Can Do, Kandern

This past Sunday I got back from a two week stint across the pond and, while I had originally intended to give summarized accounts of every day’s activities, there’s way too much material for that crap. Of course, if I’d managed to post updates while I was over there, that might’ve been reasonable, but there was no time.

To clarify, I spent July 25-August 8 in Kandern, Germany, working through the TeachBeyond organization as a counselor at an English camp that featured an emphasis on Christian spirituality. The campers were aged 14-17 and came from all over Germany, each with varying levels of proficiency in English and varying familiarity with Christian ideologies.

It’s always a pistol coming back from things like this (I guess) because part of me wants nothing more than to be able to convey all the highs and lows and inherent complexities of my experiences to my friends and family. The thing is, my narrative will always be incomplete because I’ll inadvertently leave out important details or I’ll use the wrong words to describe an event or emotion, and it’ll be all bollocksed up. So instead, I’ll just mention a few things that I thought were nice.

• I got to drive a Mercedes along the German country-side, just south of the Black Forest.
• The gospel isn’t unique to either America or Europe (thank God).
• Subscribers of Christ can, when pressed, get along famously with one another, though they’ve never before met.

Now a few thoughts about a camp that I used to attend: when I was 17, I considered my Zion Lake camp counselors to be nothing less than knuckle-dragging juggernauts of spiritual clarity. Now that I’ve experienced the other side of the arrangement, it occurs to me that my appraisal may have been slightly rose-tinted.

The last year of Zion Lake (2004) the theme was Here I am to Worship and the song by the same name was featured prominently on the synopsis video of that camp, as well as during the camp itself. As a result, that song shoulders a lot of meaning for me. It happened to be one of the songs that we played on Thursday night, after a particularly sobering chapel message. The sight and sound of German teenagers, six years and 4,438 miles away from Zion Lake, closing their eyes and opening their mouths to sing the same song that I sang all those years ago, to the same God, was quite a moving event for me. The love of God propagates independently of time and culture.

Back in the mighty mid-west,

-Ryan