What a slingshot instructor actually does all day.

If you want to know about my specific slingshot-teaching responsibilities, here is everything you’d need to know, plus a few things you probably don’t care about.

I am the slingshot instructor at Camp Redwood Glen. That’s my official job title, despite the various other things I do around here, such as goofing off at the campfire or washing kids’ heads with anti-lice shampoo. Someone commented recently as I was at one of my other tasks, “Thanks for doing this. You didn’t sign up for this,” and I had to remind them, “I signed up for everything.” But as to the actual slingshot instructor job, which I’ve been asked about:

I am not an expert at the slingshot. I don’t really need to be. In order to teach something, you have to know enough to be able to teach it, not enough to excel. I can hit what I aim for about 30 percent of the time. This isn’t bad, actually; it’s a better percentage than the kids. But when I am teaching, I am sorta expected to hit the target 100 percent at the time, so naturally I demonstrate on easy targets… which I can hit more like 90 percent of the time.

We shoot marbles. We’ve tried paintballs, with no success. We don’t shoot anything else. No rocks, no acorns, no deer dung. (Which some kids have actually tried; I regularly warn them, “We have no brown marbles. If it is brown and shiny, do not pick it up; it is poo, and we don’t shoot poo.” Some have still tried.) Everything ricochets, and if the kids ever get hit with a ricochet, a marble will only leave a bruise, whereas anything else will cut. For this reason, I have allowed kids to shoot Skittles and M&Ms and Hot Tamales, ’cause they won’t hurt when they bounce back at you, but usually I just tell them, “Shoot marbles. Don’t waste your candy.”

The majors, in years previous, have tried to play up my ability—even, inexplicably, lie about it in order to impress the kids. “He’s an expert at the slingshot,” one of them would say; “he was even on the Olympic team.” And he’d say it dead serious, and the kids would turn to me in awe and say, “You were in the Olympics?” The older ones would say, “Slingshot is in the Olympics?” Of course, I’d have to be honest: “No. He’s just kidding.” But I’m not entirely sure he was kidding. He was so insistent about it.

In any event, my job is to make sure the kids know a proper way to fire a slingshot, and to go over the safety rules.

I harp on safety. I have to. Hurt campers are not having fun, and I want ’em to have fun. So I go through the safety rules thoroughly, and make the kids recite the rules after me. And, for fun, I have them repeat them a few more times, and yell them loud enough so that the kids on the rec field can hear us.

My rules are pretty simple:

1. Pay attention to Doc and his helpers. Doc stands for “Drinker of Coffee,” which is my camp name, which the kids think is awesome and actually call me. (However, they think this means I drink nothing but coffee, which is another rant.) My helper is whichever counselor gets assigned to me for the duration of the electives I teach, or free time. I’ll rant about my helpers in a moment.
2. Aim away from people. The reason I don’t make this first is ’cause the kids need to listen to directions above all else. But otherwise, I don’t want them shooting at one another. “I know,” I tell them, “you’ve been wanting to shoot that camper that’s been bugging you all week, and thinking that now’s your chance to ‘accidentally’ get ’em. NO. Aim away from people. That includes animal people—no shooting birds, no shooting lizards, no shooting deer, no shooting mountain lions. Don’t kill anything. We’re only shooting at targets.” Some of them—you can tell by the looks on their faces—aren’t happy at all about this rule. Those are the kids I watch out for.
3. Aim carefully. “You are not trying to shoot as fast as possible,” I point out, ’cause indiscriminate firing tends to create accidents.
4. Stay out of the range during shooting. The range, of course, is were the cans and balloon targets are. You would be surprised how many of them dart into the range after marbles, loose balloons, or lizards. Basically, everything beyond the boards that are directly in front of the posts—tree stumps we’ve placed at the edge of the range, which the kids stand behind, or to the side of—is the range. Marbles either bounce off targets, or roll back to the edge of the range, and a overly-fixated kid will sometimes leap into the range in order to get the marbles—“They’re so close!” is the usual excuse—but no, they’re not allowed to go after them until everyone has finished firing.
5. Wear goggles. Because marbles ricochet. They might hit the campers anywhere, though the way the kids shoot, they won’t hit them hard. But if any of the marbles hit anyone in the eye, problems are rife. I regularly have to remind campers to put them on. “Your forehead doesn’t need protecting,” I point out; “your eyes do.” I also tend to say, “I don’t want any campers to come away from Slingshot blind. If you came here with two eyes, you should leave here with at least two.” (Quicker kids usually catch the joke in there.) The goggles are scratched and blurry from years of abuse, but they work, and you can see enough to hit near targets.

I do not have, nor do I need, a sixth rule. Some kids have suggested that rule six is “Have fun!” because certain people have put that on their rules lists. My response to that is, “Oh, you’re gonna have fun. But seriously: If I made that a rule, how do you expect me to enforce it? What am I gonna do, bench you because you’re not having fun? ‘Oh, you’re not having fun—go sit down over there until you have fun.’ Come on. Think.” Just because slingshot can be mindless fun doesn’t mean I want the kids to be mindless.

On the first day of camp, I usually hand out marbles to the kids, but the rest of the time I start them off with a marble hunt: They have to roam around the range and look for marbles. “It’s like an easter egg hunt,” I tell them, “but if you find anything brown, don’t eat it. Deer crap is everywhere. The deer, which are stupid, eat the grass on the field, and sometimes even eat marbles.

“Everything you find,” I tell them, “you may shoot. If you find five marbles, that’s great. If you find ten, you can shoot ten. If you find twenty, you can shoot twenty. If you find fifty, you can shoot fifty.”

“What if we get all of them?” one kid will occasionally ask.

“If you personally find all of them,” I respond, “then you will have been running around here so fast that friction will have burned all your clothes off, and you will be shooting naked. Eww yuck no. We don’t want to see that.” The other kids tend to laugh at that one.

“If you find two,” I will say, “sucks to be you.” Or sometimes, “If you only find one, you aren’t looking very hard.” Depends on how humorous I’m feeling.

So I have them line up behind the board, and reiterate over and over again that once I blow the whistle, they may go hunt for marbles. Once I blow the whistle. When they hear me blow the whistle, which I will blow before they can go, they can hunt for marbles once the whistle is blown. “On your mark, get set… go when I blow the whistle.” Invariably some of them will tear into the range the instant I say “Go,” and then they have to go back behind the boards and drop any marbles they’ve gathered in their haste. And, because it amuses me, I will keep giving them false starts. “Gopher hole. Goat cheese. Go go Gadget copter. Gomer Pyle USMC. Gooooooooal.” The girls tend to catch on faster than the boys do; the boys spasm every time they hear a hard G.

