Why I am a “Writer”

I’m unemployed (or funemployed as some of my friends have been calling it lately), and all that I want to do is write. I realize how impractical that is, and by no means am I just going to stop looking for a job in order to pursue a writing career, but when it comes down to it, there are very few jobs that I’ve come across in my search that I would actually want to do. Then, of the few that do look appealing, I have to live with the fact that I am usually grossly unqualified and have no experience in those fields. Thus I am still unemployed, not to mention a little bit stubborn about where I work and what I do.

I couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog for The Soundless Heard about how we are all uniquely positioned to do various things based on where God has us specifically. Now I’m not saying that I am currently uniquely positioned to be a writer, in all honesty when I start school a week from now, I probably won’t even have time to be a writer anymore, but the truth is that I cannot seem to shake the feeling that this is what I need to be doing right now. I love writing. I love the feeling of getting my thoughts out of my head and on to paper (or digital paper as it is these days). But I think most of all, I love the thought that people are able to read what I have to say and can react to it. It doesn’t even bother me if they react negatively, I might write something down then change my mind based information that someone else brings to my attention. I view writing as just another form of dialogue between me and whoever else wants to read it and respond.

I don’t know if anything will actually come of my trying to pretend to be a writer. If it does, then it is due to the grace of God. All I know is that I really enjoy it, so I am going to keep pursuing it…as well as real employment.

The Joy of a Broken Down Car

Who would ever think that car troubles would be so prevalent at camp? I definitely did not.

I have been here for nine weeks now and have seen a routine forming in my life. My weeks have begun to look very similar to each other and there is not really much variety. When variety has come though it has usually been marked by some form of car trouble. For example, at the end of the only prank war of the summer, by car battery died. No big deal, and I learned how to change a car battery because of it. The next weekend however I drove the camp minivan two hours away to where we go whitewater rafting. When one of the other staff members drove it as part of a shuttle so we could have cars where we finished rafting for the day, he drove the entire way with the emergency brake on, over 20 miles round trip...I had to drive the van back to camp that night because I had responsibilities I needed to take care of the next day. I learned a lot about what shifting into low gears when driving a automatic can do for you since I had been instructed to use the breaks as little as possible, and it turns out that the conversation I had with the person that was with me on the way home was quite possibly one of the best ones I have had this summer. Then the very next night, we had a women's staff appreciation night where we drove them all up to the summit of a local mountain and set up a movie for them which we ran off of a generator...which was not powerful to run the projector, computer, and sound system...so we ran the sound system off of my car battery...Being one of the last to leave that night, there were not a lot of people around to help when my car dies right after we pull onto the road. The car would start, but then it would die instantly. After popping it into neutral and rolling it back into the parking lot, my friend Donny and I slept in my car until 3am when our friends Craig and Chris were able to come and save us. I'm still not entirely sure what was wrong with my car, but we got it running again and it has worked fine ever since and I got to spend some quality time with Donny up there on that mountain as we laughed and hypothesized about what could possibly be wrong with my car.

It is strange to me how every time I'm doing something different from my standard routine, something goes wrong with the car I'm driving. It kind of makes me want to not break my routine at all! But given the fact that I work at a camp and my routine can be changed literally at a moments notice, that is not really an option. At the same time though, these three incidents of car trouble have lead to some really great memories. God has clearly used them all to help point to some of the things that I am going to remember the most about my time here. Part of me is surprised by this, and I'm not entirely sure why. Our God is one who time and again uses our hardships, no matter how small, to bless us and show us how much He actually does love and care for us.

Growing Together

Campers can be really difficult, and I'm not even responsible for any of them. No, rather I'm responsible for their counselors and making sure that they are as sane as possible, and still there are quite a few campers who just drive me up the wall. But on the other hand, there are campers who are the greatest kids you will ever meet in your life. For the last two weeks, we had a group of campers in a programs called Echo and Summit who all fit this description.

The Echo program is one in which high school students pay to come to camp for two weeks to do our dishes and take out our trash. They also go out to different places in the community and do service projects there and when they are not working for the benefit of others, they are usually to be found learning about what it means to actually live the life that Christ calls us to. These kids are in high school and are getting exposure to authors that I had not heard of until a year ago. Needless to say the Echo program is literally life changing.

On a similar scale is our Summit program. The difference is that this program takes in high school students and teaches them how to guide rafts down the river and how to guide a group through the wilderness and how to safely manage groups on our ropes course. Basically they are trained to be staff members for two weeks while getting poured into spiritually as well. It really is a fantastic program.

