* On the bus heading home

It’s just after noon and we’re headed home. Our kids are tired. They’ve had a very busy couple of days. From breakfast at 9 to lights out at approximately midnight. With 2 teaching then discussion sessions, am and eve, and all sorts of fun in between, including at meals. Amazing the energy high schoolers have! And their youth directors.

Me on the other hand, not so very much. Brave thoughts I had before this trip started? Totally flattened by the time I shut off the lights in the room I was chaperon of with eight 10th-12th grader’s that first night. Fortunately day 2 I was joined by a great university student I know who very ably took over from me. And I’d recovered pretty much by Saturday. It just takes me a bit of time to adjust to flat out energetic high schoolers that greatly outnumber me and are just coming back to the room from the outdoor hot tub at 1230am.

So what things did I see in the last 72 hours?
* 300 kids singing their hearts out with/at the live band they stood face-to-face to, sometimes jumping up and down, sometimes swaying back and forth.

* Last night I watched high schoolers–all wearing special headphones–attend a black-lit dance where they had 3 different DJs to pick from at any time depending on which channel they chose. Seeing a room full of people wearing headphones with lights on the ears was very strange. If you weren’t also wearing your headphones it was even stranger as people don’t really sing alone as much as saying bits and phrases.

* 2 giant hot tubs full of a hundred or more kids on a windy night when it was in the 30s and most kids walked back wet to their cabins a block or two uphill through the wind.

* high school boys in the room next door pulling out and starting to use a megaphone at 1245am. I must have looked scary when I told them to stop as I never heard or saw it again!

* a karaoke night that went on for over an hour with most kids ‘singing’ 1 and many 2 or more songs, all in groups of 2 to 20

* a speaker, a Lutheran woman pastor from St Paul, who talked about “Keep church weird” with her presentations in the following order: doubting Thomas after Jesus’ resurrection, the Christmas story, Jesus kicking out a demon (‘demons’ of addiction, racism, etc.), rest in the midst of insanity–rest the disciples didn’t end up getting while with Jesus as crowds were following him everywhere–and finally Blessings, this one dressed in an orange costume of some kind.