The majority of this week has been spent at the church in counselor training. Thankfully Mark is not a morning person so we don’t start until 9:30. I’ve really been learning a lot in training about how to work with kids. It’s cool because he teaches us from the perspective of a child, and things that I would never think are a big deal can be extremely hurtful to a child. I’ve been learning a lot about how to be sensitive to that. One of the main things that Mark has been teaching us is that “God has brought us here to work more in us than through us.”
Now at first that was a little hard for me to understand, but I think God’s finally showing me what he means by that. It’s not that God isn’t going to work through us. It’s more that we should not be so fixated on how we will impact campers that we ignore the work God is doing. Before we go and do anything we must make sure that we are pursuing a relationship with Christ.
As we go through training we’ve been taking lots of break to learn all the camp games. We have both regular games and mind games to learn. Along with all the other games, I think we learned ten different ways to play tag and at least ten different mind games to play with the kids.
Learning camp games
Along with working as counselors at Camp Baldwin, the summer missionaries will also be serving as Sunday school teachers on the weekends at Salcha Baptist Church. Another summer missionary and I will be teaching the youth. He will teach the boys, and I will be teaching the girls. Over the next six weeks we will be going through Colossians 1-3. It is a bit overwhelming for me to think of teaching three entire chapters in only six weeks, but I’m praying that God will show me what is most important to share with them. This week we started off with Colossians 1:1-14, and we went through just a basic overview. The youth here are great, and I’m so excited about working with them and getting to know them better!
The first week of camp starts today with K-2nd Grade. I’m very excited, but also very nervous because I have never worked with children that young before. So please pray for me that all will go well.