But then I blow the whistle and off they go. Meanwhile I stroll around the range and point at marbles they’ve missed. “There’s a white one. There’s an orange one. There’s a green one.” Sometimes they scramble after the ones I point out. Sometimes I wind up with a crowd following me because they’ve discovered that I’m pretty good at sighting marbles they would ordinarily miss. Whenever I get a flock of children surrounding me, though, I discourage them by pointing at various non-marble objects and, instead of shouting, “Marble!” I shout, “Rock! Acorn! Poo!—we don’t shoot poo. Dandelion! Cinderblock!” Eventually they give up on following me in a crowd, and I go back to actually sighting marbles.

I see marbles everywhere. I’ve done this enough to where I can see them half-buried in the dirt, behind shrubs, in tufts of grass, or whatever. “I see them in my sleep,” I joke to the kids, but whenever I’ve had too much caffeine before bed, I actually have had dreams in which I’m repetitively seeking marbles. It’s annoying.

Anyway, after the range is fairly picked clean of marbles, I count down from 20 (sometimes in English) and have the kids get behind the board, where my helper will hand out the slingshots, the kids will put on goggles, and firing will begin.

We do several marble hunts during slingshot time. Over the course of a week, the marbles become harder and harder to find. Kids pocket them and never return them, kids shoot them into the woods, and of course deer eat ’em. I start each week with about 25, to which I add another 75, but by the end of the week I’m back down to 25.

The first week of camp, I had lesson plans (yes, we actually write lesson plans) for three days. The campers would sign up for what electives they wanted most, and consequently I’d get a group of kids who, largely, wanted to be there, and wanted to get somewhat good at it. So the first lesson would be an introduction to the rules and shooting; the second would be work on their aim; the third would be a contest.

In the second week of camp, our assistant director decided to change things. Now, during every elective time, we get a different cabin; usually a boys’ cabin and a girls’ cabin. So I never make it to lesson two. Consequently, I don’t spend a lot of time teaching them how to aim. I just show them how to not shoot horribly wrong. You’d think a slingshot would be easy enough to understand, but some of them actually have figured out ways to hold it in which they’ll accidentally shoot themselves in the face with a marble. Never underestimate the creativity of a really dense kid.

So I haven’t taught lesson 2 since that first week. And the other difficulty is that now I have a lot more campers who really really don’t want to be at slingshot. Previously, I’d get a few—the kids, by and large, would sign up for archery or the pool, and since they couldn’t all fit in the pool or the archery range, they had to go somewhere, so they’d wind up at the rec field or the farm or slingshot. Some of them would cry: “I thought I was going to the pool! I signed up for the pool!” And they did—they’d show up in their bathing suits and flip-flops, with towels, all ready for the pool, regardless of their counselors’ repeated warnings that they weren’t going to the pool; in their childlike stubbornness, they refused to believe that they wouldn’t get their wish… ’cause in some cases, their parents have never denied them anything, so why shouldn’t they get their wishes?

I don’t require the kids to do anything other than follow my rules. If they don’t want to shoot, they don’t have to. If they don’t want to hunt for marbles, they can easily find a kid who only wants to hunt for marbles—not shoot—and partner up. If they would rather sit on the bench and drink lots of water and hang out and talk to one another, that’s fine with me. If they want to blow up balloons (for popping with the slingshots) and squeak them and release them and make farty noises, that’s fine with me too. I want ’em to have fun; the rules keep them safe; everyone’s happy, hopefully.

The electives are about an hour and a quarter. Then I pray for the kids and we head off to whatever next thing they have. Usually there’s a morning and afternoon elective. This week is music camp, in which there are no electives, and I only run the slingshot range during free time.

During each elective, and free time, I am assigned a counselor to assist me. Sometimes I get two. I don’t want two. I want one. I specifically ask for only one. The reason why is because when you get two adults, they clump together to talk, and don’t watch the kids. The counselors are only human after all, and would like, for once in their day, to speak to a peer. I don’t blame them. I have to fight my own tendencies to chat with the counselors rather than watch the kids and make sure they don’t accidentally shoot one another. But when I get two counselors (and once, for some reason, I was given more than two) I have to constantly remind the counselors to stop clumping and spread out. They don’t really listen to me, ’cause they forget I’m not a peer; and I really don’t want to lecture them in front of the campers. It’s not appropriate. So it’s easier to just get one.

Some of the counselors want to shoot. I have no problem with that. So long that they’re not depriving the kids—the kids get first priority—and so long that they don’t start to compete with the kids in an unhealthy manner, I will let them “goggle up,” get some marbles, and shoot along with the kids. Usually the kids are fascinated by counselors who want to shoot, and tend to respect them more—for trying, at least, if not for succeeding—so in the long run it comes in handy. However, the counselors who are into unhealthy competition—mocking the campers, swiping marbles, bumping someone who is trying to shoot (yes, some of them do all these things)—are loathsome both to the campers and to me. I haven’t had to write any of them up yet, and hope to never need to. One I did, last year.

Some of the counselors are genuinely interested in the campers and get right in there and help. Others are honestly tired, and want to sit on a log and observe. Others are damned lazy pains in my ass who leave the kids entirely to me, and don’t watch, don’t care, and don’t interact. Thankfully I don’t get many of them, or I get them during free time, when there’s actually little need for them except to have another adult around. During free time, they can goldbrick all they like.

Free time is every afternoon from 3ish to 5ish. During that time, counselors are assigned to various observation posts all over the camp, mainly to make sure that kids are behaving themselves and not bullying or sneaking off to get into some devilry. The cabins are locked. The kids are free to go to any program area—like mine—or hang out, or go to the canteen, or whatever.

Most days it is hot, or at least seasonably warm. So the first thing the campers want to do is either go to the pool, or go to the canteen and buy something cold. Thus, for usually about the first hour of free time, there is nobody at slingshot but me and my assistant. We kick back and wait for kids. We chat. It’s a little boring—more for them than for me, ’cause I can talk their ears off—but it’s not bad.

