the green spot blog

I've been wanting to do a follow up Blog from our LEAD weekend that we had at the end of September. I have to say - it was one of my favourite youth retreats that we've EVER had at Evergreen. We had 150 youth and sponsors here getting equipped to go out and be active in their faith. Nearly everyone learned atleast two simple tools to go out and share Christ with someone near them. It was an amazing weekend! Danny MacKay from I am Second and e3 Partners was our main session speaker and his stories about taking advantage of every moment he's breathing to share Christ's love with people around him was so inspiring. If you were at the retreat - you will remember Danny talking about what was coming up for him after LEAD. He was going to be going into the Peruvian Amazon to three villages that were unreached by Christians. Well - Danny just got back and I'd like to share his stories and some pictures with you from his trip that I think might encourage you - they sur...

We've been waiting for Fall for what seems like nearly two months now. After three weeks of snowy weather - it feels long past due. I had many days where if I thought hard enough - imagined vividly enough, I could pretend that it was April and summer was only three months away. Alas - it is not April and Summer 2019 is still a solid eight months away. In the next week, we will be transitioning from our Fall Staff to our Winter Staff. We will say goodbye to at least half of our Seasonal Team and enter into a short  point in our year where we are all able to take a bit of a deep breath. We're still working hard to get ready for 2019: Guest Groups are still coming and going, Summer registration webforms are being updated, the website is going under construction, and events happening early on in 2019 are getting designed. Even so - there is a few moments where we're able to just...breathe... One of my less than secret things that I love to do this time of year is to g...

I think sometimes September is the month of "don't forgets". Don't forget your notebook. Don't forget your lunch. Don't forget your gym clothes. Don't forget to check your class schedule. Don't forget your locker code. I was watching the staff this last weekend as we served a large Guest Group. Each week seems little more busy than the last.  There's a lot of things to remind the staff as we welcome a new group on-site. There's a lot of... Don't forget to check your schedule. Don't forget to turn off the dishwasher. Don't forget to grab the activity binder. Don't forget the keys to the challenge course. Don't forget the code to the Playing Field Shed. Don't forget to check in with the Kitchen. That's a lot of remembering. It doesn't matter if you're a student at high school, college, or university - it doesn't matter if you're a staff member at Camp Evergreen. September is full of...

There are a few things that can be heard at the barn on any given day. These include calling the horses in, Prince meowing at you becuase he wants his food, or Puzzles, the donkey braying at you because you clearly forgot to give him the rest of the hay bale. Something else you can often hear at the barn is something that sounds like this...”No, you’re okay. It’s just a tarp, it won’t eat you, I promise. You can walk past it, it’s okay.” If you’ve ever worked with horses before, you very quickly realized that they can be scared of the strangest things. From a squirrel jumping in the trees, to a tarp blowing in the wind, the yoga ball in the catch pen, and even their own shadow following them. While we see all of those things and know that they are not scary, when a horse sees them they think that they are a scary monster that will jump out and eat them. It takes a lot of encouragement and patience from th...

It was a great weekend! Boy oh boy, we sure do love retreat weekends. We look forward to these weekends all year. It's fun to hang out with the youth groups and have a change from the normal weekend rentals. We also unveiled our brand new 2016 wide game: MEXICAN SPACE FISHING!! Which further inspired our kitchen to make fish tacos for Saturday's supper (one of Jogee's favourite meals). We learned Spanish and went fishing and it was great fun! Now...who remembers the Spanish word for cod... It wouldn't be much of an Alberta winter retreat if we didn't get a bit of snow...and sunshine...and rain! So sure enough, it rained and snowed and was sunny all at different parts of the day on Saturday. Jug 'n' Jog was fantastic as always...and some day - someone will catch Toby. Our speaker for the weekend hailed from Chiliwack, BC. ( Which makes me want to shout out Whatcha Gonna Do?!?...only a very few of you will get that). Al kept us laughing about how to ...

I've started a new family tradition - baking zwiebach (snowman) buns at Christmas.  For those of you who don't know what zwiebach is - its the best bun you'll ever taste - if they are built right.  My mom would bake zwiebach almost every week when I was young.  Some of you know what I'm talking about - the smell of fresh buns baking on Saturday morning while you're downstairs watching the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour.  During the ads (no pvr back then) I would run upstairs and grab another bun or six. Zwiebach were also a staple of faspa.  For those of you who don't know what faspa is, it was (and is) my favourite meal of the week.  Traditionally Sunday afternoon around 4:30-5:00, zwiebach, cold cuts, (remember liverwurst - key word being wurst) potato chips, cookies, pineapple squares etc. would come out on the table.  No scary vegetables and no better meal to enjoy as a kid. My personal zwiebach tradition started last Christmas.  I thought ...

