2 months ago my former youth pastor asked if I could lead worship at his church's youth camp. I could bring anybody that I wanted to play in a band with me. The camp speaker that week was a guy who was my counselor my first ever camp the summer before I started 6th grade. The schedule at last weeks camp was almost identical to the camp schedule I knew growing up and going to every year until I graduated high school.
I don't think anybody really knew how much I needed a break from my job as a server at a restaurant and just to get away from orlando for a short time. I was feeling as though I was almost useless in my friendships and relationships with people because I was always so fatigued and just unhappy many times due to schedules and not being able to see my wife as much as I have wanted to. I just needed a breath of fresh air.
There are many great things about camp. Rafting, cabins, music, cafeteria food, crazy kids. I used to go to camp to experience some super high emotion and I would relate it to my relationship with Jesus. If I didn't experience that then camp wasn't as good as the previous year. I'm a bit older now and a little wiser, but sometimes I don't allow my heart to be open at all to experiences of any kind. For this trip I just wanted to experience something....anything really. I needed to feel an emotion of any kind and not just continue in the mundane way of life I was growing accustomed to.
As I look back on this last week many things stick out in my mind, but the one that is overwhelming is the thankfulness of real friends. The group of people that traveled with me to TN was made up of people that I think everybody should at least meet once in their lives. I laughed more with these people this week than I have since we found out a year ago that my mom had cancer. I know a lot of people may not think of laughing as super spiritual, but I can tell you that the laughter of last week healed my soul in ways that I cannot express and in ways that nothing else has been able to do. We would sit around in the cabin and play nerdy games like scrabble (which I love and am amazing at) and chess (which I don't understand) and checkers as well. We would just sit and watch youtube videos or just sit around and relax and talk with each other. We had a car packed full of people for a 9 hour drive and although at some points I thought there might be a murder about to take place... we laughed so hard... and it was so good.
We get to split a check 7 ways for leading worship all week at the camp, which isn't a whole lot of money after the split, but it is still nice to get paid for having a blast all week. Yet I feel like even if I could give every person that went with me $1,000 that wouldn't be enough for me to thank them.
I am a quiet guy a lot of times and I internalize so much and people have no idea what is going on or how to help or anything... and mostly I like it that way. But Jesus has a way of knowing everything and he knew that more than needing to feel some spiritual high or anything of that sort that I needed to laugh and I needed to laugh hard. Thank you to everybody that lived with me in a cabin last week. It reminded me of how lucky and blessed I am to know all of those people and that they would take a week to come with me to the middle of nowhere. Some were family, some were friends that are like family, and some weren't even close to either of those statements... but the reality is that they were all like Jesus sitting around laughing with me last week and in an subtle way reminding me that Jesus laughed and He cried and understands because He once was here.
You never hear in the bible about Jesus laughing because it was probably of little importance to the writers, but I often wonder what the sound of his laugh was like. If he wept then I'm pretty sure he had a great laugh.
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