration of Christ's love. The spirit filled the room with amazing peace, and girls who had been silent all weekend began to open up and share, while the rest opened up and encouraged. We talked about our hearts, the condition of our hearts, and where it is within ourselves that Christ comes to fill us.

Then--Esther and I asked each of the girls for one specific way that we can pray for them after we leave this place, and we all looked at each other, knowing that this night had been very special. Not wanting to end on too much of a deep point, we joined the Skagit Valley YD boys for a bonfire and S'mores to close out our final evening on the Island.


Monday

Our final morning--we cleaned everything up, said our goodbyes to the Kitchens, and made our way to the ferry line. The girls were running around, doing their final flirting and watching boys participate in competitions to prove their manliness by sampling the hottest sauces at Friday Harbor's "hot sauce" store. As I gathered my remaining three girls (seeming so small from our weekend group of nine), they launched into a sentimental spiel of "This was the best weekend of our lives! I don't want to go back."

On the ferry ride home, I crashed near my friend Sarah, exhausted, and realizing I had caught a cold, and she let me pour out a bit of what the weekend had been to me. I realized through just a few moments of talking to her, that God had moved throughout the midst of the entire weekend, and He had shown Himself so vividly in the way my group had come together.

As we drove off the ferry and entered Anacortes, my girls cried out, "I can't believe it's over! Omigosh, thank you so much for inviting me," and I laughed so hard, because the one who was praising the weekend the most was the same one that I thought hated me for the first three days of the trip.

Aaah...it was 5:30pm yesterday before I finally arrived home and fell onto my couch, praising God for an empty living room.

The Weekend Themes: God showed up (of course), the weekend for our group went off relatively hitchless, and the ministry that happened came in moments of encouraging a girl to climb up a hill on a rainy day and listening to girls open their hearts up to Christ in a simple living room.

And now--after taking like two hours to write this entry. I'm going to go home and recoup.