Category Archives: Summer

How Do You Hold a Moonbeam In Your Hand?

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It is afternoon. It is late November. You are driving a stretch of highway that seems endlessly straight and flat. The expansiveness of the world before you is as the flatness and emptiness of paper waiting to be filled. You imagine how weary the men who paved this road must have been when they finished. The way the steamroller must have rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled.

You realize, suddenly, that hours, miles have gone by one small yellow tick at a time and you haven’t bothered to take much notice. You search your heavy, clouded mind for any pieces of memory, any shard of evidence to prove to yourself how you arrived here from where you last were. But nothing turns up. No evidence can be found that you ever experienced the distance at all. There is only knowing that you are here now and the knowledge that you must have passed through somewhere in between.

I feel much like that right now.

I look through my computer, cleaning off articles and images from Salzburg and I wonder what it was like to pass through that somewhere. I have memories, but more and more I am convinced that the memories are simply a fabricated reality strung together from the context clues I have assumed from the pictures I see posted on Facebook. I want to be able to hit play in my mind and yet again be walking through the warmth of a summer night  hearing the low babble of life reverberating throughout the old city. But all I can retrieve from the bland-office-beige file cabinet of my memory is freeze frame glimpses for which viewing is as effective as attempting to hold cupped hands filled with fine sand.

The people, the wonderful people, seem like those of a movie I saw quite a long time ago. I remember the characters, I remember the hour and a half in the theater when I thought the story would last forever but then the credits scrolled and the lights came back on and I was once again back in South Carolina.

People keep asking me “how was Europe?” and I can’t help but respond, “inexplicable” because there aren’t words for something like what I have experienced. No amount of storytelling will ever be able to bring 68 people back to a castle in the Austrian Alps. None. That kills me.

I remember when I first learned in physics that I had never really touched anything, but it had only been my atoms repelling against something else’s atoms. We can only ever know, feel an impression of something, never the real thing. That blew my mind. I remember slowly touching my desk and my chair and my book and my pencils trying in vein to make real contact with the items. It was impossible. It is equally impossible—however metaphorically—to touch this experience. I, we, all intimately know the shapes and shadows cast by the impression, like Plato’s cave, but it is frustrating because it can never be anything more than that.

I want to say that being home is like waking up from a dream, but that’s not entirely accurate because being back feels just as much a dream as being there felt real at the time. Maps confuse me now because I can’t quite grasp where on the planet I am.

Appropriately enough, given Salzburg’s cinematic history, it’s like trying to hold a moonbeam in your hand—impossible. A moonbeam is just light, real, visible, shimmering, vivid, frustratingly intangible light.

I know all of this and yet I continue to be disappointed when I open my hand and find nothing.

Anticipation

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“Oh, the waiting, the waiting, the waaaaaaaaaaaiting!” Princess Fiona wails on my recording of Shrek The Musical. Although I am not waiting for Prince Charming to swing into my tower and rescue me from a dastardly fairy-tale plot to steal my childhood, I still feel like the same emotion is applicable to my current plight.

I have been waiting 18 years, 11 months and 19 days for this moment to come upon me. And now, finally I am on the verge of a whole new something, something I know very little about and yet want so desperately to be a part of. College is here.

To prepare for this I have been packing for at least a month now, and thinking about packing for months before that, and planning to think about packing for months before that! I hope all these details continue to enforce the idea that I have been waiting for college to arrive for literally MY ENTIRE LIFE. And now, less than a week from THE DAY, it is almost surreal that this is actually happening. I still can’t believe that I am going off to college!

(Sidebar: I have this feeling where everything is moving all too slowly and all too quickly simultaneously. Do you know what I mean? Its when you look up at the clock expecting hours to have passed and it has been only 3 minuets and 48 seconds, but then look up again what you assume is only seconds later and realize whole hours have passed. It’s a bit of an enigma I know, but bear with me, I’m doing by best to describe it.)

Anyhow, the last stage in my packing process is now in full swing back at my house. I have moved into the guest room. Why, you might ask? Because I’m absolutely brilliant. Here’s what I did: I took all the things I thought I would need in my dorm room and transferred them into the bedroom adjacent to mine, in effect making a mock up of my dorm room. This way I would remember all those little things that I use every day without thinking about it! I wish I could say “Dear reader, try this in future, it is a wonderful plan,” but unfortunately I just created TWO messes. In the disorder, my OCD brain decided to treat  both places as confusing “non-packable zones,” meaning it took some cleaning in both rooms before my mind could again track with what was going on in either one.

