Dating : Long Day of Training

I woke up at 5:30 AM today — on the rock.

The rock is a place that we canoe to for rugged overnight camping experiences during the summer.

As of now, I have been up seventeen hours — and sleep will be much needed.

In fact, the healthy thing to do would be to go to bed right now.

But, I have a lot on my mind and it is a challenge of sorts to write these stories before I forget it all.

Part of the trip was to canoe to the rock yesterday, and canoe back.

Getting there is downstream…so no big deal.

Coming back is upstream — quite a workout for the arms.

Yesterday we went to Eagle Canyon for the day.

At Eagle Canyon a few climbs and a large rappel are set up for people to do.

Fast-forward to within the last two hours — the Executive Director’s wife challenged me to share one thing that God is doing in my life in each post.

I have had an incredible fear of heights while growing up.

It is not really in my power to overcome that by myself — but somehow I have overcome that fear in several different ways this past week and past two days.

So, it’s fair to say that in my life right now, God is helping me overcome my fear of heights.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I walked across the catwalk like a scared cat.

That sentence was partly humorous, but also truthful in the fact that it was something I needed to overcome.

Yesterday at Eagle Canyon I rappelled over the cliff — it has a difficult start at the top and feel free to correct me, but I believe the rappel goes down near thirty or forty feet.

So while it’s not me — God is taking away that fear from me — and I’m able to do these things now.

I even climbed one of the easier rock climbs there at Eagle Canyon afterwards.

Today at the tower on the challenge course I climbed to the top on a difficulty rock pattern — touched the top — then came back down.

I wasn’t feeling up to it, but it worked out anyway.

Then when they setup the rappel from the top of the tower I climbed the easier rock pattern climb to the top — stood at the top of the tower — and eventually rappelled back down.

Then, I did the high wild woozy element for my first time ever with another counselor who was just doing it for his first time as well.

So in short, I’ve garnered a lot of experience dangling with my feet off the ground recently.

If there is a first time for anything — today I canoed back from the rock with the counselor who applied before anyone else in twenty-one minutes.

The average time is forty-five minutes…and sometimes longer if you have many campers in your canoe.

My laptop screen just flickered.

The counselor who is taller than everyone else just unplugged my cord and moved a few things around on my power-strip so that he could plug his Macbook in.

His last name rhymes with bear.

He is buying new sneakers, he needs good shoes to run in without spending too much money.

He asked me if I was going to write about him, so now I have.

Now for a quick summary of our day.

We woke up two hours earlier than typical.

We canoed until our arms fell off.

We took hot showers and felt clean for an hour at maximum.

We ate lunch at camp.

We got sweaty again.

We spent four hours on the ropes course.

We welcomed the TLTs to camp.

We ate dinner.

We played a game on the ball field — the grass was slippery. I slipped and fell, twice.

Staff sure are competitive when they tell you that they tagged you five times after you fell. 🙂 fun times

We had a session about camper supervision.

We had fireside.

We had an ice cream social.

I put caramel on my ice cream.

I don’t like ice cream…but today was hot enough that ice cream tasted good.

We had cabin devos.

We had prayer partners.

For prayer partners we started it off with the question “What egg are you on?”

That was courtesy of our new TLT prayer partners.

Then we got into some deep conversations and spent meaningful time together — just the five of us.

It’s going to be a great summer. These TLTs are incredible people.

A TLT is a “Teen Leader in Training.”

Even though this post was shorter than others, the day was the longest day of training we’ve had yet.

So as a rule of thumb, if my story is shorter — the day was probably longer and there wasn’t as much time to write before bed.