Day 7: We're ready

"Feels like we're all alone

Running further from what's right

And there are no more heroes to follow
So what are we becoming?
Where did we go wrong?

I want to rise today
And change this world
Oh, won't you rise today
And change this world?"

—Alterbridge

Day 6: Have done with lesser things

"Rise up, oh men of God, tread where His feet have trod

As brothers of the Son of Man, rise up, oh men of God."

—Traditional

Your prayers have worked, and we are overseeing a different group of kids than the ones who arrived here on Sunday.


Bill Ellis from Chicago smoked the crowd Thursday night, confronting the young teens on their tendency to be "good" enough to be called "church kids," while still keeping the deeper teaching of God at bay.
"Unfortunately, that arm's length from the world may be miles from God," he said. "You betray Him. By not obeying Him. By not loving Him."


And we heard the final message of the week this morning, from Indianapolis' Eric Testa. He spoke from his personal experience, about the amazing things God has done in his life at times when he dared to have real faith. Reading them Numbers 13 and 14, Eric challenged the campers to believe that they can do amazing things themselves, if they will rely on Jesus' power.
"Explore campers, look at me — 'Be strong in the Lord.'"
Eric urged his audience to not go home and revert back to the person they were a week ago. He read the lyrics to "Rise Up, Oh Men of God," and implored the young teens to put the Xbox and Facebook away and start building dreams based on the Kingdom.
"Have done with lesser things," Eric quoted. "Serve the King of kings."


And now, the question lies in the minds of each camper. Who will go home tomorrow, spend hours texting their friends, and forget everything they experienced here?
And who will go home and still believe? Who will go home and decide to make a difference?


If there are any kids on Earth willing to take the risk...I'd bet they were at Camp White Eagle this week.

Day 5: See the truth

"Though I'm still far from perfection
I stay relevant, I'm still vigilant
I have so much more to say
I have so much more to fight for."
—Jamie Jasta


Wayne Wright from Chicago dropped the bomb on Camp White Eagle during the morning message! He had what we needed to hear: the same things as before.
Wayne spoke to the kids about listening to the Bible's message again, and looking for new insights. Knowing that the majority of our campers have been raised in church and are by now familiar with God's basic teachings, he noted that they are different people today than they were a year ago. He asked them to look at familiar Scriptures with an open mind again, and see what new revelations they can find in their constantly-growing minds.
"That's when you're rising up in your character," Wayne said.
He then asked a direct question: "Why are we so slow to understand God's Word when it says something very specific? Don't settle for the lame 'I don't know.'"
A few courageous campers raised their hands to answer.
"Because we don't like what it says," one boy replied.


Wayne also implored the kids to be brave in their schools, neighborhoods and extracurriculars. We are learning things here at Camp White Eagle that their friends need to know.
"You may be the only positive thing they know," Wayne said. "We must rise to help struggling friends."
If we do not, too many of those friends will fall victim to Satan's plan.
"He wants to destroy you," Wayne said. "He doesn't want you to really see the truth of what he's doing."

Skit night at Camp White Eagle. Haleigh Cates and Rob Chase aren't really sitting on milk crates...

And you really don't want to know what the girls in the front row are freaking out about...

Soak the counselors!

THE OLYMPICS ARE BACK!!

Day 4: It's working

"It's like going out to sea. You don't know where you are, but you want to keep going."

—Keanu Reeves

Praying together during the morning program

Greetings to the outside world from Camp White Eagle!

 We sang The Star-Spangled Banner during lunch!

YOU'RE WONDERING ABOUT THE WEATHER

Cats and dogs are plummeting out of the sky. Thankfully, our morning was cool and the afternoon was sunny, but at dusk, God decided it was time to water the plants. Putting safety first, we cancelled the starlight devotional and got everyone back into their cabins before it got bad.

YOU'RE WONDERING IF YOUR KIDS ARE REGISTERING ANYTHING

They are. Underneath the cauldron of insanity that is Explore camp, the fire of God is heating things up.

