Glendo

Early on Thursday morning, I joined around 50 students and a few staff to just north of Cheyenne, Wyoming for a weekend of camping. The hardcore stuff: water bottles to last the weekend, tents, no showers, etc. My most luxurious item was my 2-in-1 bug repellent and sunscreen, and boy was it a life saver!

On the vanride up, I met one of the residents. The way the youth group system works is that there are the two main leaders, Amanda and Mark, the two interns, me and Jason, and then 8 residents. We interns are the full timers, while the residents are the part-timers. But like the camping experience, we're all hardcore. It comes with the territory ;). The resident I got to know on the way up was Amanda Stooke. (I quickly learned that there are about 537 Amandas at this church, therefore you should get to know some of them by their last name. I.E. Stooke) We talked almost the all the way up, with certain breaks for when we would jam to a Denver local Aaron Espe, as well as, shamelessly, Dashboard Confessional. Hey, when you got an itch to scratch, you scratch it, right?

Any who, the camp itself was pretty spectacular. We set up our tents (actually, it was pre-set up by some volunteers who drove up a few hours before us) right next to a beautiful lake, and began to enjoy that right away. It was such an excellent way to meet the students--and let me tell you I got to know quite a few. Between late night games of Hot Seat, sand castle building, water tubing, games of Mafia as well as eating Banana Boats, I was able to get to know the names of at least 30 students. And, I had some very deep conversations with a few of them! They are a very open group, and I was very encouraged by my first weekend!