Last week I went to Camp Element. Element is the name of my church's youth group, and this week's theme was Deeper. I was so excited about going because I knew that week was going to be such a good opportunity to push myself farther than I've gone and to grow as a person and do things I've never done before. My week at camp certainly met my expectations and surpassed them greatly.
Monday was the first day. I got to the church where everyone was meeting at around 7:30 in the morning. I'd gone to sleep later than I should have, and I'd been up since 5:30, so I was already exhausted. But as soon as the rest of the campers got there, we got into full swing. It was a small camp - about 17 campers were there in all - but that doesn't make it any less significant. Anyway, we got divided into our teams; there were two, blue and orange. I was on the blue team along with a couple of my best friends, Brianna and Meagan. Some of my other best friends were there too, but they were on the opposite team *laughs*.
Our first camp activity was The Amazing Race. We went to three different towns and had different things to do at each place we went to. The first thing we did was we went to Lions Park in Waxahachie, and we had to hit golf balls into inner tubes, which was actually really hard! It was so fun though.
Then, we went to Jonathan's house (one of our team leaders) - I think it was in Mansfield (I think, I can't remember correctly), and we had to do a water activity, it was where we had to put a pole across our shoulders, and we had a bucket of water on each side and we had to take each bucket and dump it into a bigger bucket. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, it was easy, except for the fact that the buckets had holes in them! It was really fun too though, and the water that spilled out of the buckets poured on us and we got a nice cooldown in the middle of a very hot Texas day!
Then, after a lunch break, we had to make a tower out of newspaper and tape that could hold up an egg for 5 seconds. It was pretty easy, but the next part to that challenge was a bit more, well, challenging. We had to go to Pak Mail, the business my best friend Hilari's parents run, and behind it was a parking lot. We had to first ride a lap on a bike around this grassy area in the middle of the parking lot, which I couldn't do since I can't ride a bike, so I got to do the mental challenge. The mental challenge was that we had to take boxes that had pieces of manila paper taped to the backs of each one, and we had to put them next to each other to make something. It ended up being the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which my team figured out in a matter of minutes. The hard part was once we had it, Jarod, our youth pastor, kept telling us we had a row upside-down, so it was a matter of rotating a row, asking him if it was right, him telling us no, us fixing the row we'd just rotated, and repeating the process until we finally got it right.
Then, after my team finished, we mixed up the boxes so the other team would have a harder time of figuring it out, then we got into our cars and drove off to our next place, which was Getzendener Park in Waxahachie. Each team member had to put a Frisbee upside-down on our heads and hold it there while everyone else threw tortillas and had to make them land in the Frisbee. That was really fun, even if we did have to get tortillas hurled at our heads. But hey, at least tortillas are kinda soft, right?
After that, we went to another park in another town (it was a long day so forgive me since I don't remember everything lol) and we had to do a wheelbarrow race, one would be in front pulling it, one person would be in it, then we were allowed to have one person in the back holding the wheelbarrow steady so it wouldn't fall over. After that, we did the next part of that challenge, which was that we had to pick up gumballs and use them to fill up a glass bottle (like the small kind like Dublin Dr. Pepepr comes in). The only catch was, we weren't allowed to use our hands. We had to use chopsticks! I thought I'd be horrible at it, but I actually did really well at it!
Then after that, we went back to the church (the Midlothian Worship Center), and we had to do one more thing which for the life of me I can not remember what it was. After that last thing the day was over, and we got to take our stuff to our host homes (the girls were staying at my best friend Brittany's house, I don't know where the boys were staying), and we had an hour and a half to get ready for church that night, which was a little hard considering we had 13 girls and one bathroom, and we were only allowed 5 minutes in the shower, but it was okay, since we got to go worship that night!!! It was, to say the least, amazing and awesome and powerful and fantastic. I felt God's presence in that room so strongly that night, I was crying because I was so overwhelmed.
Monday was awesome, by the time I got to go to sleep I was exhausted. But it was such a good day!
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