But finally I gathered up my belongings and put them all into boxes, organizing everything into perfect piles in the garage. Everything has a box. Everything. Just a sampling of these boxes’ fillings ranges from the normal to the strange: I have the obligatory foot locker full of clothes, a box of philosophy and art history reading materials along with my favorite blu-rays. There’s the 12×12 crème colored crate directly from my moother’s dorm room at App in the 1980s, which is filled with my vinyl collection. I have a shoe box, the contents of which are nothing but tea leaves, and for all my techie needs I have a 10 gallon Sterilite container filled to bursting with cables.

Mind you that is “just a sampling” of the treasures that wait to surprise my roommate when we both arrive on Friday. I can’t wait. My very favorite and most exciting “dorm-room treasure” was acquired only yesterday. It is a poster from the movie Another Earth. (My girlfriend claims I have an obsession, which may in fact be true.) How did I stumble upon this beautiful piece of art to adorn my wall? I called EVERY independent art cinema in Charlotte pleading my case until finally, the manager at the very last theater I called said, “Oh yeah, we have an extra one; we could sell it to you for say, $5.” Ecstatic doesn’t cover it.

With the knowledge of all my dorm things in order and the time for me to go to school coming ever closer, I have been doing a lot of sitting, and waiting, and thinking, and reading Tina Fey’s autobiography. People keep asking me “So sweetie, are you ready to go to college?” (Imagine that in the quaky voice of an old woman surrounded by far too many cats and you’ve got the picture.) My answer is now and has always been YES!

So now you understand why I relate to Shrek The Musical so well right now. Because if you were on your way to college (like me) and you were trapped in a tower (unlike me) you would also wail in exasperation, “Oh, the waiting, the waiting, the waaaaaaaaaaaiting!”

Sunset on Summer

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It all started when I threw that royal blue graduation cap up into the air. It exploded into being during a ten-day trip to Italy. It only continued to climb the mountain of surreal greatness as I spent ten days at Furman for Summer Connections. It sweated and toiled and burned like a flame of enjoyment as I spent four weeks counseling at Camp Harrison. It ended in the most beautiful climax, most apropos ending, most extravagant denouement- Camp Rock 2011.

My summer was one I will not soon, will not ever forget. I regret now that I spent much of it wishing school would come, wishing time would move faster. It’s not at all that I’m not excited out of my mind to head off to school in 21 days (who’s counting?) its just that going to Camp Rock, always one of the highlights of my summer, made me rethink the way I think about time.

It seems like only split seconds ago that I was driving over to church on Monday morning “Songify-ing” my excitement about heading up to camp this year. And then, in only the blink of an eye, it was gone. My sister put it best when she said,

“it’s like Christmas morning, you wait for it all year long and then it is just so surreal while its happening you forget to sit down and savor the fact that you have to wait an entire year before it comes around again.”

Time is a precious commodity. It is something no amount of money can slow down, speed up, rewind or fast-forward. Moments with people are always once-in-a-lifetime experiences, no matter how mundane they may seem when they are happening. They will never happen again, never the same way, never, ever. So hold on to each second as it slips through your fingers. Hold on to the faces and the places as they happen. Lock them away tight in your memory because time is fleeting. Because people will exit your life. Because you never know when your summer will end.


Day 2 by Explosions in the Sky 

Summer Swelter

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The heat index broke 100 in the start of my final week of counseling at Camp Harrison. Standing outside for more than 30 seconds would bring the feeling of those familiar thick salty streams of sweat running down my brow and into my eyes and mouth. My Nalgene stayed filled and, as often as I could, iced cold.

With the soaring temperatures came the thunderstorms. Even as I sat writing this on the porch of the dining hall the rain is beginning to come down, It pitter-patters on the roof and the mist of the storm is in the air. Thick, branching, bolts of lightning crack over the mountains behind my screen.

Last week I came up with the new idea to theme the week. This idea came about thusly: Every day I instruct paintball for the first two periods of land activities and then I use the final period to fill CO2 tanks and to get various things done that need doing. Last monday, however, I had a staff member and some CITs (counselors in training) from different activity areas come down to help me since I was a bit short handed.

Surprisingly, we actually ended up finishing up far relier than we normally do. We were riding in my Volvo station wagon back from where we take the CO2 tanks to be filled when we decided to blast the Mamma Mia soundtrack at full volume. We rode through camp screaming “Mama Mia” and “Dancing Queen” at the top of our lungs. The kids got really excited to see their counselors making, what they thought was, such a fool of ourselves. We drove all around camp, and even got permission to go onto the general athletics field and drive through a soccer game. Through the soccer fields, down the hill, over the basketball courts, and under the zip line we went, waving at campers and singing along the whole time.

