A slice of 90 minutes...

Sorry I am late with this update...
but I was just dealing with trying to schedule next week’s high school camp which is full and spilling over to the Apple Orchard which puts the AIM team in Reddingham, but we are not sure if the bathrooms will be able to work because the plumbing and septic are causing troubles and the concerned about the other bathrooms in Sherwood if they will do alright for next week’s Week in the Forest for people with developmental disabilities, where our numbers are approaching 50 people. I then took a step towards my office when I got distracted by a few people praying for a young woman, who in January was set free from a terrible and abusive past 5 years. I sat and wept as I heard the story but then the afternoon thunderstorm hit us and I had to make sure that everyone in the Junior High and Sherwood camps were under shelter and no one was playing out in the open and making sure that the people on the ropes course were safely taken off the wires. Craig Shigyo was concerned about how the dinner down in Sherwood would go and we decided to eat in the huts, using one hut as the distribution hut. Then I was approached by someone coming from Eastview who was concerned about the bathrooms up there and could we do something about them. I told him they could take some boys in the morning to the bathrooms in the Apple Orchard for showers and potty. He thought that might work as long as the mountain lion that has been heard on the manzanita trail doesn’t come and eat them. I told them to walk in groups and don’t scare the kids with any stories about lions, tigers or bears, etc. He assured me he wouldn’t talk much because of the distance he has to walk to the bathroom.
Then the storm hit and the dinner bell rang and the tables on the dining pad were getting drenched by the downpour so we moved the 160 kids and counselors inside the Dining hall to eat on the floor in small circles… like a picnic only with out a blanket and on red concrete. I gathered all the counselors together to make sure that all of their campers from their cabins are present. A few minutes later a counselor came in and told me one of his boys were missing and a youth pastor came to tell me that one of his counselors was missing as well. We found the boy up in the Eastview bathroom and his cabin having to change because the shower drain backed up and soaked his clean clothes that he was just changing into. The woman counselor, who last week found out she was pregnant and is having major nausea, went to sleep in a friend’s room in Cedar Lodge. Near the end of the downpour we were deciding about camp pictures and how to do them when Dave Davis drove up with a message for me to give to one of our Junior High campers that she needed to call her dad so that he could tell her what the evening news is saying about her missing mother. At the end of the storm many staff people came out onto the deck and danced. Even our speaker, George Freeman, who came up with his wife and mother (who is in the middle stages of Alzheimer's) was dancing with his mom.

I will try harder next time…