Every so often a die-hard slingshot fan will come by within that first hour and take advantage of the fact that he (it’s mostly a he) is the only kid there, and collect all the marbles available, and shoot every last one of them. By the time another kid comes around, the die-hard will be on their second giant pile of marbles, and the other kids have to wait a few minutes until I’ll let them hunt for marbles again.

Some kids come by to hang out and talk too. ’Cause it’s warm.

By the end of free time, I’ll have a last-minute surge of kids, but I usually have to shoo them all away and tell them to come back tomorrow. Then I gather up all the slingshots (I usually leave the goggles and marbles there; no one’s gonna come back to steal marbles) and go off to clean up for dinner.

All told, I spend about five hours a day on the slingshot range, either setting up, or cleaning up, or instructing, or waiting. I try to spend as much of it in the shade as I can, but I still get sunburns when I’m not really careful. And I don’t want to sit in the shade all day. I need to do something out there. I get squirrelly when I’m sitting inactive all the time. So I’ll go hunt marbles with the campers in the poison oak behind the range (where a tarp unsuccessfully tries to keep marbles out of the woods) or I’ll help campers who can’t figure out how to make the marbles fly any more than two feet, or pick up litter, or blow up balloons, or whatever.

But yeah, basically it’s one of the cushiest jobs ever. I get to hang out with the kids all day and they pay me to do it. It’s awesome.

Not giving up on dreams, and inappropriately using Joseph to teach this.

John C. Maxwell’s Running with the Giants. Chapter 3: Joseph.

John C. Maxwell’s lesson in chapter 3 of Running with the Giants is “Don’t give up on your dream.” If that’s the message you want to teach, whose mouth, from all the folks of the bible, would you put it into?

Right: Nehemiah. Here’s a man who heard that Jerusalem’s walls were down, and petitioned the shah of the Persian Empire about it, got permission and financing, and overcame political pressure and terrorist threats in order to get those walls up. He had a dream; with God’s help, he saw it come to fruition.

Maxwell, of course, picked the guy whose life was filled with stories about dreams: Joseph ben Israel.

I told a coworker about the theme of chapter 3, then mentioned Maxwell used Joseph as his example. Her response was the same as mine: “Those aren’t really his dreams. They’re more like dreams God gave him.” Well, yeah. And if they’re dreams God gave us, it would actually be sin to give up on those dreams; it is disregarding a message from God, after all.

Maxwell isn’t talking about God-dreams, or even literal dreams. He’s talking about the grand plans we make for our future. We call them dreams because they have no substance to them, like actual dreams, but they are not at all the same thing as the regurgitations of the subconscious we have while asleep, and not at all like the visions given by God to Joseph. As my coworker pointed out, God gave those. Such visions are His to fulfill. Not Joseph’s. Joseph was a slave and convict, in no position to accomplish anything, and wholly dependent—as Maxwell regularly forgets in his lessons—upon God’s grace.

Why Maxwell is insistent upon taking largely passive subjects of God’s mercy, and using them to teach lessons about how we need to be proactive and achieve great things, I have no idea. I am not a Calvinist; I don’t believe at all that every human is, ultimately, a passive agent in God’s sovereign plan. God is love; love requires someone to love; therefore God is relational. He wants to have a relationship with us humans. Therefore He chooses to interact with us, and have us become an interactive part of His plan to save the world. We’re not just semi-interchangeable pawns of the sovereign cosmic plan. Nonetheless, Maxwell has picked Noah, Esther, and now Joseph; the first two were mostly pawns in their own stories, and Joseph did not achieve, through personal effort, the grandiose station where he eventually wound up; it was entirely on the whim of the pharaoh, who unknowingly was a pawn himself, of God. The bible, after all, is about how awesome God is; the people of the bible are only significant in that they make God look good. Thus each of these folks were the results of God’s grace, and not the results of following the advice that Maxwell has thus far dispensed.

It’s a giant blind spot in the book, really. It undermines every lesson just as much as the poor biblical interpretation. As I’ve said, Maxwell has good advice, but you gotta wonder how good it is when the man twists the scriptures so much in order to validate his advice.

Well, for the unfamiliar, let me go through the Joseph story, which you’ll find in your bible starting at Genesis 37. Or you can watch it, more or less, in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. But I’ll actually start with the backstory of Joseph’s father Israel, which plays into Joseph’s story later. You’ll see.

Israel was born Jacob, son of Isaac, younger twin brother of Esau. Jacob was a sneaky bastard who shafted Esau out of his birthright (his right to take over the tribe when Isaac died, and inherit twice as much as Jacob—which he’d need to administer the tribe). Esau was angry enough to kill, so Jacob went to hide out with his uncle Laban—a man twice as sneaky as Jacob, who tricked Jacob into marrying his unattractive cousin Leah and working seven years for her dowry. Despite Laban’s brilliant but evil conniving, Jacob managed to produce a big inbred family, a pretty sizable fortune, and receive Esau’s generous forgiveness—all because, at his core, he followed and trusted his father’s God, who had grace upon him despite all his sneakiness.

Joseph is the 12th of 13 (maybe 14) kids born to Israel; obviously Israel’s favorite son, as evidenced by Israel giving him an extra-fancy embroidered tunic. (The King James Version translates this “coat of many colors.”) His brothers hated him for the favoritism, and Joseph exacerbated the situation by telling them of his dreams—his brother’s wheat sheaves worshiped his sheaf; eleven planets and the sun and moon bowed to him—obviously indicating to them that Joseph felt he was God’s favorite, as well as his father’s.

Once his brothers got a chance—when Joseph was sent to check up on them as they were shepherding—they were gonna kill him. His oldest brother Reuben talked them out of it; his next-oldest brother Simeon came up with the idea of selling him to their cousins. They faked Joseph’s death to fool Israel, and Joseph was sold to an Egyptian palace guard.

Joseph actually did well as the guard’s slave… until his master’s wife accused him of trying to rape her. Then he wound up in the pharaoh’s prison, where again he did well, became known as a dream-interpreter, and after impressively interpreting the pharaoh’s dreams of a coming seven-year famine, was promoted directly to vizier. As vizier, he stored up for the famine that struck the ancient Near East, and shrewdly managed to enslave the Egyptians for the pharoah by selling back the grain he had taken in taxes.

