My deepest apologies go to this month’s Guest Blogger, Jessica!
She sent in her Post with plenty of time to spare and sadly, in the “busyness” of last Wednesday, publishing it completely slipped my mind.😞
Before you begin to read this very interesting post, let me explain that our 2017-18 Wednesday Words Theme is the introducing our current Day Camp Committee. Each month from now until next June you will get a peek behind the scenes as our hardworking band of members prepares next summer’s program and as each member explains a bit about their role in the process.
So with no further ado, welcome Jessica!
In the time that I’ve spent with Daycamps, I’ve had a lot of different roles. It’s hard to pick a favourite. I loved being a camper (especially telling the travelling team what to do, since my dad was in charge of the camp so I was by default his second-in-command), and I loved leading a travelling team. I loved coordinating, although it came with a pretty big set of headaches, and I’ve loved being on the committee. If I had to pick a favourite, though, it would probably be the time that I get to spend organising team supplies twice a year, and the similar time spent putting together binders full of resources for team leaders.
Supplies, as I tell the team members when I try to frighten them into keeping their bags organised for the whole summer (it never works), are more than just what we send out. Supplies are not just powdered paint and hand-sewn banners and glue sticks. Supplies are not just the paper towel tubes and empty milk cartons the local coordinators have painstakingly – or, in some cases, not – gathered. Supplies are opportunities for creativity. They are also opportunities for caretaking.
I think a lot of what we do on the committee can be boiled down to these two principles. We have a rich pool of resources from which to draw as we work on each year’s program, fundraisers, recruitment, and community-building activities, but very often we don’t quite have something to fill our very specific needs. Our work sometimes feels like it’s mostly fitting square pegs into round holes, but as any good supply supervisor knows, there are endless ways to make things like that work. Often the result of carefully building that square into something round, or discovering that the hole is a slightly different shape, is much better than a round peg would have been in the first place.
In building new solutions out of what we have on hand, exercising creativity and often not a little desperate prayer, we are made to focus more closely on what the needs actually are, rather than what the needs might seem to be. I tell the travelling teams every year, after numbering their paintbrushes and explaining what wood-grain contact paper is, that “supplies” are also the loving words that ask how a teammate is feeling. They are knowing someone’s favourite snack and finding a way to get it for them. They are prayers for strength together, and they are reminders to call home. They are offers of a game of soccer to blow off steam at the end of a tough day. They are all the tools at our disposal to care for the people with whom we serve.
On the committee, we find this identification of supplies and care as well. When we are forced to see the needs for what they really are because we don’t have something that fits the needs as we first think them too be, we end up with solutions that always seem to be more emotionally significant, more spiritually supportive, more caring. The work we do throughout the year is to care for the program by writing and workshopping it into a tool for spreading the love that can only come from God, and to care for all the people involved in it by giving them both conventional and kind of out-there supplies.