Dig it: So it's dinner time, and I'm sitting at the very end of a long table. Tonight was salsbury steak, which was excellent; I've only had two pieces and I'm desperate for 3 or 4 more.

Way down at the other end, I see that some of the boys are drinking Tabasco sauce again. One guy, after gulping his, slams the bottle down onto the table.

A tiny little drop of Tabasco goes flying off the rim of the bottle.

Straight into the eye of the boy sitting across from him, who was not even involved in the hot sauce madness. In the real world, this would sound pretty crazy; at Camp White Eagle, it's another day, another disaster.

Important detail: dessert has just come out of the kitchen.

Tabasco Victim starts spazzing out. He leaves the table to go wash his eye off in the bathroom — right as the carrot cake arrives.

The carrot cake moves around from the far side of the table to my end. Sitting next to me is Courteous Camper, who grabs a piece of cake and passes it along. He then looks up, at the empty seat where Tabasco Victim had been sitting, and sees that his plate is empty.

"Does that guy have any carrot cake?" Courteous Camper yells to the other end.

It's always really loud in the dining hall, and no one at the other end hears him.

"Does that guy have any carrot cake!?" Courteous Camper yells again. He gets a response this time: a few shrugs.

Courteous Camper puts his own slice of carrot cake onto a plate and has it passed down to Tabasco Victim's seat. He wanted to make sure the guy got dessert.

Sometimes, people ask me why I keep coming back to camp year after year. People will be like "You know, self-punishment doesn't actually get you into Heaven."

Episodes like what I saw this evening keep me coming back.

Epilogue: Washing his eye out only spread the sauce around and made it worse. A counselor took him to Nurse Karla, who did her thing as usual and had him hooked up momentarily.

During this whole scramble, I'd gotten up to check on Tabasco Victim. As I walked from one end of my table to another — behold, one of my campers still has an untouched piece of salsbury steak on his plate!!  I ask him what the scoop is and if he has any immediate plans for his meat. He says no, so I snatch it.

But he issues me a warning: he doused it in Tabasco before deciding he didn't really want it.

Whatever dude.

SLIDE SHOW SONG #1: "Coming Home" by Dirty Money

Day 3: Look at me differently

"Justice be served to all mankind
Searching for identities we've left behind
One God, one Name, one destiny
Rise up, rise up, rise up, rise up, RISE UP!!"
— The Urge

FROM THE FRONT LINE: Actual conversations between campers and counselors


Camper A: "Do you know if Ryan is going to be OK? He looked pretty messed up."


Counselor A: "Huh?! What happened to Ryan?!"


Camper A: "Oh my Gawd, you haven't heard!?"






(Counselor #2 observes Camper #2 walking by, with a noticeable limp...but Camper #2 does not seem to have noticed his limp)


Counselor #2: "Dude, what happened to you?"


Camper #2: "I dropped a boat on my foot."

Dawn at Camp White Eagle, and a girls' cabin is studying the Bible together

Brennus Jonquet creates a birthday card for Logan Keysear, who turns 13 today

This morning, the boys heard from Phil Perez of DeKalb, who spoke from the first book of Samuel. He brought along our new brother in Christ, Kiaree Daniels, who was baptized on July 7 in DeKalb. A football player for Northern Illinois University, Kiaree told the gentlemen that it took men who dared to stand out to grab his attention.

"People respect you more when you're doing the right thing," Kiaree said. "They look at you different.

"Everybody in here wants to see everybody else do good," he added. "'Bad company corrupts good character' — put that on your mirror.

"I wish I'd went to high school with all you boys."






THE EVENING PROGRAM
The campers watched a filmed called "To Save a Life" tonight in the rec shelter, a movie that depicts the effect one teen can have on a multitude of other people. The film dealt with many of the traps that Satan will try to lure our campers into once they come home (drugs, impurity, violence and more), but showed them the power that they can have in their lives if they choose righteousness instead.


The film was intense; some campers cried, some were visibly stirred.

Day 2: Uh, awkward...