Our journey ended at the cafeteria where I parked and we decided to bring the CD in with us to listen to while the whole camp ate lunch. During lunch we announced that the next day would be Hairspray themed, and the week’s theme of Broadway was set. The dance Wednesday night was Broadway themed and every lunch was filled with the magic of the Great White Way.

This week, with the release of the final movie so imminent, it was clear that the theme should be Harry Potter. One of the counselors made a master list of all the best characters and assigned them to everyone in camp. I was assigned Harry Potter himself. Tomorrow we all plan on dressing up like our characters and parading all around camp for both our and the children’s delight.

Last night I went into the booming metropolis of Lenior North Carolina to stop at the Walmart and the GoodWill to buy costume supplies. My costume is composed of: a repurposed extra-large women’s choir dress, a scarf made from what used to be a gold and red plaid button-down, some hipster-style fake glasses, and possibly a grey cardigan. We will see how the camp receives it tomorrow!

As the week draws to a close I’m realizing that I’m not excited to leave this place, It has become like home, but the next adventure awaits me, calls me into tomorrow.

Something New and Different: Furman Summer Connections

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In the spring I received a letter from Furman with a picture of some kids sitting on the top of a mountain smiling happily. As I do with all mail from my future alma mater I flipped it over and read it carefully: It was a flyer for a free summer theological seminar that the Lilly Center on campus was putting on how faith and vocation work together. This concept intrigued me, as did the price and prospect of meeting new people before I arrived on campus for “O Week.

I filled out the short online application with elaborate and well-written essays in the sprit of the many I had already written thus far in the college process and within a few weeks a plump letter was returned to me saying that I had been accepted to the program.

I was all at once excited and apprehensive. It was that feeling you get in your stomach when you are going into something utterly unknown. I pushed that fear, or apprehension, or whatever, out of my mind.

A few months later I found myself on the road making the 2.5 hour drive down from Camp Harrison, where I am working as a counselor for the summer, to campus for the start of the week. Honestly at that point I don’t know what I was expecting, but I can tell you that it was anything other that what happened.

When I arrived I found myself overwhelmed with a desire to be extroverted, something camp had not given me, something not even parties with my closest friends in high school had really given me. It was an extroverted-ness that did not, as usually was the case, make me exhausted of people in general. It gave me joy to be around and begin to form bonds with these new people. Seeking out and befriending everyone became my new goal. Whereas in the past I would have shrunk back, fearing awkward encounters or rejection, I now put myself wholeheartedly out in the open, for better or for worse and was myself, my crazy, loud, thoughtful, apparently funny, sometimes to the point of being obnoxious self.

It was freeing to be this new version of me. I liked it, I liked carrying myself out in public without so many cares and without so much need to draw back and be alone. The week left me wondering if this was a version of myself that I could sustain or weather it would come to a head later in the fall.

No matter what, I felt like something had indeed changed. It was as if there had been something inside of me that had been wanting to get out had finally escaped, finally been let loose, and was finally having its turn to be the me it wanted to be.

Adventures in Alberta: Day 3

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Today was a day unlike any other. Really, how many of you can say that you have gotten to literally hang out with multiple bands in the same day? And then watch a Flyleaf concert from backstage?

The crazy-awesomeness of my day started when I realized that Lacy from Flyleaf was in devotions this morning. From there it only went up hill, as I continued to run into band members through out the entire day, they were in catering, or even better coming to me for interviews!

I would just like to say that I do have the best job ever! I spent my day in charge of communicating between the social media people and the live streaming people, so basically what that means is that I would go over to a guy with a laptop and get him to tell me what he sees on facebook or twitter and then take that information over to the people with a video camera who would say it as a shout out of ask a band a question!

So I got to help interview Tadashii, Downhere, Starfield, Hawk Nelson, and Skillet!

(Skillet performing live at Rock the River West 2010)

Adventures in Alberta: Day 2

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I awoke this morning at 7 AM bright and early to the brisk Canadian morning. (I had to wear a jacket all day) I grabbed a shower and headed down to get breakfast at the “Riverside Bistro” which coincidentally, over looks a river. As I ate I read the Canadian newspaper, that was an interesting experience. I don’t think Obama was mentioned on ANY page, and all the temperatures are in Celsius! After a sumptuous meal of eggs over easy, bacon, hash browns, and toast I was ready to attack the day.