Last week I had the opportunity to sit down with one of our Summit students who, as it turns out, does not yet have a real relationship with Christ. More or less I kind of stumbled into this conversation without really moving. I was just reading a book and he was having a conversation with the Summit director near by and when the director left to talk to someone else momentarily, this young man invited me into the conversation. This was by far the highlight of my week. His questions and concerns were so real and genuine and his emotions were honest and true. He was expressing himself in a way that very few high school students I have known could. I think he is about to embark on the beginning of an adventurous story that will lead him far away from what he has known and into a place where he will be seriously transformed by the love and power of the living God.

I realized that night that camps exist largely so that the campers who come can see how big and how powerful God really is, and on the same scale, for the people who work at the camps to see the same thing. Then campers and staff members can actually be growing together in largely the same ways, but often with different levels of understanding on the point. Sometimes I think the campers actually understand what is going on more than the staff members do.

High Adventure...more or less

This week I was back on the river with our High Adventure program. Because there is still so much snow in the mountains, the rock climbing portion had to be canceled because the roads are all still closed due to being covered in snow leaving us with no access to our rock climbing site. This means that we all had an extra day on the river and what a difference one day can make.

White water rafting is a very tiring activity for people who are not used to doing it every day and when you are dealing with Jr. and Senior High students who are more interested in anything but the physicality it takes to keep the raft moving where it needs to be going, things only get more difficult for everyone.

I was fortunate to have a pretty solid group of paddlers the days I was guiding down the river, but that didn't prevent our group from having a few minor mishaps. The first day, the first group we sent down missed their take out point and had to raft another five miles down the river to get to the next one, which by and large was the most difficult take out on the river to drive a trailer down to. The second day we had a girl slide head first 15 down a cliff into the water from one of our jump rocks. She was fine, just a bit bruised.

The third day on the river is where we had the most trouble. Everyone was tired, even to the point where that morning the Women's Staff Counselor, Kelsey, came up to me and told me that she just didn't have it in her to go rafting that day and had been praying about it and just really felt like she should stay back and rest. This actually worked out really well because then she could come and pick us up at our take out point and help us shuttle at the end of the day. After about an hour of rafting we came to a rapid called Rattle Snake which is currently running at a 3+ level and all of our boats made it through just fine. Unfortunately we were in the second group of boats that went out that day.

After we pulled around the corner after the rapid we found the first group waiting for us. This was a bad sign. This means that something had gone wrong, and as we pulled in, our worst fears were confirmed. One of our guides had been pretty seriously banged up, (thank God it was a guide and not a camper), and needed to be evacuated from the river and get to a hospital. This task fell on me and another guy. We hiked our injured guide out of the canyon and started to look for a car. There were none around so we had to hitchhike back into town.

The first car that came by was a forestry truck. Awesome, the forestry service work camp is right across from the clinic in Happy Camp (the town we raft from) this would be perfect. He drives right past. The next car also drives past without hesitation. Not many cars drive this road so we were beginning to worry a bit about getting our friend to the clinic. Just as I'm walking a little ways down to see if there is anyone that can help us, I hear a car stop behind us. It was Kelsey, on her way to help us shuttle at the take out point.

God is always working on our behalf, and this week has been a great testament to just how much he cares for us. The first two days on the river I had a guy in my boat from a youth group in the bay area. I could tell by some of the things he would say and even by the music he would talk about, that he had lived a very difficult life up until this point, and that he was desperately searching for something to bring him peace. On the way back to camp after we were done rafting that third day, I heard him tell about some of the atrocities that he had had to deal with in such a short time in his life and I just began praying for him, that God would get a hold of his heart.

Thursday night in the middle of our campfire session, a thunderstorm began. It was short, but enough for us to move our "campfire" indoors. After worship and before the speaker spoke, this young guy pulled me aside and we went outside to talk. Fortunately it had stopped raining by that point but the only places there were to sit were soaking wet, but not wanting to stand I sat down on the wet table anyway and came down with a serious case of wet butt. He asked me why I believe in God.

This was the beginning of a really long and powerful conversation about who God is and how He so greatly desires that everyone come to know His love and forgiveness. I got to hear some more of his story and what his life had been like growing up and I was able to listen to him as he honestly told me about the brokenness that he had experienced and the pain that he had been through. He let me work through a lot of that with him and by the time we were done talking I asked him how he was feeling. He said that he thought he had heard all he needed to hear, but he wanted to sleep on it. I told him to come and find me the next day to tell me what he was thinking.

The next day at staff meeting, I found out that he and his counselor had talked for a long time afterward as well, and that night at dinner he came up to me and thanked me for talking with him. He told me that I had changed his perspective on the world and I gave him my contact information so that we will be able to keep the conversation going in the future.

