66 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 12-28-17”

  3. Stating the obvious is racist now too Chas, and a show of your white privilege. You can’t win. That’s how this game is played.

    🙂

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  4. I had the song on my mind all through breakfast. Only not the way you think.
    When Chuck was a toddler, Elvera used to keep a little girl, Donna, about his age while her mother worked. She would go around singing “Jingle Bells……….Oh what fun to ride in “danmaws dibodey” (phonetically). We figured out that she was singing “Oh what fun to ride in grandma’s Chevrolet”.
    Donna would be about the age of our Donna today.

    It wasn’t just “white privilege” it was “NORTHERN white privilege. When I was singing it in South Carolina, I didn’t know what an open sleigh was.

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  5. Peter, I’m not sure if your “pan” comment yesterday was serious or tongue-in-cheek.

    So to clarify, Lutherans believe the Lord will return once and for all. There will not be two “second comings” and when He returns, it will be all over. We do not believe that Revelation (and Daniel) describe sequential, upcoming events. To quote from “A Lutheran Response to the ‘Left Behind’ Series’ – “The author of Revelation, however, intends that the book’s contents be read as a reoccurring cycle of events. (In the Old Testament, Joseph’s dreams are repeated for emphasis. Similarly, Jesus repeats the same point in several different parables in order to drive home His message). Seen in this way, the Book of Revelation presents a series of visions depicting the same time period from different angles, and each cycle of visions increases in intensity. The six visions of the end times in Revelation are a highly figurative description of events that will take place between the first and second comings of Christ.”

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  6. I am resisting the temptation to open up that discussion again.
    But the Lutheran interpretation doesn’t seem to fit nether scripturally nor logically. There will be an appearance before the great white throne.

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  7. Linda – The “pan” comment is both serious and not serious. I get tired of those otherwise godly Christians arguing over something that is not a necessary belief. The Second Coming is a major doctrine, but the details are all unclear. There are good arguments for all the different beliefs, and good arguments against them. So we should never break fellowship with someone who believes differently in a minor issue. When we moved to a new location and wanted to attend a church, if I saw on the church sign or other advertising “Pre-tribulation/pre-millennial” I stayed away from that church.

    I believe that much of the book of Revelation has already happened, though I cannot “argue” the points. What is important is whether one is saved by the shed blood of Jesus, not whether one believes Christians will or will not face tribulation. As Chas said, there is a lot of tribulation going on right now in Asia and Africa.

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  8. Peter. 100% agree.
    Chas, No need to open it again, but since you didn’t leave it at that, I’d suggest the same is true of other interpretations. If you have some free time on your hands, you might research the origin of the “rapture” theology. That is not to say it will change any minds, but I did find it quite interesting. Love you!

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  11. Pastor A stayed away from heavy interpretation of the details surrounding the Second Coming, but I remember him saying that the real point of Revelation was to show that Christ was the centre of history . As I mentioned before, Revelations seems to be a view of history from the spiritual side, and there is a strong possibility, that as the four beasts around the throne of God are actual spiritual beings, so are the evil beasts in its pages – but spiritual beings, not physical ones, because as Paul said, we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, power, the rulers of darkness, and spiritual wickedness, and the weapons of our warfare are not physical and temporal but mighty through God (Ephesians 6:10-19; I Corinthians 10:3-4). In other words, our real enemies are not the physical tyrants and false prophets that walk this world, from Nero to Hitler, Muhammed to Joseph Smith, but the evil angels that deceived them and those who follow them. In that sense, yes, Revelations is portraying a continual cycle of history where the spiritual enemies of God ever rebel, dragging their human slaves after them, and yet Christ is ever victorious and His people continually seek to wrest the enemies’ victims from their grasp. We Christians simply wait for the final manifestation of the victory which was already accomplished on the cross, and the reason we wait is that He still has other sheep to gather to His fold.

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  12. There’s a big difference between “arguing” in a contentious manner and discussing what Scripture teaches, which is always appropriate for Christians to do.

    Today’s Tabletalk entry is titled “The Glorious Return of Christ,” but I haven’t read it yet. 🙂

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  13. On the discussion yesterday about exotic vacations and young people, many have charged that the mission trips that church youth go on are of a similar motivation. There is some truth to that, in my experience. When I went with a team to Chihuahua, northern Mexico, it was with a mission that specializes in setting up short term missions trips with churches. We arrived at the same time as another church youth group. The missions director, after getting them settled, came and asked us what we wanted to do. Our team leader replied simply that we had come to serve them in whatever way we could. His face lit up. We later discovered that he spent his days catering to the whims of the teams that came, that parents whose precious child came down with some minor ailment had threatened to sue him for not medically evacuating their child, that basically these church youth groups came expecting an exotic vacation and treated him as a tour guide. That is part of the reason I went for so long to West Africa – I wanted to be there long enough to be useful to the team. Short termers can be exhausting to long term missionaries, who are constantly trying to shepherd them away from all the pitfalls and faux pas that someone new to a culture can fall into and commit.

