the green spot blog

Sparks&Explorers1 is over and it was a week of cuteness, profundity, God's good grace and crazy fun times. I will have to post more later, because I am SUPER tired! But it's a good tired: the kind that follows a good week!

Ignite 1! We were exactly maxed out this week, with 96 Ignite campers on site. (We also had 7 ARISE campers, 6 PUSH campers, 9 Roughin' It girls and 9 Adventure Classic campers.) Funnest week ever (well, at least till next week comes around!). Our speaker, Sid Koop, has been excellent! [I will update this part right here with a week-ending summary of Sid's talks.] In other Ignite 1 news, cabins across the camp are using ... unique ... acrostics and poetry to score (like, we know that Jenny is the nurse/cabin clean up marker, but Jennylp?). For example, Cabin 7 pulled this gem out the other day: Justin Bieber Encuriging Not Negative Yes you Like our Pick up lines

Our BIG game this year is Settlers of Alethia. That's right: you're not coming to Camp Evergreen this summer, you're coming to Alethia (which, ps, means "truth" in Greek). Originally, we were thinking about how we could play Settlers of Cataan as a wide game and then things just exploded. The story behind Alethia is that the campers have entered into a Narnia-esque world where they must help the locals settle the land. They do this by earning tokens, which they can use to buy resources at the local market, which go toward cities and roads. The cabins are split up into tribes and they do things like playing games, cleaning their cabins, and memorizing verses to earn the most tokens as a tribe. The tribe with the most cities and roads by the end of the entire week is rewarded with a huge prize. For the older kids (Ignite and Impact), Mike, who is both Assistant Program Director and Governor of Alethia, invented the craziest game. One of the campers, after play...

Okay! A few more pictures of Trail Blazers 1 plus a summary from speaker Jenny about what all we talked about during Trail Blazers 1! To get the summary, I made Jenny sit down in my office (she's the nurse right now; it's Ignite 1 camp). This is what she said, "essentially it was about choosing to walk wisely. We have the choice to either walk with God or not with God. And he takes what we choose on this earth (walking with or not with) very seriously! But ... big important point: he loves us regardless of whether we walk with him or not." So ... I guess the question is, who are you walking with? Upcoming posts: Roughin' It Boys in review; Settlers of Alethia featuring The Lost Tribe.

So! Week number 1 is over ! How the heck did that happen? It was so quick! The kids were so great! At times, the rain was so ... intense! We had a great first week of camp here at Evergreen. We were amazed and awed and infinitely thankful that even though we had intense rain, the crazy hail that struck Sundre (just 16km away from us) and Calgary skirted our property entirely. Trenton, one of the leaders at our first Boys' Roughin' It camp, said that on Sunday night, he was watching the black clouds come toward them ... but that all of a sudden, they just changed directions, like they'd bounced up against a wall. I definitely think that God was looking out for us. Cabin 2 parties in a puddle. Our speaker was the lovely Jenny. Our verse for the summer, of course, is Micah 6:8. Actually ... I'm going to have to finish this later ... there's crazy lightning outside my window. Stay tuned!

So, as I type this, Team Benton is working frantically to finish their video summary of the All Staff Reunion to share with you. I'll post it soon! We have some sweet stories and songs and battles with folding chairs to share. In additional to all that, staff training is underway (yeah!), and our first family camp is already over! Where is the time going? I'm so far behind on blogging about everything that's going on out here! The All Staff Reunion, which ran June 11-13, 2010, was pretty amazing. We had about 50 people out for Saturday, which was the key day. When you think about the number of people who have worked here over the years, perhaps 50 isn't the hugest turn out, but it didn't really matter because the 50 of us who were here had a great weekend. Staff from the 1960s through to the 2000s were here. We ran activities, exchanged stories, strolled the property, broke out our old photos, played games, drank crazy amounts of coffee, bought out the ...