Israel’s sons, of course, went to Egypt for grain, and there Joseph recognized them and spent several months messing with their heads until he finally identified himself as Joseph. He forgave them for the slavery, since “God meant it for good,” (Ge 50.20) let them move to and live in the Sinai Peninsula (a.k.a. Goshen), and thus the story is set for the eventual slavery and exodus of Israel’s descendants.

What dream does Joseph not give up on? Well, it’s kinda disturbing. But let’s first dig through Maxwell’s tangled web of eisegesis.

The PowerPoint bullets that Maxwell has Joseph impart to us along the track sorta fit the Joseph story. Not well, but that’s why you stretch the biblical text where you can. Basically, you don’t give up on your dream even if…

• …You didn’t start off well. Joseph certainly didn’t. His poor start, as Maxwell depicts it, came by sharing his dreams in the first place. They “got him into trouble,” Maxwell said, but “it didn’t stop him.” (Maxwell 29) As if it was a good thing for him to brag about how, someday, his family would bow before him. The only person who shares that kind of information is either an egomaniac or an a--hole; usually both.

  Maxwell totally misreads the reaction of Joseph’s brothers. They weren’t discouraging his dream so much as they were objecting to the a--holic behavior of their brother. Israel too reacted: “His father corrected him, and said to him, ‘What’s this dream you’ve dreamed? Will it come to be that I, your mother, and your brothers come to bow to the earth to you?’ ” (Ge 37.10 KWL) Israel knew personally what sort of trouble could come from usurping authority from family members, and how homicidal one’s brothers could be; he had shafted his brother Esau more than once, who had finally, generously, forgiven him. Joseph was creating ten times the trouble for himself. But he was too dense to see it.

  “Too often,” Maxwell states anyway, “we give up on our dreams in the early stages when they are most fragile.”

  Yeah, we do. But connecting this thought with Joseph’s story in any form takes the hugest freaking stretch that I’ve seen in this book thus far.

• …Your family doesn’t support it. Man alive, did Joseph’s family not support his dreams. How could they? Those dreams made them subservient to the family’s spoiled brat. Even the most noble of us wouldn’t want that to come true, and considering the source, would sincerely doubt that dream ever came from God. Even though God can—and does—use jerks, we’re still not receptive to any message preached without love. (1Co 13.1-2)

  Nonetheless, Maxwell dodges the point behind Joseph’s family’s rejection and states, “When your dream comes from God, the dream holds you when you feel unable to hold it.” Which is actually a great point, and a memorable turn of phrase. If only it weren’t lessened by the completely out-of-context scripture references.

• …Your journey is full of surprises. Maxwell condenses Joseph’s life, between where he’s sold into slavery to where he becomes vizier, into a point-by-point list of circumstances in which Joseph could either have given up, or gone on. He’s misunderstood by his family; he’s sold into slavery; he’s in a strange country far from home. Give up on his dream? Not Joseph. By golly, he would see that dream through…

  Maxwell, in presenting this, never entirely states what Joseph’s dream actually happens to be. I, on the other hand, can’t help but think about it, because as a motivator, it is so very wrong. It is the dream that one day, one day, Joseph’s family will finally bow to the earth before him.

  If that’s what he was clinging to… that’s kinda sick. It makes Joseph look like a vengeful monomaniac nut, whose drive to “show them all” helped get him through slavery. It ain’t the healthiest form of motivation, is it?

  It wasn’t the dream of sweet, sweet vengeance that kept Joseph going. Honestly, I don’t think Joseph’s dreams of his family bowing to him even entered his mind at this time. It was, more likely, that he had seen his father’s reliance on God despite all the humiliation Israel had gone through under Laban. If God got Israel through Laban, He could get Joseph through slavery and prison; and He indeed came through in spades. Joseph’s focus was more on, “God, help me get through this,” and rejoicing when God actually got him through this. Faith does not develop out of hope; it develops when we act in faith and God proves our faith to be valid. Joseph didn’t give up because God proved his faith, not because he clung to the hope that his family would, one day, bow before him.

  Joseph probably never gave those dreams a thought until, one day as vizier, he was routinely distributing grain when suddenly ten Hebrew shepherds came into his office and bowed before him. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

• …It takes a long time to realize it. It took 23 years between the time Joseph was sold into slavery, and the time Joseph saw his brothers again. His reaction? Toss them in prison. Then keep Simeon in lockup while they went back for Benjamin, the only brother who hadn’t sold him down the river. Then set up Benjamin, and threaten to imprison him, as a test to the others. Then forgive them.

  “In the end,” Maxwell said, “Joseph ruled his family.” (Maxwell 31-32) Yikes.

  But he was a lot nicer to them afterward. He could have continued to be a giant a--hole, and it’s entirely possible that a lot of his behavior after seeing them again was a certain amount of vengeful regression. However, he wept a lot when he finally revealed to them that he was Joseph, which to me suggests he was feeling pretty guilty for it; and after he revealed himself he was nothing but kind to them. Had he spent 23 years festering with bitterness over his dream of his family bowing before him, I doubt he would have had cared to do anything but put his brothers through more conniving plots—he was the son of Jacob, after all—but no. Joseph forgave, and it was permanent. All those years of depending on God had taken their toll; Joseph couldn’t indulge his evil nature, because the Holy Spirit simply won’t have it.

Maxwell ends with “Joseph’s words of encouragement,” the bit where he puts words in Joseph’s mouth that don’t entirely sound like Joseph so much as they sound like Maxwell. Again, it’s good advice, mostly. But it doesn’t always fit the context.

• God is always with you. Indeed He is. In fact, this statement sorta fits all the folks in the bible who had faith in Him. Joseph too.
• Develop yourself during the down times. Joseph’s “down times” would, it seems, be slavery and prison. Me, I think of “down times” as periods between obvious productivity, not periods that I’m getting violently crapped on. But hey.
• Realize that self-promotion can never replace divine promotion. This actually fits. Joseph, in proclaiming his dreams to his family, motivated his brothers to tear him limb from limb. That didn’t fulfill God’s objectives. Whereas the pharaoh, recognizing the supreme value of Joseph’s communication skills with God, promoted him and did fulfill God’s objectives. When we are humble, God works with us. When we are proud, God leaves us to the caprices of a fickle society… who sometimes love us, and sometimes rip us to shreds like sharks.
• When the dream is realized, it is sweeter than you can ever imagine. Maxwell has Joseph say, “Do you know what it was like to finally be reconciled with my family”? (Maxwell 33) Trouble is, that wasn’t the dream. The dream—the dream Maxwell kept harping on—was for them to bow. Which they did; Joseph got them to bow before him, because his paranoid-looking behavior scared the bejeezus out of them. But Joseph ultimately didn’t find vengeance to be all that sweet. So not only does Maxwell ignore his own disturbing interpretation of the Joseph story; he ignores the fact that where it does fit, it’s likewise pretty disturbing. Disturb-o-rama.