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  14. Linda @ 9:47
    I have studied it extensively. My belief is a mid-trib rapture (also called “pre-wrath”).
    Most of the professors at Southwestern Seminary were of the opinion you mentioned. Most of them believe that all the predictions of the Bible have been fulfilled except for the final judgment.
    That leaves lots of things undone.
    I had the opinion that they were over-reacting to the radical dispensationalists who believed that every pope since Luther was the antichrist. And that Rome was Babylon.
    A lot of extremism on both sides.
    But, as the cliché goes, “You don’t throe the baby out with the water”.

    FINIS

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  15. https://tabletalkmagazine.com/daily-study/2017/12/glorious-return-christ/

    ________________________________

    Eschatology, the category of systematic theology under which we study the last things, continues to be the subject of much discussion and debate in our day. Much of the discussion is related to such topics as the timing of the millennium, the identity of the Antichrist, the place of the modern state of Israel in prophecy, and other subjects. These arguments might lead us to think that there is no consensus on eschatological matters in the Christian church. However, that would be a wrong conclusion. As evident in the ecumenical creeds such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, believers from many different theological traditions agree on core eschatological elements. One of these areas of agreement concerns the return of Christ in glory.

    When examining the Bible’s teaching on the return of Christ to consummate His kingdom, we must take care to study only those passages that actually deal with the subject. We say this because some of the texts often referenced on the final return of our Savior may not actually address it. For example, it is likely that most, if not all, of the Olivet Discourse recorded in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 20 has to do with Jesus’ judgment on Jerusalem for rejecting Him, which occurred in the Roman destruction of the city and its temple in AD 70. Those texts, therefore, are not the best places to go, at least at first, when we are studying the final return of Christ. …

    … We do not know exactly when Jesus will return, but we do know that it could be at any moment. Every breath we take could possibly be the last one we breathe before Jesus returns. Knowing the imminence of Christ’s return should spur us to serve the church and engage, as we are able, in the work of making disciples. We do not want to be found idle when Jesus comes back (Matt. 25).
    ______________________________________

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  16. Roscuro, my aunt & uncle (missionaries to Ukraine) loved their short term mission teams. However, it is not an exotic location and they probably just put them to work where they were needed most and most suited. They were also not high school, but college age.

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  17. Lots going on in our news coverage area today — It’s just barely 8 a.m. and we already have a possible bridge jumper, a dead whale tied to a dock across the harbor and a coyote spotted eating a cat in one of the beach cities.

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  18. Not disagreeing with anyone’s comments about my young relatives but I probably should have kept my mouth shut since it so often becomes an area of judgement in my heart (see today’s Utmost!) and then it’s difficult to love them as I need to.

    That probably should be my prayer request! 😦

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  19. Dil is coming to town for a funeral and staying with me and probably bringing two grands for me to watch. These are the ones I just visited in Portland. Nice, but I was or am packing in the extra bedroom, so need to clear out my stuff. And then where do the grands sleep?? The upstairs is not clean at all and, since they are working up there to upgrade the electrical, I have no plans to clean it.

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  21. Michelle, if your young relatives wanted a really exotic vacation to the Artic Circle, then they should have gone to Auyuittuq National Park in Nunavut, located on Baffin Island. Not only is it at the edge of the Arctic Circle, it has both very beautiful and very dangerous terrain, with famous Artic mountains such as Thor Peak, Mount Odin, and Mount Asgard (featured in the opening sequence of the James Bond film, ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’). As the park’s webpage says:

    All visitors to Auyuittuq National Park MUST register and attend a mandatory orientation session in either Qikiqtarjuaq or Pangnirtung prior to entering the park. It is also necessary to de-register with the park office upon exiting the park. Otherwise a very costly search will be initiated.
    Auyuittuq is a backcountry park with little in the way of maintained facilities, apart from emergency shelters and outhouses. Visitors must be self-sufficient, as help is far away. Any park activity more demanding than a simple guided daytrip should only be attempted by those visitors who are experienced with wilderness travel, who have highly practiced skills for their chosen activity. Visitors must also be aware of the risks associated with polar bear encounters and know how to avoid them. For spring skiers and climbers, hypothermia and frostbite can be serious dangers that can end a trip. Drowning, hypothermia and rock falls have injured and killed a few summer visitors. Parks Canada implores visitors to be properly prepared and prudent, in order to avoid becoming someone else who might remember their visit because of an unhappy evacuation.