When I was talking with him about God, faith, and all of that stuff, I was able to share with him the story of how Kelsey had chosen to stay back and not raft the morning before, and how it was her who God used to get us off of the road and back to safety that day.

Our guide was back at camp that night, he just needed to be stitched up a bit, but he was fine otherwise.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. - Romans 8:28. Sometimes though I think God likes to remind us just how true that is.

Training...Blood, Sweat, and Blackberry Bushes

The first four days of all staff training consisted of training as a river guide for white water rafting. In my first hour on the river, before I ever even had a guide stick in my hand, I watched a guide steer her raft through a class three rapid, disappear in the white water and come back up bleeding profusely from the mouth. At some point she had hit her chin on something and impacted two of her top teeth into her jaw. Day one on the river began with a slight medical emergency. The next day I got tossed from the raft and caught in an eddy (a backwards current along the bank of the river) and had to hike out of it through a bunch of blackberry bushes to the other side of a large boulder in order to regroup with my raft that was about a quarter mile downriver. That is when I knew that i had found myself in the right place for the summer.

So I have been at Kidder for a little over two weeks now, and for a little over two weeks I have been in training. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, I'm loving what I get to do here and it really seems as if a new staff member arrives every day. With a week left of staff training, I'm getting really excited to begin the process of getting to know everyone. Oh, and training at a high adventure camp is not quite what many people think training is. So far I have had the opportunity to play on a ropes course, shoot rifles, learn how to guide a river raft, lead the staff in a personality training, go trap shooting, help repair a paintball field, shoot some archery, teach and co-lead a discussion on living in community, and make somewhere around 45 new friends and remember all of their names...i think.

My job for the summer is primarily going to be hanging out with the guys on staff and helping to take care of any of their spiritual needs, and it has been awesome beginning to get to know the guys who I am working with. I had never met any of these guys before I got here, and I can tell you with confidence that God has something really big planned for all of them as we move throughout the summer. I'm getting really excited for how God is going to use me this summer. I have already been leaning so much about what it means to be intentional with my relationships with people. My position is centered on my relationships with the guys and it has been so awesome being able to invest even a little bit of my time into them.

I can tell that this summer is largely going to be about facing my fears and fighting through my inhibitions. Thus far this has resulted in my first ever bloody nose from jumping off of a thirty five foot cliff into the river, facing my fear of heights by climbing Jacob's ladder (a giant ladder in our ropes course), guiding a raft down intense rapids, and confidently allowing myself to be myself and celebrating the way that God has uniquely designed me. Our God moves in powerful ways.

I have the blessing to be able to live with Craig Thompson the camp's program director for the summer at his house on camp property. I'm sharing a room with Austin, another member of the leadership staff, and it has already been such a blessing to be able share life with him.

I have already been very uplifted and encouraged by the communications I've had with everyone outside of Kidder Creek. If maybe by chance you ever want to send me something, care packages, letters, etc. here are my addresses.

For US Postal Service only:

Kidder Creek Camps

c/o YOUR NAME

PO Box 208

Greenview, CA 96037

For UPS, FedEx, etc...

Kidder Creek Camps

c/o YOUR NAME

2700 S. Kidder Creek Rd.

Etna, CA 96027

I will be at home in San Diego for about 36 hours next weekend to walk in graduation so hopefully I will be seeing many of you then. I love you all and I can't wait to see you all once I return for good.

Scott E. McGhee

Beginning at Kidder Creek

Family,

I am now at Kidder Creek. I feel like I stumbled in really. As of now there are only12 of us here for leadership training. I have to say that I was a little surprised to find out that I was on the camp leadership team. Probably one of those things that I should have known but I just didn't manage to put two and two together, but that is neither here nor there.

Coming to camp, if I'm being entirely honest, I was really concerned about having to live inside of a new community. It just usually is not an easy transition, but having been here for two days, I have to say that I have never felt so welcomed into a community without question. The people here are all really great and I am excited to get to know them all even better over the next three months.

I feel like this week is going to be a lot of me learning about just what it is I'm doing this summer and how to live and function inside of a camp atmosphere. I am really grateful that I have this week with just the leadership team to help me get acclimated before the rest of the staff gets here this weekend.

The rest of this week involves more leadership training and team bonding, culminating in the Adult White Water Rafting trip the camp puts on every year...the bad news is that it is supposed to start raining tonight and not stop until Friday night, and given that it was snowing on my way in on Saturday, I'm expecting it to be pretty cold on the river.

I'm getting really excited to see just how God is going to use me this summer as a part of this team and this fantastic ministry way up here in the middle of nowhere, and I cannot wait for the rest of the staff to arrive. I can already tell that this summer is going to be unlike anything I have ever experienced. Pictures to come potentially. Praise God.

Scott E. McGhee