Nehemiah’s story would have been so much more appropriate for every single last idea Maxwell wanted to present. He didn’t start well; his family—his fellow Jews—didn’t entirely support him; his journey was full of surprises (and open hostility, political intrigue, violence, corruption, etc.); and it took time to realize it. Yet God was always with him; he developed himself during down times; he didn’t promote himself, but stayed humble; and he saw great success as Jerusalem’s wall was finally built.

However, Maxwell has saved Nehemiah for chapter 7, in which he tries to teach, “No problem is too big when you have help.” My first response is that Elijah might make a better person to teach that idea… but I’ll rant about that, I suppose, once I get to chapter 7.

Staying at the camp.

I don’t have to stay here, but I do. This job is like a vacation with pay, and staying here makes it more of one.

The camp is only 3 km from where I live, but for convenience I have been staying there, in a dormitory next to the Dining Hall. All the cabins and lodges at the camp are named for Santa Cruz County cities, hamlets, beaches, and other landmarks. (With the exception of the “guest cabins,” in which the Alphas live this year; they’re named for certain California cities.) The one I’m in is called Ben Lomond.

Two other staffers live there. There are three rooms; fairly standard bedrooms, with a bunkbed, desk, dresser, closet, wall heater, ceiling fan with light, and TV (which actually gets basic cable, but I never watch mine) and we can pick up the camp’s wifi signal from the Dining Hall. Each room has a door to the outside—there is no other way into the building—and a door to a rather spacious and impractically-designed hallway. There are two bathrooms, each of which has a sink, toilet, and shower. There’s a table with a microwave oven on it; I discovered yesterday that the microwave is too small for my coffee cup, but you could nuke a cup of ramen, or a burrito, in it. And smaller cups. That’s all. There is also a fire extinguisher and vacuum cleaner.

The backside of the dorm, sharing a wall with but unconnected to the rooms, is a laundry room. Lots of people use it. Alphas use it for camper laundry—when the campers wet their bunk, or otherwise soil themselves, it often goes there. I use it in between those times. The washers, when in the spin cycle, cause the entire building to vibrate. The first time I felt it in my room, I thought we were undergoing a minor earthquake. I was half asleep at the time. It felt like it was only a 3.0, so I ignored it. When I was more awake, later, I realized what was going on. It’s not annoying.

The bathrooms have two switches. One is the light and fan. The other is a heat fan. C, one of the guys in the other rooms, didn’t realize this at first—none of us did; we thought it was just a regular fan—and figured after he had used the toilet that it might be a good idea to leave the fan running in the bathroom, in order to dissipate the smells he had left behind him. Instead, the heat fan made the odor quite a bit worse; we warn each other all the time to be careful which fan we use so that we don’t inadvertently “take a hot dump.”

I can’t get much of a wifi signal from the bathrooms. (Yes, I sometimes take my laptop in there. Sometimes the camp food requires me to spend more time in there than I care to. Damn government cheese.)

The dorm is underneath part of two oak trees, so the building stays pretty cool, even on hot days. The next dorm over has been converted into a house, sorta; a staffer’s family is living in it, and her husband was telling me how hot it gets in there sometimes. My room, in contrast, is almost always in the shade. The other guys still like it warmer than I do, so they run their heaters whenever the temperature gets below 20°C, whereas I leave my window open at night and run the ceiling fan a lot.

As I’ve said before, the mattresses on the bunkbed are foam wrapped in plastic, and aren’t all that comfortable; they’re pretty thin. The other guys compensated by taking the mattress from the top bunk and putting it atop the other. I tried this and woke up with a backache. Guess I need a firmer mattress. But once I got my wool blanket from home, it’s been comfortable enough. The temperatures lately have been such that I am sleeping quite comfortably with a bedsheet and an open window.

I have a key to the building—well, specifically to B’s room—but it doesn’t work. I lock my door, ’cause I don’t want campers getting in there. So does C. But B does not; he doesn’t seriously think anyone’s gonna go in there. I hope not. Most of the petty theft at the camp happens among the campers, in their cabins, anyway, but my worry isn’t theft; I don’t want to be surprised by an obsessed camper. But I actually I wind up going through B’s door, most of the time, to my room.

It’s a huge convenience living at the camp, of course. See, I can catch rides to the camp in the morning, but not at night; I have to walk home. (I could get a ride from someone, but I don’t want to inconvenience anyone like that on a regular basis.) It’s only a 45-minute walk, but why walk home when I can hang out with the staffers? Plus, I can sleep till 7; my ride in the morning would arrive at 7. So my alarm is set for then—though most mornings I wake up at 6 anyway—and I read my bible, check email and Facebook, shower, get my coffee, and saunter down to the flagpole at 8:10. It’s nice.

The kids were a little surprised to discover that I live less than two miles away, yet stay at the camp. “You don’t understand,” I pointed out. “It’s like a giant vacation for me.” It really is. I’ve even been staying here on days off. I’m at a camp, after all; it is a great place to hang out when you’re not working. Sometimes people don’t appreciate the awesome places where God puts them. I try. And, in the case of the camp, I do.

The “Tarzan” song.

My least-favorite camp song, and my attempts to defeat its performance.

Had to get to this eventually. There is one particular camp song I have grown to loathe this year. The reason why is not just that it’s stupid; most of them are stupid, but I have a fair amount of goofy fun with them. The reason is because the tune is catchy. The kids can’t stop singing it. They want us to sing it at every function. At campfire, in chapel, at the flagpole, you name it, they want it. I find myself humming it from time to time, and am very annoyed at my damn brain for spitting it up to annoy me. It’s called “Tarzan.” It goes like this. Each line is repeated.