    It doesn’t get any more exotic than that.

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  25. Apparently, that scene was supposed to be in Austria in the film, but those mountains don’t look at all like the Alps. Usually films are shot in different locations than the real ones to cut down on cost, but I don’t see how remote Baffin Island was any cheaper or easier to get to than Austria – it is still prohibitively expensive to get up north, never mind bringing a film crew along.

    Link to Auyuittuq’s website: http://www.nunavuttourism.com/parks-special-places/national-parks/auyuittuq

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  27. To reiterate what I wrote last night: The woman in the article that was shared earlier this month did NOT say that Jingle Bells (or whatever the song was) is racist. She merely said that at the time it was written, one particular line or so would have had a racist element to it, but no longer has that connotation. It was merely a bit of historical trivia, not anything against the song.

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  29. Jo, depending on the size of the children, maybe they could sleep in pulled out drawers on a chest of drawers with books placed underneath the drawer for support. They would be happy to tell stories about that.

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  30. We enjoyed watching the movie Arrival last night. If you like Sci-if then be sure to see it. Son picked it up from the library. We have also been watching the Firefly series that I gave husband for Christmas. It is wonderful Sci-fi, too.

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  32. Roscuro – The “exotic vacation” aspect of many youth missions trips is disgusting. In fact, Paul Washer didn’t like them. When he was a missionary in Peru he said they did more harm than good in those two weeks. If the idea is to work, than go for it. But those that want an exotic vacation should just take one without dressing it in “service” clothing.

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  33. I just read yesterday’s fascinating posts. Wow! Poor Thomas the Tank Engine getting put in his place by the Left. And the discussion about missions trips to exotic locations began. As son was growing up, I wondered about the ski trips and beach trips the youth groups went on. They were not mission trips, but they seemed a bit extravagant just for a get away to have a week’s worth of devotional time with the group leader. My church has an annual mission trip to Appalachia now where adults and youth do a lot work either on a construction crew or another outreach to local children. They do make a good difference.

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  34. My siblings were rather disturbed by the pictures from one of their College and Career groups’ missions trips in which the young adults were on the beach, the girls in the skimpiest of swimwear. I remember being somewhat disturbed that the other youth group in Mexico weren’t observing the dress code that had been given to us to follow. In West Africa, the tourists that wore skimpy clothing annoyed us, since we knew just how offensive it was to the surrounding culture, but they were tourists and one couldn’t expect any better from them; but the missionaries are held to a higher standard of service. I think one of the biggest problems with youth missions trips is the fact that not all of the youth are committed to Christ, in fact, very few of them may be. Missionaries are carefully vetted by both mission board and church, and they are interviewed and otherwise tested to see if they are fit for service. The likelihood of a youth group, many of whom may simply be attending for the sake of their peers or their parents, being fit for mission service is small.

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  35. There is a spring trip out of Saskatoon for high schoolers that costs an arm and a leg and they visit Disneyland and other tourist places in California and they also do some ‘mission’ work. I expressed a wonder at the point of it and it was shown to me that the trip would replace the ‘spring break’ type grad trip these students would otherwise take, giving them Christian influence instead of drunken parties. I still wonder at the expense of the whole thing and the actual ‘good’ that it does. My children would not have been able to afford it, nor the drunken party trip, so…

    Oh, and the students fund raise so they can go – I haven’t supported any yet as I am not so sure I agree with the trip. Lots of our camp staff end up going on these trips.

    My daughter did a short term mission in Peru – 6 weeks. I know that she worked very hard and did not do any touristy things while there. Hopefully, their team was a blessing and not a hindrance.

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  36. Roscuro, good point about vetting the youth. Daughter went through a length of training and at the end it was decided who would go and who would not.

    The Disney trip is for anyone – Christian or not – more of an outreach to the students than to Skid Row or wherever they might serve for a day or two.

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  40. For the past 10+ years our church has had a partnership with World Vision in the outskirts of Tijuana. We send a team of youth every summer to work there for a week. A LOT of preparation goes into it to ensure they are prepared for and committed to serious service while they’re there. Some of them are not committed to Christ yet, but they have an opportunity to see aspects of Christian commitment they might not see otherwise, and to see God at work in unfamiliar places. Some have given themselves to Christ while on the trip. KJ and Flyboy both went, to their benefit.

