Camp Memories

I remember the camp I used to go to every summer when I was a teenager. Gulftreat sat within walking distance of the Gulf of Mexico in Panama City Beach. I always had great fun and wished that I could live there all the time. One year our chaperon was the camp director so our group had to stay until every last kid was picked up. I wandered around the empty buildings feeling desolate. Everything was so...abandoned. It was depressing, but enlightening. I realized then what made the camp was not the location, but the people.

College was the same way. Wonderful memories, but it was the people that made it special not the place. This occurred to me when a good friend and I went back to visit buildings and professors. One such professor knew our faces, but our names eluded him. Even though we knew him so well in the years that we were there, he had probably known hundreds of students that had darkened his classroom door since then. A new image of college came to me then-that of a train station or an airport. Many people pass through. They are there for a little while, then they go on to the next location in their lives. I almost feel sorry for those working in the airport or the college or the camp. They don't often get to see the ending journey for the travelers.

And yet if that is their calling to work in that transitional place, then it isn't a sorrowful existence after all. All of the wonderful people to meet from one destination and headed to another. And in that one specific transitional place there is some pretty amazing journeying taking place, too. They view hope and dreams and maturity. And they send the travelers off with a blessing. Maybe even a tiny bit of themselves as well.

May your journey be full of unexpected blessings and may you keep growing into the kind of person you would most like to meet.