Weekend Warriors of God

For five days last week, I had an amazing, arduous, and elevating experience at a small Christian camp about two hours from San Francisco. Westminster Woods is the closest camp to San Francisco that serves kids in the usual functions of a Christian camp. Winter retreats and summer camp activities have been a staple of Christian youth in this area for some forty plus years now. Last June I received a letter from them explaining that they were planning on building a new playground structure at their camp and they needed volunteers to help build it. I thought through my time committments and realized that I would, indeed, be able to attend. And so, I strapped on the weekend armor of God and drove on up.

I missed the kick off by about an hour because of traffic and the need to get some sleep after class the night before. But when I arrived, I immediately put on my heavy duty boots and waded right in. At first, being an unskilled laborer, I was asked to help carry 2 x 4's from a prep area to a routing area where the boards were going to be beveled on all edges. I did that for about thirty minutes or so before one of the sub-foremen, Gary, snagged me away to help him cut boards with the straight saws. We were only at that for about a half hour or so before the big boss, Mike, came over and "borrowed" us to help load heavy 6 x 6 timbers into place around the playground site. These 6 x 6's would form the supports for the entire playground. Our "short" stint with the timbers ended up lasting the rest of the 5 days. I never did go back to helping with the wood cutting.

After taking the heavy 6 x 6's (some of them were as long as 16 feet and required four men to carry them) and dropping them into pre-dug holes, we needed to level the boards and fill the holes with a clay like river dredge that when packed down allegedly held the support beams level. As it turned out, this task took most of the warriors the rest of the day shift and all of the night shift to complete. But as we walked off the site at 9:00pm, every single support beam was in place (or so we thought).

For the first two nights I slept in a cabin by the swimming pool with a bunch of other guys. Whereas during camp it might be normal to get to really know my cabin mates, our conversations were only cursory as we were all too tired to stay up and talk much. By 9:30pm, most of us were fast asleep.

On Thursday, I woke up at 6:00am and took a short walk. My muscles ached from the day before, but after a short walk, I was feeling much better as I headed to breakfast. Westminster Woods has always had one thing going for it that other camps don't always live up to - the food is excellent! I mean restaurant quality excellent! And plenty of it! Still, as I had known for years, the harder I worked, the less hungry I became. I ate enough to get energy for the day and that was about it.

By 8:00am, I was back on site, joining a new team of men and a boss named Trevor. Trevor is a EMT firefighter out of Petaluma with a lovely wife and three young kids. He was also a sub-foreman and a true Christian leader. Our job was to tackle the "Rock Wall" steps that formed one half of the front of the playground. Our co-warriors for this task were Dan, a pastor from Fort Bragg, Lyn, a retired member of a local church, and Gary, another retiree from the same church. Together with Trevor, we formed quite a team. By lunch time, we had already managed to raise our base platform and nailed in all the support beams and legs for every single one of the stairs. We had made incredible progress, until we discovered that the entire structure was an inch and a half too wide. We had to undo all that we had done.

As the skies grew darker and more threatening, we undid one entire side of the structure, then painstakingly reconstructed it (after moving one of the giant support beams). As is typical of anything with God, just as we were physically and emotionally and mentally exhausted, along came a new warrior (Noah) who had fresh armor. He led the reconstruction effort for us and did most of the backbreaking work. By 9:00pm that night, as we walked off the site, we had gotten all the way back to where we had been at lunch time.

And then it rained... and rained... and rained...

By the end of Friday, we were walking in mud that rose to our ankles. But during Friday, we built up our basic structure into a set of very solid stairs and ended the day by capping the 14 foot structure with a bridge that connected the two front structures. It was exhilirating and tiring. But by dinner time on Friday, I was actually feeling pretty good. Call it a second wind, or call it God's strength, but I was feeling downright giddy.

On Friday night, I was joined by the Lakeside Youth Group. They split our group up amongst two "dorms" for the youth, male and female. The major advantage to this was that our dorm was right next to the chow hall (and much closer to the work site). The disadvantage for me was that I was now chaperoning a bunch of excited teenagers at camp for the weekend on a Friday night. To be fair, they set up an Xbox game system on the meeting hall's projection screen and tied it into the surround sound system and our dorm became a video game arcade. While somewhat annoying to hear video game noise when you're trying to sleep, it did have the soporific affect on the teens that you read about in all the video game reports. They shut up and played Halo 3 and, other than messing with my dreams, there was no lasting damage done. I slept solidly on the carpeted floor - my reward for three straight days of grueling work, including one spent in the mud.

Saturday awoke with a thin fog that covered everything, but by 9am, it had burned off and we were greeted to beautiful sunny skies for the rest of the weekend. It didn't immediately dry off the mud however. Eventually, we covered the mud with rock (the base of our playground ground covering) and that made things go much quicker and much cleaner. On Saturday, we completed all of the wood paneling, support beams, and other fixtures that needed to make our structure solid - and we built the wall that would hold our "rock wall" in place.

To be fair, with 400 volunteers on Saturday, I didn't need to go at the pace I'd been going. There was a lot of standing around and waiting for wood to be cut, followed by a flurry to get the wood in place, before we stood around and waited for the next piece. Some of the youth saw me standing there and asked me if I was just tired and I would simply reply, "Hurry up and wait" - an old Navy mantra.

Of all the days, Saturday felt the most like camp to me with hundreds of youth and adults running around the camp site, laughing, giggling, hugging, and straining with the effort of getting this massive project rolling. By the end of the day, the playground looked nearly completed and almost every feature was in place or was in the process of being completed.

There was a campfire for the youth and I'd like to report what it was that was said, but it started before I was off site and I was way too tired to walk up to the fire pit and sit in. I was half asleep by the time everyone trudged back into the "dorm" to play more Halo 3, and I was fully asleep not too long after that.

By Sunday, I was really feeling it - not just in the muscles that ached and the legs that felt like hardened jello, but mentally and emotionally. Throughout the day I would alternate between fits of irrational anger, depression, and extreme joy. I was on the ragged edge of exhaustion - but I stayed until the very end.

At noon we took the group photo and there were suddenly hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that showed up that I had never seen before. It didn't matter. I disappeared behind some people into the shadows of the structure that I had helped build from the ground up, and that somehow seemed fitting. I was reminded again and again that this was not about me or my glorification - it was about making kids happy in a safe, Christian setting.

The frustrations grew and the pain grew and my emotions were held in check by only the thinnest of margins and when, at last, 5pm rolled around and we nailed in our final board, I shook Trevor's hand and walked off the site to go find someplace to sit down. I had been taken to a place that I hadn't been in a long time, but I had left it all on the field and taken none of it back with me.

I felt empty for the first ten minutes or so until I started seeing the little kids growing eager for the opening ceremony to begin. They would run around, hugging one another with smiles as broad and as deep as the Nile. Though they had been put through the emotional ringer for young children, waiting for a structure to be built by their parents while they toughed it out in day care, the feelings and emotions of anxiety that their little hearts had been dealing with melted away with the anticipation of the good times to come. My emptiness began to fill up with the love of God and the feelings of His pleasure which was palpable in that formerly muddy field.

We opened the playstructure after a brief ceremony and a lovely prayer and I watched the kids flood onto the structure that I had built and immediately run up the steps that I had constructed to the bridge that I had stood on for nearly two days - delighted in the ability to finally realize their imaginations. And that was that. After saying goodbye to everyone, I hopped in my car and drove home - not needing any more thanks than that which I had received from kids too excited to form the words.

My armor was dinged up. My emotions were raw. My exhaustion both physical and mental. And yet I was feeling strong and powerful. I was soaring like on the wings of an eagle.