Tarzan

Swinging from a rubber band [swinging motion]

Tarzan

Crashed into a frying pan [smacking motion]

Ooh, that hurts

Now Tarzan has a tan

And I hope it doesn’t peel [peeling-arms motion]

Like a banana [repeat]

 

Jane

Flying in an aeroplane [flying motion]

Jane

Crashed into a traffic lane [smacking motion]

Ooh, that hurts

Now Jane has a pain [bend forward, hold aching back]

And Tarzan has a tan

And I hope it doesn’t peel [peeling-arms motion]

Like a banana [repeat]

 

Cheeta

Rockin’ to the beat-a [disco dancing motion]

Cheeta

Got eaten by an amoeba [smacking motion]

Ooh, that hurts

Now Cheeta is Velveeta

And Jane has a pain [bend forward, hold aching back]

And Tarzan has a tan

And I hope it doesn’t peel [peeling-arms motion]

Like a banana [repeat a lot]

When you sing “Like a banana” you’re expected to pound your chest like a gorilla. The kids really like this part. This is the part they repeat most often.

Honestly, I am trying to find ways to sabotage this song, and the performance of the song. Of course, I can spit up my own alternate verses of the song any time I like, ’cause my brain works that way. For most people, the most common psychological reaction to the unexpected is laughter; if I can be ridiculous enough, the laughter can sometimes incapacitate the song-leader. So I go for the particularly outrageous. Sometimes I don’t even bother to make it rhyme; I just go directly for, “Tarzan / Swinging on your mama!” and if the song-leader is the visual type, they are desperately trying to fight laughter for the rest of the song.

Last Friday, ’cause it was the first night of camp and I just knew someone was gonna slip “Tarzan” into the campfire’s song lineup, I snagged a banana from the Dining Hall. (I tend to do this anyway. I like bananas.) So that evening, while I was on stage, by golly someone decided to lead the kids in “Tarzan,” and I wasn’t close enough to the song leader to throw him off lyrically. But I had my banana. And as we got to the line, “Like a banana,” I stated, loud enough for many to hear, “I would like a banana,” and produced my banana, and began to peel and eat it. It didn’t completely disrupt the song, but it wreaked just enough havoc to amuse me.

As I said, the reason I hate it is because it’s stupid but catchy. I am in the habit of humming to myself whenever I go somewhere. (Unless I have my iPod on; I suppose I just like music when I walk.) Usually I will compose whatever I’m humming; most people just assume I’m humming an old jazz tune or something, but I’m making it up as I go, ’cause I’m a genius like that. Every once in a while I will recognize that whatever I’m making up sounds an awful lot like another song; “I’m humming ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ” I will realize, or “That’s ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’ ” There is a lot of music in my head. But lately, every so often, I catch myself and realize, “Aw, crap. That’s ‘Tarzan.’ Dammit! Stop it brain, or I’ll stab you with a Q-Tip!”

Our program director put “Tarzan” on the schedule for last Tuesday’s campfire, and as I was announcing the song, I basically admitted to the campers, “Honestly, guys, I hate this song. You have no idea. I am really really really REALLY tired of it. I have had to hear it every day, several times a day, for the past three weeks. I would rather set fire to my own frontal lobe rather than hear this song again. But, here it is!”

And then I got out of the way and let the song-leader do the bloody song, to the great glee of the children.

“Congratulations,” I told the kids afterwards, “you’ve just witnessed the forty thousandth performance of ‘Tarzan’ here at Camp Redwood Glen. One for the record books. You think I’m kidding. But now it’s over. Yea!” And then I introduced something else.

If the kids had their way we’d sing it again within the same program. We’d start and end every program with it. We’d sing it in chapel. We’d sing it for grace before meals. You ask them what song they want to sing, they’ll automatically say, “Tarzan.” It’s like crack and they’re crackheads.

“We know how you feel about it, Kent,” staffers will say as soon as they mention it’s on the schedule, just after I let out another groan of despair.

The kids would eat nothing but candy if you let them; that is why the responsible adult will not let them. Likewise the kids would sing nothing but “Tarzan,” and it is my responsibility to limit the damn song to reasonable levels. Once a day, not nine times a day, fr’instance. We need to sing more songs about Jesus around here anyway.

I have debated whether to alter the lyrics of the song into something more Christian, and slip my new improved Christian lyrics to the kids before they ever hear the “Tarzan” lyrics. That way, once they hear “Tarzan” they’ll think it’s some blasphemous parody of a worship song. But every time I try to alter a song, I’m not successful; I’ll rant about that another time. Suffice to say I just try to discourage “Tarzan” whenever possible. “Don’t say the T-word,” I’ll order the kids; and I have even offered the song-leaders money to not sing the song. They do anyway. ’Cause it’s like crack.

Crackedy crack crack crack.

The food at the camp.

I’ve been eating a lot of camp food this summer. It’s pedestrian, but it needs to be.

When you’re a kid, if the cooks know what they’re doing, camp food is awesome. The wise camp cook sticks with simple foods that kids like, are familiar with, or at least will eat. These staples include pizza, chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, burritos, hamburgers, spaghetti, sloppy joes, or assorted sandwiches. Breakfast foods will be pancakes, french toast, eggs, or breakfast cereals. They will be uncomplicated, have no significant differences in flavor from the school lunch versions of each item (except, hopefully, less grease) and if the camp isn’t cheap, be made with ingredients that have a USDA rating of grade AA or AAA. (School lunches tend to use ingredients that were only graded A on a bribe. Right below A, of course, is pet food.)

My first year at the camp, I had no complaints about the food at all. Our cook was a professional chef and knew how to make awesome food—and took the time to do it. Most camp cooks are reheaters—they buy frozen trays of this or that, thaw them, put them in the oven, and call that cooking. Our chef refused to do that, and God bless her. But for the purposes of a camp, she may not have been the best fit. Children have really unsophisticated palates. Feed them something unique at your peril. So while I liked the food, the kids frequently would say, “What’s that?” and wouldn’t eat it. Some of the counselors are only two years removed from being kids themselves, and think Taco Bell is haute cuisine, and responded in the same way. Barbarians. But when you’re cooking for a camp, regardless of your own ability, however amazing—regardless whether you went to culinary school or would never eat that sort of stuff yourself—you have to aim for the lowest common denominator and hit it.

I make it sound like our current cooks are barbarians themselves. They aren’t; they just understand what kids will eat, and don’t mess with what works. This of course can become tiresome to the counselors—when, every Sunday, breakfast is pancakes, lunch is chicken nuggets, and dinner is Bisquick™ pizza. There is a salad bar that the staff is allowed to get into, but some of them are not salad eaters, and for some of the few that are, the only dressing they ever eat is ranch. So after three camps with the same menu week after week, some of them are beginning to bellyache over the sameness of it all.