    One thing I’ve always liked about our youth group is that outreach and service are a consistent part of their discipleship. The Mexico trip is just one example.

    Our partnership on the World Vision project isn’t limited to the youth trips. We have sent adult groups periodically and support their work in other ways.

    It isn’t easy, but it is possible for a youth mission trip to be well done with benefit both to the community served and to the youth.

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  41. When I was in my late twenties or early thirties, my church was sending a group of people to Africa, Kenya to be precise, for a two-week “missions trip.” The trip was to include a week counseling at camp (which is something I did every summer in America, at no cost to the church), a safari, and some time helping people do some construction work or something of that sort (which I felt ill-equipped to do, being neither very large nor very dexterous). Each person was raising three or four thousand dollars to go.

    I was somewhat tempted, having long wished to take an African safari and, my parents met and married in Africa (Nigeria), my interest in the continent being increased.

    But I simply couldn’t justify asking other people to pay my way to Africa because of my personal interest, knowing I would not do enough useful to justify that sort of expense, and knowing I would be giving up the chance to counsel at the camp that counted on me for a week each summer. I also didn’t want to go badly to pay that sort of money myself, which told me it was probably better to pass on the trip, and I did so.Had they set it up as a chance to see Africa and interact with our missionaries while we were there, I might well have jumped at the opportunity, paying my own way. But not with the circumstances as they were set up.

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  42. Another interesting discussion today. I’m curious what kind of screening methods are used to determine who is fit (or unfit) to go on these mission trips, those of you who have a protocol in place. (I think that’s an excellent idea, BTW.)

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  43. Jingle Bells:

    Third Arrow and I and my high school piano student performed a trio this month entitled “Jingled Bells.” It’s a pretty new piece, composed by a friend of mine, and while I can’t find it on YouTube yet, if you can imagine three players at one piano, playing the tune you know (in 4/4 time), then swaying left…right…left during the 3/4-time waltz section; playing in 4/4 again; standing (one player at a time, in succession, every half a beat, then striking a chord together, and sitting back down together; playing some more; stopping for a five-beat grand pause as we laughed maniacally; modulating from G Major to G Minor and playing the tune in a dirge-like style; and finally dashing across the keyboard with our hands flying at around 160 bpm and shouting “Jingled Bells!” at the end, and getting it all done in barely one minute’s time; then you know sort of how the piece sounded. 🙂

    We had a blast, and the audience loved it.

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  45. On another topic (this is for Mumsee):

    It looks like your hubby’s email got hacked or something. I and nine others with last initials either the same as mine or with nearby letters of the alphabet got an email in the wee hours of the morning that says it’s from your hubby, but his email address is listed as mikako_seven_ATbirdDOTocnDOTneDOTjp. There was nothing in the subject line, and no greeting, only a strange link (http : / / stayDOTyouboughtitDOTca), which I DID NOT click on (!) and your hubby’s first and last name under it.

    Just thought I’d alert you of that. It looks like something went crawling through a section of his email contacts.

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  47. Our high school youth group does a week-long mission trip each year that is five days of work and one day of fun at the end.

    The kids spend the year working projects for church members, with the pay going into the trip fund. They have to put in so many hours of volunteer work to tap into that money, attend weekly prayer and training events and so forth.

    Once on the field, they work hard. My two kids spent time in Mexico, on an Indian reservation in Colorado and feeding folks on Skid rows in LA and San Francisco, among other places.

    Afterwards, the kids debrief and then do a presentation to the church.

    Some, like my daughter, move on to the church’s annual eyeglass clinic in Nicaragua– but that is a very expensive trip people pay for themselves.

    OTOH, it’s the only eye care clinic in that part of Nica and the spiritual results have been profound for some.

    The maturity of those preparing the kids and their participation can make a huge difference.

    As in anything, God can work when you don’t expect it.

    My nominally Catholic niece changed her major after a house building trip to Mexico– and now runs an affordable housing program in Denver that helps people. I call that a win in one area, though, alas, not in the spiritual for her.

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  48. I have not been a big fan of short term missions but there are some good ones out there. Our church sends a few people every year or twice a year, to China. They go up into the mountains to an area with no known believers, and have been going for several years. They help build things like incinerators and pick up truck loads of trash, which has been a big encouragement to the folk who live there. Apparently, tourists come with their dump the trash mindset and the people who have been used to very clean valleys have been swamped with trash.They do not discuss God, but the people have asked the local presence, why these American young people come and help them clean their valley. The Word continues to go out into the nations.

