camping trip

I just got back from Immanuel's annual camping trip. As always it was awesome. There were, as Mike said, "About 5 billion mosquitoes per acre." I'm very tempted to think this was an honest estimate and not just a humorous exaggeration.

For me the best parts are the community of living together, the meals, the water fight, the swimming, the hikes, and especially the orienteering race. Ok fine, I like it all. It's so cool just about everyone in the church comes, even people who don't really like camping.

Well this year I made a mistake. We were about to start our orinteering race and were standing around getting the rules from Mike, the pastor and the man who sets up this little adventure, when I asked God to teach me some kind of lesson through competing in the race. (Can anyone remember that old proverb, "Be careful what you wish for"? Well the same can sometimes be said of prayer because God is not without a sense of humor. :P) That was my mistake. I never learn, I'm always praying these prayers of a slightly dangerous nature and then being swept up into these adventures. However if I quit praying stuff like that I'd get really bored. I'd rather have the adventure.

Anyway, I was put on a team of five, the purple team, and we were given two pages of clues to follow. We started off quite lovely and got the first two purple flags with ease. Things started going downhill from the second flag. First we got confused and went to the wrong lake (there are like a thousand in the area where we were camping, which explains the raging mosquito population). After going at least a mile out of our way and backtracking we found our third flag. At this point it had been two hours. Mike had announced to everyone that our team was the most likely to win, however he also expected the winners to return within two hours. We knew we had lost and this was made worse by the fact that we were the expected winners.

Not wanting to be quitters we continued. Rather suddenly, when we came upon a road that would easily lead back to camp two of our team members decided to call a quit and go back to camp. It was discouraging but three of us decided to keep going even though we were disqualified without all of our team members. Now it was just Josiah (our eagle-scout leader), Jessie (our energetic 16-year-old runner), and me. We got caught on the fourth flag. About two hours of exploring small lakes and mashes looking for a patch of lilies with a flag in them and we were one flag richer and one pint of blood poorer than we had been when our other team members had left us.

Somewhere in all that fruitless searching we all got quite discouraged. Though none of us wanted to quit Josiah delicately hinted that maybe we should as soon as we got the fourth and nobody disagreed. However, with the forth flag came a burst of encouragement. We realized that just because we came in last didn't mean we had to come back beaten. Since the next flag was not to far we went after it and found it much more quickly. With only two left we just couldn't quit. Flags six and seven also came faster, even if we did end up back-tracking again to get number six.

Finally, after five and a half hours the purple team emerged from the forest, wet, tired, hungry, mosquito-bitten, but proudly triumphant. Immediately we happened upon Mike, who had come to look for us since it was after 19:30 and beginning to get a little dark.

So what was my lesson? Obviously perserverance. Not quitting when everyone seems to give up and there's only a few left, and when you seem to get nowhere. I was thinking about that stuff the whole time. However, someone is begging for use of this computer so I must go and save this already long post for getting much longer.....