Crossed Trails & Cajun Confessions

   First off, I have no excuse for being absent from your blog notifications for so long. If it helps, I have been seriously busy for the past month or so: day camp, family vacation, camp camp, lakehouse retreat, and the National Youth Gathering. This is the first day in a very long while that I've been able to breathe and not worry about getting my laundry done before bed.

   If I'm being honest, I would have to say that I wanted to wait and process all of these things after the fact, instead of forcing some revelation each weekend as if it were glue that was left open overnight. 

   This really has been a great summer. It helps that I feel the most alive-awake-alert-enthusiastic when I've got waaay too much on my plate. I found myself relaying this trait of mine to several friends this summer, and they looked at me like they were waiting for me to realize the innate stupidity of what I had just said. But alas, 'tis true. I absolutely thrive on being almost too busy. I think it's because when that happens, I always feel like, for those few weeks, I really, truly, really earned my paycheck.

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   But back to the summer, starting with day camp: this was to be my third time around hosting a day camp team from Cross Trails Ministry. The last two years had seen people come to Longview that had known me as a co-worker at CTM, which was fine for the most part, but definitely gave both parties (the team and myself) a weird balance to strike. This summer however, I received a team full of new faces. For better or worse, I think it's safe to say that I have fully stepped (read: slipped and fallen) into my role as leader. 

   Crossing paths with a generation of summer staff was always going to be a bittersweet experience, and everyone who has worked at camp will tell you the exact same thing. You want to believe that you and your generation were the summer staff gold standard. You want to believe that everyone coming after you is going to be adorably inept and in need of your sage tutelage. You want to believe that they are going to explode with eager anticipation any time you show up at camp. 

   But you also know that is so not going to happen. The truth is, there were people before you, and people will come after you. And while you may get a few staff members who are delighted to hear stories of your glory days, most just don't care. They're living the stories they'll tell someday and you've just got to deal with the fact that you've flown home from Never Land and are all grown up. 

   Between day camp and Camp Chrysalis, this was probably the biggest thing I had to learn this summer. As I spent time with staff members in Longview and at Chrysalis, I found they were just as raucous, random, and blissfully ignorant to anything outside their camp community as my friends and I were. All the new faces were passionate, interesting cast members of their own reality show, just like my friends and I used to be. They were solid Christians who still made big mistakes, same as me. It was all this that smacked in the face with the reality that I am not the same age as the staff anymore and I needed to make sure I acted like it. Sure, I could hang out with them and have a good time, but they (and I) needed to make sure the line was always clear. I had my time, and this was theirs.


   The other shoe that dropped this summer was the ELCA National Youth Gathering in New Orleans. It was the last hurdle to jump over, and it was the biggest one of all. I know I spoke of the horrors of having to keep track of nine high schoolers in a herd of 34,000 in a city not exactly G-rated, but the real eye-openers were the end-of-day gatherings in the Superdome (groaningly renamed "the Lutherdome" for the weekend).

   To preface what I'm about to write, I'll write the following: for a long while, I've been feeling a disconnect with the organized Lutheran church. This is not to say I feel disconnected from the church God has called me to, or that I no longer hold Lutheran theology dear to my heart. Neither is at all true. What is true is that I think Lutherans, as a denominational group, are becoming a little braggy.

   Right from the start of the opening night worship service, the message of the gathering was "we are all citizens with the saints." The gathering's theme came from Ephesians, where Paul writes of Christ breaking down the barriers between slave and free, Jew and gentile, us and God. To their credit, the ELCA drove that point home exceptionally well. However, it would've been nice if they did so without building up another wall, separating Lutherans from every other Christian denomination. 

   More than a few times did a speaker say something to the tune of, "Only Lutherans include everyone!" and the thousands of people in the stadium would applaud. While I don't have any problem with being proud of your theology, I found it very odd that no one seemed to recognize the irony in statements like that. More than that, the speakers- and here is where I'll say that the speakers were all exceptional- kept saying "Lutheran" when they should have been saying "Christian." Even the T-shirts being sold at the gathering had more on them about Luther than Jesus or the Gospel.
   Now, I don't think anyone in the church means to do this. I mean, I was definitely engulfed in Lutheran pride more than a few times while in New Orleans, but for every time we shout "all are welcome," we need to be wary of what small things could turn people off - because it's those small oversights that will stick in people's craw.
   This is an inherent problem for our denomination because it creates the perception that we are more attached to a theology than actual faith. It's something that's weighed on me since moving to Longview. While areas such as central Texas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota probably don't see it as an issue- since there's an inundation of Lutherans in those areas, which means the random person on the street is more likely to know what Lutheran means- but for areas like East Texas, Lutherans are few and far between.
   Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of Luther's thoughts on faith. The Lutheran tradition has definitely shaped me into the person I am today. And there's nothing wrong with being proud of your traditions. But it wasn't Martin Luther who died on the cross and rose again. We need to make sure we are Christians first and Lutherans second. 
   When it boils down, being a Lutheran or not is not a prerequisite for salvation. We are all sinners and saints, yes. And we are all citizens in God's Kingdom.

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   To end, I'll share with you a funny story from the NYG, since I feel like I've been light on the comedy this time around:
   On Friday, the gathering schedule called on us to be separated into our Synods- nay, [airquotes] Mission Areas [/airquotes]- for a special, localized time of bonding and worship. From there, we were broken into small groups at random. I was a leader of one such small group.
Cue PRIDE.
   At the start of our time together, we were given markers to draw crosses on each other's hands to give a tangible, public reminder of our salvation. It also served as an ice-breaker for the kids. It was a fun (if not totally ground-breaking) exercise that I could tell the kids enjoyed. Once inked, we were commanded to proceed with a pre-printed lesson.
   Thanks to some incoming inclement weather, we were forced to end before the pre-assigned end time. In a fit of incredibly poor judgement, the people in charge stood up and told a room full of hormonal, over-dramatic high schoolers that we were being forced out of the hotel because management was placing the building under lock-down, which was happening in seven minutes.
   Cue PANIC.
   Having not quite completed the group time and trying to make myself heard over the din, I zoomed through the last page of the lesson, which said something about putting the sign of the cross on each other's forehead like we had done earlier on our hands. Without thinking, I grabbed a kid's face, uncapped a green marker, and planted a cross RIGHT ON HER FOREHEAD.
   For a split-second, she looked at me as though I had shot her. Then she smiles awkwardly and says, "I'm pretty sure we only supposed to trace it with our fingers." I look around, and I see everyone else marking their neighbors with the cross, not with markers, but with fingers.
   Cue OOPSIE.
   I turn and give her a sheepish grin, like this girl who doesn't know me will just say, "Aw, shucks, Danul. I just can't stay mad at you." She just continues her awkward smile, that pretty much says, "Thanks, weirdo."
   As we get shuffled out of the room, I offer her the chance to write a cross on my head, but she declines, says it's fine, and makes her way over to her group. I'm pretty positive the next- and last- thing I shouted at her was, "Hey, you're like the Christian Harry Potter!"
   Cue FACEPALM.

-  :Danul