"This is 10% luck, 20% skill
15% concentrated power of will
5% pleasure, 50% pain
And 100% reason to remember The Name"
— Fort Minor

Having no electronics, the kids spent this morning learning about how communication used to get done: face to face, hand-in-hand, shoulder to shoulder and, in the case of some of our new games, earlobe to earlobe and ankle to ankle.  Uh, this is weird...

It's a pleasure, as the week goes by, to watch everybody loosen up.  Strangers that they had to get tangled up with on Monday will be trusted allies by Friday afternoon, and we'll all look back at moments like the one above and be thankful that we reached out and grabbed that unknown dude's wrist.

Kirk Stevens, who leads the Madison church, spoke to us this morning.

What are we doing after this?

7:07 p.m.:

I've already been stung by a bee, and it's only Monday.

I'm having complete conversations with other voices in my head, which normally doesn't start until Wednesday.

But the real problem is that I'm already smelling like Friday.

Others are worse off, however. Among the walking wounded here at Camp White Eagle, we have a counselor who darn near lost an eyeball this afternoon in The Gaa-Gaa Pit.

Hahahaha, "The Gaa-Gaa Pit." When you stop and think about it, that sounds like something really dangerous.  Fear not, dear parents, for in the long and legendary history of The Gaa-Gaa Pit, only two competitors have come close to losing eyes.  So it's really no big deal.

Gotta go: 3 out of 4 voices agree that it's time for the evening program!








AFTER THE EVENING PROGRAM:
This morning, Kirk Stevens came down from Madison and spoke to us about the accuracy of the Bible's content. He explained the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls in proving that the Bible we have today is the same as what the ancients had long ago. He also shared a few of the techniques the ancients used for memorizing whole books, and our modern-day ability to remember musical lyrics with the same capacity.


After dark, Bill Ellis from Chicago's Metro region spoke about the emotional ups and downs of being a young teen. Some days, it feels like the world is ending; the next morning, it's blue skies and rainbows. He encouraged the campers to cling to God — He has the awesome power to shake the mountains, but He will stoop down and listen to each of us, and help us get through what we're facing.

Day 1: Sunday

Eric Testa leads the first evening's session

Every summer, when I come back to Camp White Eagle, I ask myself the same question:

"How has it not yet occurred to anyone that giving teenaged boys an unlimited supply of Tabasco is a bad idea?"

We've only had 1 meal here at the Explore session of the Rise Up summer, and the experiments with hot sauce have begun again. Thankfully, no one has challenged me to a contest of who can swallow the most spoonfuls — yet. Like I said, we're only 1 meal in. Most of these kids could swallow spoonfuls of reactor fuel from 3 Mile Island and then go play dodgeball for 2 hours; my stomach has significantly higher mileage than theirs, but I dare not show any fear or weakness, lest the whipper-snappers overrun me.

 Eric Roberson is like "Dudes, I need a brownie too!"

We've seen that the other traditions of Explore camp are in full effect, too. Some children are already homesick but scared to show it, others are new here and scared of not being labeled "cool." But, most of this group have been to White Eagle numerous times, and have close friends from other cities that they're overjoyed to see in a format other than Facebook.

Oh yeah...social media. They're already exasperated. The camp rules state clearly that no electronics are allowed here, other than cameras — but some of our youngsters are of the understanding that they have an exemption. Because they will "so totally die" without their mobile phone.

Your counseling staff is rounding up the contraband from those who believed the no-gadget edict applied only to others. They will learn by sunup that there is life after texting.

"Look, enough is enough, I need some texting, right now!!"

Years and years and years ago, when I counseled my first camp session, I wondered what this generation would be capable of doing without hand-held video games and music players. I learned immediately, and have seen annually, that kids have not changed at all: Take away the fancy toys, hand them a volleyball and show them a mud pit, and watch the magic. Parents, your Rise Up counseling staff can attest that your kids are just as bright, just as crazed and just as capable of loving God as any generation before them.

And they're just as creative, once you take the phones away and force them to use their imaginations.

Which is where Tabasco changes from condiment to canvas.

Why does the counselor's cabin never have Pepto?