Camp Allendale 2015
Summertime at KIDS Inc. means taking groups of our students, some of whom have never spent more than a day or two outside their own neighborhood, away to camp for a week. We load up the vans with 15 to 25 students, plus a few volunteer counsellors, and spend six days in the woods, sleeping on wooden bunks, surviving scrapes and thunderstorms, eating all our meals under the sky, and learning about doing hard things and the love of God.
It’s a difficult week.
Nobody sleeps enough Many of our students have never spent a week without cigarettes or their phones. We lead team-building exercises in trust, with students who have never met anyone worthy of trust in their lives. We encourage them to do scary things, from enduring spiders in their beds to riding a zipline or jumping into a lake.
We get to teach our students about the love of God,
and they teach us things too. We get to listen to their stories, often brought up precisely because of the hard things we’re doing, in moments of special vulnerability and truth. We lead them in bible studies and sing praises to God under the stars.
The week at camp changes people.
It changes our students, as they do things they didn’t know they could, and taste the freedom of a few days away from the haze of their regular lives, their broken relationships, and their fear. More importantly, they encounter Jesus. If we could have nothing else, this is what we would pray for our students. It’s what we pray for every week at our regular activities, and it’s what we pray for during the precious time we have with them during camp. This is why we keep going.
We love our students,
and we love the chance to take them to camp and give them a place to meet Jesus. We ask (and thank you in advance) for your prayers and support to make another summer possible. We look forward to sharing stories of the great things God has done!