Since I am one of the few that knows how to cook—and one of the few with any creativity, it seems—I know how to work around the sameness of it all. When I saw it was chicken nuggets again, I went to the salad bar, got a salad, then got three nuggets, sliced ’em up, and added them. Chicken nugget salad. “Wow,” said one adult, “that’s a really good idea.” Not necessarily, but it’s different.

Since I am kosher, I have to dodge the pepperoni/sausage pizzas, most of the scrambled eggs (they put swine in ’em) and of course breakfast sausage. I do worry about that sausage—pink is not a healthy color for pork products, no matter how cooked through they actually are—but only on the kids’ behalf, ’cause I won’t touch the stuff unless it’s to serve it to others. Otherwise I eat largely what the kids do, and have few complaints about it.

Because on my days off, I can go get variety. Two weeks ago, J and I took off for Pizza My Heart, and I had commented, “We’re off to get some pizza. I haven’t had pizza in so long…”

“Yeah you did,” I was reminded, “we had pizza on Sunday.”

“Real pizza,” I said. Bisquick™ pizza, while it can be tasty, is not proper pizza. Proper pizza has to have a wafer-thin crust, brushed with olive oil (not canola), with a tangy sauce (not sweet), fresh mozzarella (not bulk-bought), and baked on a stone (not a baking sheet). I don’t care if it’s circular or square, or what sort of toppings you like to add, but the foundation must be the stuff I’ve listed above. (Though I will allow feta to be substituted for mozzarella. I am Californian after all.)

Thus we had our real pizza. And last week I had real burritos, made by a real taqueria, with my family. One of the cooks calls the camp’s burritos “White-ican,” which they really are, although with enough Tapatio™ you can make almost anything Mexican. Almost.

The important thing, of course, are the kids. The kids love the food, and eat lots of it. Some of them don’t eat this well at home, which is a shame, but at least at camp they can have full stomachs and one less worry on their minds.

Because we work with underprivileged kids, the Salvation Army gets a big fat bonus from the USDA—a whole lot of free food, which greatly offsets our costs of running the camp, ’cause food is of course a giant part of the budget. Your tax dollars at work. We officially use it to feed the needy; and in between feeding them we tell them about Jesus. So, my conservative friends, this is why whenever you bellyache about having to pay for social programs, I tell you to shut up. Some of us use those social programs to do a lot of good, and until your church is doing as comparable a job among the poor and needy as the Salvation Army, you be quiet.

What we do at the campfire.

There’s nothing quite like whipping the campers into a nightly frenzy.

Every evening at camp we have “campfire,” which is basically an outdoor amphitheater (Bethany students: It’s like the Redwood Bowl) with a campfire pit. Last year the fire department wouldn’t let us actually light fires in it ’cause of the drought, but this year it’s been no problem. From 8 to 9 every evening, the campers fill the seats, and then the program staff leads “the evening program.” We wing it for about 45 minutes, then someone leads a brief devotional, and then the campers go back to their cabins to bed. (Whether or not they actually go to sleep by 9:30 is up to their counselors.)

There is very little rhyme or reason to the evening program. We’re given a theme. Last night was “Farm Night.” Before that was “Fourth of July Night.” We’ve also done “Pirate Night” and “Spartan Night.” A note about Spartan Night: If the movie 300 had not come out—a movie, by the way, that the campers are really too young to have seen (though many have)—I suspect Child Protective Services would have looked askance at that particular theme. The Spartans are known mainly for three things: their military culture, their sparse decorating style, and pedophilia. It’s that last thing that makes Spartan Night completely inappropriate.

But anyway. Once we’re given the theme, we have to decorate the campfire pit. Some of us go off to the craft house and start painting banners, on butcher paper, to decorate the area. Others of us dig into the costume closet. We have a room, at the pit, that contains a lot of cast-off clothing—stuff the Salvation Army thrift stores couldn’t even use, so that gives you an idea of how useless these things are for anything but costumes. The room smells musty, probably because of all the straw hats and sombreros. But we clean it every year to make sure it’s mildew- and mouse-free, and the kids dig through it so they can be appropriately—or inappropriately—dressed for their skits. At times the costumes make useful props and decorations. For Farm Night, we decorated the place in straw hats. (’Cause we weren’t dragging the goats over; we’re not that nuts.)

The cabins like to put together sketches (which they call “skits”) and perform them. The staffers do sketches too. These sketches don’t always have anything at all to do with the theme. Sometimes they don’t even make sense, or the kids blow the punchlines, or they get uncontrollable stage fright and you can’t hear them, even when I put the microphone under their faces. We don’t care; they’re amusing. This allows many of the hams among them to come out.

In between sketches we have songs. Camp songs. Sometimes very obnoxious, tiresome, old camp songs. I try, whenever I’m leading, to get a kid or someone else to lead them. I am not the strongest singer; I can stay in tune for about half the song, but then I stop really listening to myself sing, and my voice goes all over the place, and while some people find this amusing, others think I’m desecrating the song. But most of these are camp songs; I desecrate damn near all of them. On purpose. This is part of the reason I have campers sing them whenever I can; they get to have fun, and the song gets all mangled, and it amuses me. Purists will gripe, and some adults will attempt to “take over” whenever a kid is struggling through lyrics—and therefore steal the fun from them, and embarrass them, and make them feel like they’ve blown their chance to shine. I hate when people do that. Purists need to avoid camp. It’s about having fun, not singing “right.”

In between sketches and songs we have stunts and games; “Chubby Bunny” attempts to determine which adult can articulate despite an increasing number of marshmallows in their mouths; we tried bobbing for apples yesterday; there are also eating contests and bubble-blowing contests and all sorts of wackiness. Sometimes we pitch water balloons at the crowd. Sometimes we throw candy. I pitch wristbands and gum and anything else I can get my hands on. The point is to entertain, and we do that as much as possible.

I, of course, indulge my inner ham from time to time. Okay, a lot. I do a lot of riffing on the microphone. I have learned from experience though (harsh experience, in my newspaper days) that while some find it amusing, others don’t get my sense of humor at all. Not even the Brits are familiar with the Monty Python references. Thus I try to dole myself out in small doses. I try not to hog the microphone; I immediately give the mic to anyone who asks for it. Most of the time, I sit in the crowd with the kids and goof off from there. A giant dose of me every night, despite how awesome I am, will get old; for me too. But a little bit of me goes a long way.