The Magi following the star. The Christmas season can mean many things to different people, young and old. Maybe it represents family, gifts, traditions of hiking out to find the perfect (or imperfect) Christmas tree to decorate. It can also mean a very busy season, year end for businesses, too many meals to prepare for and attend, bills, missing loved ones passed, and obligations. Then there's 2015, where many people have been anticipating some other than Christmas: Anyone else willing to admit that Star Wars has been more the thing to talk about than Christmas? I'll admit it. I saw it on Sunday. I wasn't dressed as one of the characters but when the first title popped up on the screen with the score that I learned on the piano as a child...I had an ENORMOUS grin on my face. Last week, in our last general staff meeting before Christmas break, we read the Christmas story from Luke. We talked a bit about it and Taylor, our Program Director made a very profound p...

Hasn't fall just been absolutely amazing this year? I feel like we're being spoiled with the colours. I don't know if we have had the kind of colours that we have had this year in years. It's almost unbelievable to walk out to the barn and see the array of yellows, oranges, and greens. We're just starting our second month of fall groups. By the time October finishes, we will have seen over 2000 people come through Evergreen in just two months. Isn't that crazy? I love Guest Groups. The variety and personalities of the group. One day we might have a group of Beaver Scouts and the next could be a quilting group. Today we have a huge Home Schoolers group and tomorrow will be Edge School of Athletics. It's always an adventure here. This last weekend was a special one though. It was our Heart Transplant Group. Families from across Western Canada who have a son or daughter who has been through one or more heart transplant. This group has been coming for a f...

It's a strange thing to walk out of your house at 7:45am on March 9th to find puddles already formed and eavestroughs dripping. It's strange to watch the horses start shedding or rhubarb trying to grow. My brain is still trying to convince me that it's winter and yet everything around me screams that spring is here. Do you know what spring means? It means that summer camp is just, JUST around the corner. Ever since I was a young'un - I loved camp. Loved, in my case, might be a slight understatement. While my brother experienced a wee bit of homesickness - I was the kid who was hauling their bags out of mum's car, insisting that I could register myself. One year I even told mum that the camp ended a day later than it actually did. The camp directors figured that one out pretty easily though. The day that camp ended I was counting down the days until I got to go again; 357 days...356 days...355 days...354 days... I loved the food, the silly dress up nights, night ...

Hi, Hello, How are you? Today I am going to take you on a bit of a journey... rabbit trails and everything but I do hope that at the end I can bring it back around to a place where people can understand. Let me start with a few stories. I set out to write this blog post last week in preparation for this coming Wednesday and guess what? It is Friday already.. wait Saturday now! How did that happen? Writing this blog post has stirred up many memories of university. I would spend hours at the library staring at the computer screen itching to get a few words on the page. Late nights and procrastination were my forte. I would be the one running into class with the paper fresh off the printer. Why? Maybe I needed the deadline but I also felt the need to make it perfect. I would always strive for perfect but felt like I would come up short. What is perfect anyway? A few weeks ago Travis and I headed out on the Camp Days Tour. If you have never heard of Camp Days, this is wher...

Asking for help is not one of my favourite things to do. Independence has always been something I've been good at. Until now. You see, seven weeks ago I got my heel bone and achilles tendon reconstructed. It's a pretty big surgery that results in about six months on crutches. The surgery wasn't a surprise and I had thought that I had prepared myself for the first leg of the journey. I had someone coming to check on me but in my mind - I was going to do this on my own. I, Jogee, was going to remain independent! Boy oh boy, was I wrong. Everything was more difficult; making meals, feeding my dog, moving laundry. Everything. Was. Hard. I quickly discovered that there would be no getting through this without help. It's one thing to ask for rides to and from work or take Koda for a walk but I found myself resisting from asking for help in all areas. Areas like - cleaning my house and grocery shopping. It became hard for me to ask for help in these things because they...

I have a couple "jokes" or funny comments that folks hear me say sometimes around here about trust issues. The first one and probably the truest one for me is Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. You know, those cookies that look like chocolate chip cookies but when you bite into them expecting yummy, sweet chocolate - you get this odd texture and a sweetness that has no business impersonating chocolate. I don't trust very many cookies that may claim to be chocolate chip and are really fruit. I hate Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. They give me trust issues. And really, anything that looks like something that it isn't can give me trust issues. Proverbs 3:5 It reminds me of this time when I was a kid and we had a friend from Australia staying with us for the Harvest season and I made a jam sandwich for school. All was well and good, nothing even looked off when I was at school and bit into my sandwich...our Aussie had switched my JAM sandwich for a VEGI-MITE sandwich (think molass...

Hey peeps! It's winter out. Have you noticed? (If you haven't...you might be on vacation...if that's the case...can I hang out with you?) . November seemed like a pretty mild start to our white months up until about two weeks ago when almost all of Alberta went through a period of white-outs and cold, COLD weather. During that time, camp experienced almost 18 inches of snow and -40 degree weather. Yikes! I was out on the roads when the blizzard started and experienced some white-out conditions where I couldn't see the sides of the road or even the road itself. It was very scary when the road would clear ahead of me and I would realize that I was in the on-coming traffic lane. Praise God that I got home safely! A couple days later, I was out snowshoeing and came across snowshoe tracks from Sabastian and Christoph from the day before. Because of the wind and snow, their tracks were blown over and almost gone. There were points when I couldn't even tell where...