I spent my summers during college working at a church camp. For those of you who have never worked for a ministry like this, I think my experiece is summed up in the quote written on a note card I found pinned in a small corner of the camp office bulletin boards my first summer:
"We have done so much for so long with so little, that we are practically prepared to do anything with nothing."
During these summers I taught archery, cannoeing, high ropes and group games. I dug holes in the ground with shovels, augers, and my car tires. I learned how to drive a commercial-grade mower, Ford tractor, manual transmission diesel truck, back hoe, and multiple golf carts. I spent days planting flowers, lifeguarding, working in the office, cleaning bathrooms (with chemicals that I'm sure will cause cancer when I'm 40) and deep frying enough fish to feed an army.
I have memories of my friends driving golf carts into trees, flying off of golf carts, falling into large holes in the ground, spinning the mower in circles in the middle of the soccer field, running the mower into the soccer net and making bonfires so big that the flames could be seen over the tops of the trees (bonfire=pile of sticks the size of a car+diesel+aim n' flame).
But of all the memories and things I learned to do during those summers some of the best life lessons were learned while working in the horse barn.
First lesson: Know your limitations.
*I will never be able to back up a wagon. I have tried many times. and somehow the result is always the same: jack-knife. I think the gene which enables the driver to coordinate turning of the wheel and manuvering the wagon, well I'm pretty sure that gene is only found in the Y chromosome. So in order to avoid continued frustration I learned to get an expert: boy, to get the job done.
Second lesson: Plan ahead.
*One of the scariest jobs was when I had to let the horses in their stalls after grazing in the yard all day. It was especially scary the first time. I opened the door to the barn before opening the individual stalls. Both huge, HUGE horses tried to get into the same stall. There was a lot of rearing up, loud neighing, and...maybe...some screaming from me (In retrospect I do not think this was helpful to the situation.) I ended up having to shoo both horses back into the yard and start over. I consider it a grande accomplishment that I did not die when pinned to the side of the stall. Next time I got the right doors open first and all screaming was avoided.
Third lesson: See things for what they are.
*In the barn lived baby racoons. These were baby racoons without mothers and the plan was to raise them until they were able to fend for themselves and then release them into the woods surrounding the camp (only to be hunted by dogs and rednecks or run over by trucks....but this is not the point). We would feed them with bottles of baby formula and called them our "babies." I should have seen these little guys for what they were...not babies...racoons. Babies do not try to eat your hair, or make scary screeching noises that sound like Satan set on fire. Babies do not bite you...and if they do, it's not that hard and you don't have to worry about rabies. I think many hard feelings and awkward situations in life would be avoided if I learned to see people for who they were and not try to make them into who or what I WANT them to be. You just end up bitten and smelling like sour milk.
Fourth lesson: Don't throw poop on your friends.
*Probably the most important lesson. It was a hot day when I drew the short straw and "got" to learn how to muck the stalls. Not sure why it was called muck...sounds like yuck and that's exactly what it was....a LOT of YUCK. It was after the second trip from barn to manure pile when our camp manager decided I was trying a little to hard to stay clean. Scoop, throw, scoop, throw....plop....scoop, throw, plop..."Hey!" The laughter told me this was no accidental miscalculation of the distance to the pile. He threw a few more poop balls before I ran away. This was the last time I mucked the stalls.I have found in my life that I often throw my poop on those I am closest to. Hard day at work...can't yell at the boss but I can be snippy to the husband. Frustrated about the way life worked out....can't cry to strangers so I plop it on people who are closest to me. Now I feel that we all have a need to express our feelings to those we can trust to gently handle our fragile emotions, but we don't need to throw poop on them just because they are next to us. They might never come back to the barn with us.
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