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  49. The cost for going is very small and they stay three weeks. Lots of camping involved and staying in interesting locations, meeting the people. I believe it is under one thousand. One of our children went. I think it had an effect on him.

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  50. The same is true for having teens help out at camp, that it really depends on the training and accountability. Nearly always my teen junior counselors were harmful, and I know of enough sexual sin involving teens who are supposed to be on “missions” to camps that I would be reluctant to send my own teens to help at a camp unless I knew something of how it was all run.

    My first time to counsel at camp, I was 18 and socially fairly awkward. I was put as co-counselor (not junior counselor) of ten-year-olds, with a woman in her lower twenties working with me. Our particular cabin had two separate bedrooms connected by an adjoining door, so as it happened, we had in effect two groups of children. Hers happened to be a group of girls who were more ready to be grown-up, mine a group still content to be children a bit longer. By the middle of the week, her half of the group was late to every event since they couldn’t go anywhere (this was camp) without the make-up to which she introduced them. I couldn’t help but wonder how all the parents might think about sending their pre-teens to camp to have a stranger sharing all her make-up with them. But midway through the week I was asked if I could work with the eight-year-olds. Seems their main counselor was in her late seventies or early eighties and she loved the kids but couldn’t keep up with them by herself . . . but her assigned junior counselor (daughter of the camp nurse) had been sneaking out at nights to be alone in the woods with the cook, and the girl was being sent home. (I don’t know what happened to the cook.)

    Another time, by now an experienced counselor myself, I had a junior counselor who was supposed to be helping in the kitchen, but we had more children than expected and so they quickly made another cabin of girls, taking two of the kitchen stuff into cabins as junior counselors and separating counselors who were initially supposed to work together. My junior counselor was 15 or 16, and she was no help at all. During cabin devotions the girls walked around the cabin, going to her to have her fix their hair, and talking to her as she worked their hair in a way that was distracting to everyone and that I couldn’t talk over. After two or three days of this, I forbad any fixing of hair during devotions–and the teenager glared at me. One day two of the girls were walking ahead of me on the path and giggling. I don’t remember if I asked them what they were giggling about or if they volunteered, but at any rate, they found it hilarious that one of them had borrowed this girl’s Bible, and she had written in it, and they were giggling and I couldn’t understand everything they said, but she had written either the f-word or the rhyming s-word in it, along with a hand-written definition of the word, and the girls found it hilarious to see such a word defined inside one’s Bible. The girl quickly developed favorites among the children, and at any outside event those girls would cluster around her and want nothing to do with me (I was stricter, so they basically chose her non-authority over them instead of following the rules). She found excuses for herself and some of the girls to be elsewhere during some of the chapel times. She was in no way fit to be an example to children, especially not at a camp that was supposed to be Christian. I would have done better without her.

    Yet another year I had a co-counselor who was not a “junior” counselor, but I was an experienced, careful counselor (having done it for about eight years by then), and she was a twenty-something newlywed. She and her husband had been married all of two weeks and she was counseling girls and he was counseling boys, and then they were going to have a week at home and be back for another week. Whose brilliant idea that was, I have no idea, I just know they spent the week looking for chances to sneak off and be alone together. One evening she went off after lights out to take her shower, and I thought that was a good idea, and the next day I told her I would do the same myself. It was probably a good thing we had decided to put our cabin to bed half an hour early that night (for infractions I do not recall), because when I came out of the shower building at five minutes before official lights out, my cabin was screaming and the lights were all on. As I got near the door, it opened and girls spilled out onto the porch to tattle to me about each other. “She did this–she did that–they did that.” I put my hand up for quiet and asked where the other counselor was. They shrugged; no one knew. So I stepped into the cabin, got the girls’ attention, and said quietly but firmly, “I am going around back to hang up my towel. When I come back inside, the first person to speak has no canteen tomorrow.” (Canteen is the daily chance to buy candy or soft drinks in the afternoon; one of the most dreaded punishment at camp is putting campers’ name on the list at the canteen that this child cannot buy anything today.) Normally I wouldn’t do that “punish everybody” approach, but I knew there was no way to get to the bottom of who did what and why, and I knew that any counselor worth her salt would not leave ten nine- and ten-year-olds alone unchaperoned at bedtime–that it was really the counselor’s fault and not the girls’.

