Post Number Forty-Five

Constancy

Choir Camp 2011 begins in two days. With the exception of a few years when we lived in Illinois, Terry and I have participated in this camp every summer since 1975.  That is a constancy that cannot be matched by anything else in our lives, save for our marriage and our children.  

Every year shortly after Christmas I begin to worry about Choir Camp.  Will anyone come this year?  Can I find music that challenges and inspires.  Have we gotten too old to be effective? Do I still have the stamina to keep pace with the week?  Is this still the place God wants us to be?  

Every year I arrive at camp and the answers to those questions hit me with the force of a mighty wind - my own little Pentecostal moment.  More than you expect.  Always.  Not yet.  We shall see. Trust that it is so.

The constancy of this annual experience is not physical nor geographic.  Since 1975 Choir Camp has been located in three different camps, Lake Huron (now the Lake Huron Retreat Center), Judson Collins United Methodist Center, and for the past five years at Lake Louise United Methodist Camp (my favorite).  The people involved over the years change continuously.  Children become adults.  Counselors drop out and are replaced. Terry and I are both trying to set the camp up for our eventual retirement.  We too will hand this off to others.

The constancy of which I speak is a constancy of spirit.  It is a constancy of love and joy that has never failed. It arrives in camp and sets up shop before the coming of the staff and the campers.  It takes its place in the first rehearsal and rides the wave of every song.  It lights the vesper fire every night as we ponder what God has taught us through each and every day.

In the fifty-one weeks between the end of one camp and the start of another I tend to forget the lesson of Choir Camp.  The burdens of living, the weight of responsibility that I feel, and the uncertainty of our future all dull my spiritual receptors.  I fall into the delusion that all things depend upon me.  But through Choir Camp, God teaches me every year that my part in God's plan is to show up, trust God, and tune in to the love and the joy.

Dave Gladstone