The kid version of my sense of humor is pretty much what you read here—without any profanity, double-entendres, or pop culture references. Not all the staffers entirely realize why it’s a good idea to eliminate the pop culture references. I reminded a few of them last night that the kids don’t know who Bill Clinton is. This shocked them, but it laid home the salient point: A ten-year-old only knows three years’ worth of pop culture, if that. All your references therefore, if you use them, have to stay current. But rather than keep up with all the crap that entertains them, it’s just easier to keep everything non-topical when it comes to kids. You gotta know your audience. This is particularly true with evangelism, and why the older a youth minister becomes, the less effective they are—unless they drop the pop culture references, or deliberately watch and listen to the same stuff the kids do so as to stay current. Not that this is always a good idea. A fifty-year-old unmarried preacher who knows everything about Miley Cyrus is just wrong on so many levels.

After all the goofing off, we attempt to get the kids to calm down, because then we have a devotional. We have some really gifted people who know how to communicate with kids. Unfortunately we don’t always use them; we use people who want to preach (and me, who was asked to) and they don’t always know how to hold children’s attention. I don’t preach; I teach, which is not the same thing. I know how to dispense information, and make sure it stays in there. I can hold an audience’s attention with goofiness, not captivating oratory. Cpt. Roy, on the other hand, definitely does keep their attention; he has a knack for this. So do some others. But everyone else… well, I will not mention them by name, because I see no need to alienate anyone unnecessarily. If they ask my opinion I will honestly give it, but they never do, and thus they are like the clueless American Idol applicants who suck and don’t know it. They think they’re gifted, and misread their audience—they confuse utter boredom with spellbindingness—and no one has the guts to tell them they’re truly awful. Of course the Holy Spirit can do His thing with the kids, despite the all-surpassing dreariness of the speakers. I put a lot of hope in God.

Because we are, for the most part, winging it, we have a lot of blank spots on stage—a lot of moments where I’m asking someone, “What are we doing next?” or “Which cabin is performing next?” or “I don’t know the words to that; want me to make ’em up?” (The answer is always no, but I ask for my own amusement, ’cause they know I can—and sometimes will, anyway.) But we stay interesting enough to keep the kids amused. A lot of the kids see our campfires as the highlight of camp, and it’s pretty awesome that they actually think we’re better than archery or the pool—considering how slapdash we are. But they are a lot of fun to pull together. I missed ’em last year, and don’t intend to make that mistake again.

About kids reading my rants.

I don’t mind if people read my rants. Unless it encourages obsessed children to try to get in touch with me.

The rumor has got around the camp that I have a blog. One of the Alphas found out last year, and word has been slowly spreading around from there. I don’t mind if they read all the stuff I’ve been ranting about for the past several years. I have nothing to hide. (If I did, I wouldn’t be so stupid as to blog on it.) Some of them, I would prefer they read my devotional blog, ’cause they really and truly need Jesus; they may think they have Him, but their fruits obviously show otherwise. They know who they are.

Unfortunately the rumors of my blog have to a smaller degree spread down to the campers, and I don’t want that. We are discouraged—for very good reason—from giving personal contact information to the campers. If any campers want to get in touch with me, they can contact me through the Salvation Army or Camp Redwood Glen. The problem is that, through my blog, you can easily get my email address, and with very little effort can also find my address and phone number. That stuff’s pretty much all over the Internet by now; they publish it in phone books you know. And while I don’t mind people having my basic contact information, it’s all kinds of problematic when the kids that I teach or work with get ahold of it.

Of the kids who want personal contact information, three out of ten are normal and well-adjusted and just want to say hello to me. They’ll drop an email saying hi, and ask me what I’m up to, and hope I’ll be back next year, and that’ll be that. Then they’ll go back to their regular life, and not give me another thought till summer.

Six of that ten are not entirely normal, nor well-adjusted. They don’t get enough attention from the other people in their life, and will think my friendly attention over a week of summer camp makes me their bestest friend ever. Or, in the case of girls, they will get mad crushes on me. This happens nearly every week, and happened every school year where I taught (and pretty much throughout my entire life), and I am used to it. But it’s sorta blindsiding a few of the other staffers, who aren’t entirely sure how to deal with it. Because honestly, it’s icky. They’re children, after all. No matter how mature they think themselves, or how much they dress and pose to appear adult, they’re really just children playing dress-up. I am greatly concerned about anyone who doesn’t think it icky. Some of the girls’ counselors think it’s “cute” when one of their girls crushes on me; I joke about how cool it is when girls with crushes can be talked into paying attention and doing better in school. But honestly, the crushes bother me. Nothing’s ever gonna happen, and I don’t like to string people along. It’s sorta evil.

The last of the ten is the obsessed kid—the main reason why I tend to find the crushes to be icky. I’ve had to deal with an obsessed kid before. It wasn’t at all fun. Obsessed kids are basically underage stalkers, with all the stalker behavior you’d expect of adults, only they’re kids. When you reject them, they turn psycho. And when psycho comes—and it will—people almost automatically take the kid’s side. As they should; an obsessed kid is probably the only exception. Thankfully there aren’t a lot of them, but it’s because of them that I am very happy the Salvation Army has procedures in place for making sure that no one adult is alone with any one child at any time. I wish some of the other staffers were a bit more cautious about these rules; they don’t realize what sort of utter hell they will be in for if any kid starts to go all stalker on them.

But most of the kids I’ve worked with or taught are fairly normal, and have been great. Heck, some of them are even Facebook “friends.” (It’s still a little strange to read some of their Facebook comments about going out to party and get liquored up, but that’s just ’cause if the only thing you ever post on is your partying, your Facebook posts make you sound like a raging alcoholic. Just like how my blog entries make me sound like a ranting maniac sometimes. It’s not the whole picture, folks. It never is.) If any of them care to read my blog, that’s fine. Just brace yourselves: My vocabulary gets harder and I swear a little more. And if you grew up Christian, you might not be used to the idea of someone talking about Jesus in the way I do.

But if you’re under 15, I am not gonna email you; and if you’re under 24, I’m not gonna date you. (Likely not even if you’re older.) No offense. God bless.