    Only at one camp have I had junior counselors who took their roles seriously. I was the only counselor from our church, because that year we were just starting to send kids and we only had four or five, so they were grouped in with another church’s week. They trained their junior counselors carefully and the teens took their roles seriously. Unfortunately, that was the only thing that church did right at camp! (They had safety violations, multiple examples of being gross and crude to get the kids to laugh, petty punishments, all sorts of things they did that made for a really bad week overall and I chose not to return. But of all things they actually had great junior counselors.)

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  51. My problem with “Jingle Bells” is the constant sleigh bells usually played in the background, and the lyrics are absurd. I mean, who would think that being in an unheated, open sleigh in frigid temperatures as “fun”?

    I recently read that the song was originally a Thanksgiving song. I don’t think of it as Christmas music, though, since it mentions nothing about the holiday and has meaning for the entire winter.

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  54. A friend and I were at a diner one night last week and I couldn’t help but think about Chas as they played “Rudolph” along with many other mid-century “pop” seasonal songs — including Elvis’ rendition of “White Christmas.” Now that one I found annoying.

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  56. My father had a record of those old pop ‘seasonal’ songs such as ‘Silver Bells’ and ‘Rudolph’ that we would put on when the first snow fell, so I have a nostalgic liking for some of them, but they always sound to me like time capsules of the late 1940s and 1950s. ‘Jingle Bells’ (which is an older tune than the others) is an good song for music teachers of young children, to teach them to ring the bells in time to the rhythm of the song. I was just reminded how much young children like rhythm, rhyme, and onomatopoeia as I was reading Tiny Niece. The more of those there is in a song or story book, the more it captures their attention.

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  60. Well, I like Rudolph & Jingle Bells. And I like it that my dogs sound like ching-ching-ching reindeer when we take walks through the neighborhood and go to the dog park in late December.

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  61. And the 1960s added many more, from “Feliz Navidad” to “Charlie Brown Christmas” piano theme to the Beach Boys’ “Little St. Nick” to the Beatles; “Wonderful Christmas Time”

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  62. I can see riding in an open unheated sleigh being fun, at least for the same sort of people who think snowmobiling is fun. The second and third verses tell about falling into the snow, which does not sound like fun. But the “narrator” of the song seems able to smile about the whole thing, which seems on the whole to indicate a good outlook on life. I imagine at the time when sleighs were the norm, people had few enough things they could do for fun, and being outside doing stuff just for fun instead of working would have been a good enough reason to enjoy it.

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  63. Cheryl, what happened between you and your newlywed co-counselor after the incident where you had gone to take a shower? Was she at all repentant for having left the campers alone?

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  65. Kevin, the co-counselor told me she left the cabin because she had to make a phone call. Whether she had also (or instead) snuck time alone with her new husband, I have no idea. I told her of the chaos in which I had found the cabin, and told her that had she told me she needed to leave for a few minutes, I would have waited to take my shower until she returned, or she could have waited until I returned, and she acknowledged it would have been wiser.

    The only time (as I recall) that I actually had a wise, mature co-counselor was a sad experience in itself. I would have been in my early thirties and she maybe ten years older. She was set up to counsel at the camp, and probably we would have been in separate cabins with separate junior counselors, except for a tragedy in her own family. Her sister was the mother of six or seven children (her own children, I believe, were grown, but the sister’s were not); the sister abandoned her family. My co-counselor then needed to step in and be mother to her brother-in-law’s now motherless children as much as was possible. She called the camp and told them that one or two of her nieces was scheduled to be a camper, and she could be a counselor as she had committed, provided she could also bring the littlest ones along, who were now in her care. Otherwise, she would not be able to come. The director consented to that, so she came, and with her came a nine- or ten-year-old who was old enough to be one of our charges, and a two- and three-year-old who were not. Naturally the little ones, recently so harshly deprived of a mother, took most of her care (she was in fact potty training at least one of them at the time), but she was physically present as much as possible, and her wise presence appreciated. The sorrow of those three little girls, and of their aunt, was palpable, though, and I have remembered it many times–and many times reflected that when a man walks out on his family, we somehow feel less horror than all of us felt at a mother doing so.

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  66. Wow, those are terrible situations for camp. We interview and vet our counsellors and also have them do a three week intensive training (LIT) before we will hire them. We look at the recommendations of the previous year’s LIT directors and also their youth pastor and what we saw of them as LITs. We also put our junior counsellors with mature, trusted seniors who then lead the cabin while mentoring the younger leader.

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