Church Camp. One of the most popular summer activities for kids all over America and no different for our family.
Since the end of camp last year, we could hardly wait for this year. As I am a rising senior, this meant I only had one camp left after this one so I was determined to have an absolutely fantastic week of camp. But things never happen the way that we want them to.
After having a week of what I can only describe as miserable, I have seen the many ways to make church camp the worst week of anyone’s year and also simple ways of how you can avoid it.
Please leave a comment below on your thoughts about church camp after reading this. I would love to hear experiences from you!
All right, here we go- 5 ways to make camp miserable.
1.- Room with all of your friends.
About a month before camp, it was me, my sister, and our two friends. We all have what can be described as close friendships and our plans were from the beginning to room together. What could go wrong? (Que the dramatic eye roll)
When you basically live together in a cabin, you get no breaks from each other. They are first people that you see when you get up and the last people that you see when you go to sleep. Basically they could be described as your shadows. Especially if you hang out with each other most of the day.
Problems with this. Where to start?!
At camp, you are active all the time, whether you are mentally or emotionally or physically active, you pick, but you are constantly doing something. This causes one main thing. Being TIRED. TIRED = CRANKY in my book. This causes you to look at things from an exaggerated point of view and you generally think that everyone is annoying around you. See where this could make things hairy in the cabin among your friends? I sure did!
Unless you practically live with your friends already, please consider what could happen to friendships.
2. Be Mad at Your Friends for Making Friends
When you bring your friends to camp and they are nervous about meeting all of the friends that you have made from camp, what is the first thing that you will tell them? “You will meet so many people and you will make LOTS of friends! There is nothing to worry about!”
I have never heard something more true and yet so wrong at the same time.
Your expectation as the person inviting people to camp is that you will get to spend a lot of time together and that you will become better friends because of this.
Problem with this train of thought? It quickly derails into the station of frustration.
Frustration that your friend has made friends and now you never see them. When you do see them, they only talk for a few minutes and go right back to their new friends. You feel like you are not even friends anymore. You don’t want to hear about their day in cabin talk because it is all about what they did without you during the day. Get the picture? But the problem is that you gave them the advice to go and make new friends!
Be happy that they made so many friends! That means that they are having the fantastic week of camp that you described and that they were hoping of having!
3. Have a Crush on a Boy at Camp That You Know Your Best Friend Likes
Lets say your best friend comes home from camp and starts talking to a boy there, and develops a huge crush on him, and then is disheartened because he says that he cannot date her for several reasons. Natural reaction would be to tell him he is a jerk and be there for your friend as much as possible right? Apparently that is not the case in teenage girl circles anymore. Instead the standard protocol is to go after that same boy right in front of your best friend.
Problems that occur with this are as follows: You hate your so called best friend. You cannot talk to your best friend. You cannot look at your best friend because she is always with the boy that you still like. You talk about her behind her back. You make your friends around you choose sides in a war that has broken out. Neither of you get the boy that you were going after.
Why is it that girls cannot go somewhere and not focus on boys that they like? There are fifty billion other things to do with your time at camp other than chase after a boy that if you were not chasing could see that he was kind of a jerk. You could focus on the friendships that you can see falling apart right in front of you. You can go on a hike. You can read and meditate on the Bible in your free time. It is church camp. Use it as a retreat to focus on God and to have some personal reflection. You can play games. You can draw, dance, canoe, literally anything that you can dream of. But girls choose to chase after boys and loose a week that could have been amazing.
Please choose something that is going to be a better benefit for you in the long run.
4. Try to Drag People Trying to Stay Out of the Drama Into the Drama
This was the big one for me, because this is what happened to me all week.
As the week progressed in camp and I began to see the split in my friends, I somehow found myself in the middle of it. I was not in either camp but I always found myself trying to help one side or the other. At that point, I did not feel like i had a place in any of the groups of people that i was hanging out with, and sometimes i was the only person talking to different people just because everyone was upset.
Of course I was having a blast playing the games, talking in my small group, and doing as many different types of activities as possible. But when you do not have anyone or a group of people that you can hang out with and laugh with, you can start to feel pretty lonely. When I could not find people that I meshed with, I started to stick to myself, spend a lot of time reading and writing and reflecting. I am a generally introverted person, and I do tend to spend a lot of time with horses, but there is nothing worse than feeling isolated. Like you are a puzzle piece trying to fit into the wrong puzzle.
When you are the puzzle piece that does not work in a particular puzzle, it is worse to try and be forced to fit. Do not do that to your friends. Just don’t do it. It is not healthy for the sanity of anyone.
5. Don’t Take Naps When You Need To
This one pretty much explains itself.
Here is my last piece of bonus advice on how to drive the people around you crazy.
- Make up on the last day of camp and act like nothing happened.
After you go through a whole week full of drama and being upset with everyone, how can you come home and say you had a great week at camp just because you made up on the last night.
Sure you can say the end was fantastic. One of our friends got baptized and there is no way that you can diminish the joy of that fact. But that was one out of seven days and that is no way to gauge the rest of your week.
Be honest. Don’t try to sweep it under the rug and forget about it. Those were silly and yet damaging things that happened. Learn from them but do not try and ignore the fact. Otherwise what will happen is that you will hold grudges with each other and will always have a certain amount of bitterness towards each other. No matter how hard you try to act like you don’t.
That is all I have for my tips for camp, but please keep in mind this is from an outside perspective into everything that happened in a terrible week of camp for me. But that does not mean that I am the only one that saw these things. There are several people that I have talked to that agree with how everything happened so this is not just my opinion on everything.
Anyway, please seriously think about all of these before going to your next church camp and try to learn from my experiences.
Comm Equestrian 