I walked down the block to the Fairmont Hotel, where Rock the River’s headquarters are located, there we had morning devotions and a production meeting. After the meetings and devotions I headed out to the venue to begin a day of putting up all the finishing touches. My day consisted of hauling cable, rewiring televisions, getting boxes, and A LOT sitting and watching (which really isn’t as bad as it sounds, it is really interesting to watch everything get put together)

After a long day I got to go hang out with some of the non-production people from BGEA, which was really fun, they are really funny and cool people!

Everyone’s hard work is gonna be worth it when everything comes together tomorrow at 2:30! If you wanna check out the whole concert it will be streaming online all day at Ransom.tv check it out you can catch Hawk Nelson, Downhere, Skillet, and Flyleaf’s acts live!

Adventures in Alberta: Day 1

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At exactly 5:32 my alarm clock decided it was time to go off. And as any sane human being would do at that time of morning, I hit snooze. But as those pesky alarms like to do it went off again 15 minutes later. I realized that I really did need to get out of the bed. I jumped in the shower, threw on some clothes, double checked my bags and headed out the door to the airport.

Have you ever been to the delta terminal at 6:45? Its basically empty, I have never gotten through security faster. Once I had put everything back in my bag I walked up to the large monitors to check my flight, I skimmed over the names till I hit upon mine: Minneapolis/St. Paul 8:35. I ambled down to gate A7 slowly, looking all around me as I looked at the shops and newsstands, taking it all in. A few minutes later, my boss arrived and we went over to the food court and caught breakfast before the flight.

On the first 2.5 hour leg I managed to get the first day’s worth of AP Art History homework done, I finished the last question right as we were landing. We had a short layover in Minnesota so I grabbed lunch and hopped on another tiny commuter jet for the 2.5 hour leg up to Edmonton. It wasn’t all that bad, except that I fell asleep in a weird position and got a crick in my neck. I managed to finish the first day’s worth of AP Euro also, but I still have a lot to do homework wise.

Anyhow, we cleared customs after I said all the right things to the guy; he wanted to know why I was going to be in the country and what exactly I was going to be doing and exactly how I would accomplish it, intense, I know. After immigration we made the 45 minute drive into downtown Edmonton, AB, and over to Telus Field home of the Edmonton Capitols Baseball Team, this is where everything is happening this weekend.

It was really cool, there were people everywhere setting up different things; laying cables, or building the stage or, as I did, hooking up the video truck. If you have never had the experience of seeing a video truck up close it is basically tech heaven. Buttons and lights in every color and function imaginable, it looks very similar to a NASA launch facility. I think that’s what it just secretly. Since I don’t really know what anything does yet, I carried stuff around and plugged a few computers and printers in. Nothing difficult. But it was cool just to be there.

We watched a few promos, seeing my own footage in a professional product was awesome, I was like “WOAH I SHOT THAT!!!” (in my head though).

That was basically my first day in of this adventure. I’ll keep you posted!

Nothing Like That

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Over the course of my short life thus far I have been on quite a few missions trips. I have picked up trash in inner-city Charlotte, I have put up vinyl siding in the 110º Charleston sun, I have danced with natives in the rural farm lands of The Gambia, I have torn down walls in the heart of Pittsburgh, and have visited the shanty towns on the busy streets of Dakar, Senegal. But I have never worked as hard or had quite as much fun as I did this past week in the heart of rural Appalachia.

Let me begin by giving you some context, for those of you who don’t know I joined the Putnams and 5 other families from Charlotte for a week of serving with World Vision in Phillipi, West Virginia, my family would have been the 7th family in that mix but for a number of reasons had to pull out at the very beginning. A few weeks after my parents had decided that we would not be a part of the trip Jay called me and asked if I would join their family and go anyways. I said yes, I’m still not sure why, but I just did. It was one of those snap decisions that you can never quite put your finger on how our why you made it but God must have had something to do with it. I know this because looking back on what I normally would have thought about the way it all seemed to be shaping up it just would not have been the kinda thing I would have tried. I would have never said yes. But I did, and it was such a great choice.

I spent the week working with Jay and Mr. Putnam with help from Courtney Faulkner, the other Putnams and some of the Banks on building a 50 foot wheelchair ramp for Raymond Robinson, a man living with Lou Gehrig’s disease (more commonly refered to as ALS).

“Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is a form of motor neuron disease. ALS is a progressive, fatal, neurodegenerative disease caused by the degeneration of motor neurons, the nerve cells in the central nervous system that control voluntary muscle movement.” (wikipedia)

Ray has been living with ALS for a few years now and is beginning to show signs of his disease, he has trouble getting in and out of his home since it has a long uneven concrete path and then many stairs up to a porch, and finally a large bump over the threshold which his wheelchair cannot clear. My work team built a long ramp for him so that he could get in and out of his house himself.

When you go to a third world country you tend to lower your expectations in terms of living conditions, I mean people tell you what to expect, we have all watched the documentaries and seen the footage of the emaciated children from Africa or Asia. And I’m not saying thats what we experienced, it was just poorer than I had expected. Poor monetarily but, as our group soon found out not so poor in spirit.

The people in West Virginia are like no other people I have met before. All the projects that we worked on were through World Vision, but also locally, they were through Weaver Church of the Nazarene. Possibly one of the most impactful moments of the trip occurred there during a wednesday night Bible study. We were working our way through Malachi 3 when the pastor went on a tangent about blessings, he made a comment that was echoed by the locals that they were so blessed to be living in America, that God had blessed them so greatly that they were allowed to live and worship freely. That comment seemed to be a jumping off point into a whole conversation among the attendees about worldly possessions and lifestyle. One of the congregates made the point that we have all been given so much, and she remarked upon how thankful she was for all that she had received directly from the Father.

That got me thinking, hard, these people who, in my eyes, were some of the poorest of the poor in America were utterly contented. They have only a fraction of what we have down in comfortable south Charlotte in abundance, But yet they are the ones who are fulfilled. It blew my mind. It seems like every second of every day is, to some extent, about obtaining more things, thinking that they will make us happier, but it doesn’t.

The dichotomy of this whole situation boils down to this: things are not what it is about. Now, I know that this is something people say all the time, but its a realization that must sink in over time, or bludgeon you in the head in the brevity of a moment. Its about people. For instance, I can spend a week alone in my room watching TV and messing around on Facebook, but is that what makes me happy? No, people crave people, people need people, in the words of Jason English, people free people. I would enjoy my hypothetical week so much more using the gifs that God has given me to serve others and spend time with friends rather than sitting catatonic allowing my body to degenerate slowly via a bag of Doritos.

Alrighty, I feel like its time to bring it all back around to a close, so basically what I want to say is that I’ve done a lot of church-y stuff but I’ve done nothing like that.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

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It seems like every book I have read this sumer has been my new summer favorite, each one just as good as the one before it! I have read nothing but great books this summer, The Fountianhead, The Stranger, God is Not One, and now A Million Miles In A Thousand Years.

I would like to begin by thanking Todd Lesher for encouraging me to read this book, I had seen it and wanted to read it, but without his encouragement I would have never picked it up.

Donald Miller is a great writer. I read his most famous book Blue Like Jazz a few years back after being encouraged by another mentor at church. Miller likes to play to the side of Christians which is casual and spiritual at the same time, relating spirituality through stories and conversations rather than fire and brimstone sermons. He writes in a very different manner and thats what makes him intriguing.

In A Million Miles In A Thousand Years Miller tells the story of story. The concept originates through his new friends Steve and Ben who are movie producers. One day they come to Portland  OR where Don lives to ask him if they can make a movie of his life, based on his book Blue Like Jazz. There’s only one catch, they think his life needs some spicing up a bit, some obstacles and climaxes and editing in general. This sets in motion an entire chain of events which compel Don to “live a better story” from story seminars with famous Hollywood screenwriters, to hiking the Inca Trail in Peru, to simply “getting the girl.” Miller really conveys the importance of living your life like a story, because thats the way God intended it to be lived.

This book, much like his NY Times best seller Blue Like Jazz is a wonderful ramble  through Don’s life experience around the time the script for the movie was being written. And also much like Blue Like Jazz it makes for a thoroughly enjoyable book! In the words of Rob Bell “I felt like this book read me more than I read it.”

Beyond only being enjoyable A Million Miles In A Thousand Years sets out a difficult challenge: to go out and live your story, which if you read the book, you will understand just how simultaneously blissful and terrifying that can be.

I would 100% recommend A Million Miles In A Thousand Years to Anyone without stipulation or reserve. It is just a great read: intellectual, challenging, enjoyable, throughout provoking, and stimulating all through!

(I’m also looking forward to the Blue Like Jazz movie! Check it out!)