a camp

last week, me and the other youth members of our church here at cavite went to an inter-church youth camp in tagaytay wherein we met many other young people, some 200 of them and got to embrace unity for each other towards spiritual growth, as always. it lasted for barely four days, 15-18 april, which was tuesday up to friday. the venue was ok...maybe i can say it's cool but it's comfortably small. anyway, it worked out for the purpose of the program or so-called 'encounter' though.

by our arrival, i couldn't sense somehow that it was a camp... a place away from home... a place literally and figuratively away from home. maybe because i'm slightly accustomed to camps...i've joined already seven, four from that yearly inter-church one and three when i was in highschool in my former school. but anyway, it's a good feeling because if i was homesick i'd miss the hype and the spiritual gains. and through those four days, everything went tough but beneficial, challenging but fun, nerve-wracking but fulfilling...so the decision of joining that thing wasn't bad at all... let alone i was really reluctant to go there the day before it started. thank God for his wonderful will on making me grow and progress spiritually, mentally, physically and socially through that four-day exciting experience. plus it's forever fun and great to make and have new friends, especially humble ones...

the downsides, of course there'll always be, are... the water supply on the boys' department. i experienced sudden water outage once when i was rinsing my face of left-over facial foam (so it irritated my face at that moment) and also once (or maybe twice) while i was in the middle of gargling the foamy substance out of my mouth after brushing my teeth...so i could only speak gibberish. another thing was that the room wasn't that cozy. plus the double deck bed was easily shaky...sleeping on the under half, i could feel even the smallest turning of the guys sleeping over me, and to worsen the situation, they're playful! not to mention, noisy too...i join them but when it was time to sleep, i madly wanted to, but they just wouldn't. i can remember the first night was a sleepless one. thinking of the downsides, there are other inconvenient little things about it but there is no need to mention them here. what's important is there are more gains than pains.

so glad that our group (there were four, composed of various young people from different churches who, most of them don't know each other yet) won the flag competition and the best group title. big smiles spread all over my groupmates' faces during the awarding on the final day...hands clapped, shouts hovered all over the hall. it was fun... then looking back, i loved the obstacle on the second day... especially the crawl-on-mud station, where i got so dirty i felt like i was a moving cement man when the soil on me was drying up. i also loved the night worship services wherein the leading pastor guided us in prayer prior to reviving our souls... i heard alarming voices during times like that like haunting cries, loud sobs, intensified shouts which all sound so weird but if that's their way of reaching out to their God, there's nothing so wrong about it. and in that camp as always, my teamwork juices were squeezed out, leadership skills are unleashed and at the same time, my kiddy spirit's revealed... i wanted to have fun and cheer everyone up. so the encounter was hot, and cool. i'm so thankful to God for making a way so i could be a part of the event and for the camp itself, including everything, even the littlest ones, that i gained from it.