A Little Longer Here With You

I think God uses both people and places to help stitch together our hearts. Sometimes you are lucky enough to have overlap. A few weekends ago, I got to go back to one of those places with some of those people.  I used to spend my Julys at a summer camp outside of Kerrville. The food was terrible. The mattresses thin and the dorm had no air conditioning. But it was also beautiful and holy and thin. It is one of my favorite places. A place that shaped me and taught me about belonging and who I wanted to be. 

I have kept in touch with a handful of the people, but haven't been bakck to this place since my early twenties. I worried a bit that maybe it wouldn’t hold up. That all these years later some of the magic might have worn off. That maybe the beauty had faded, like my name in Sharpie on so many of those bunks or that peeling paint on the tennis courts. I wondered if the other people showing up would still have things in common besides memories. 

A few of us had a loose plan. We were both intentional and apprehensive. We printed stickers and songbooks and packed our footlockers or giant pink suitcases. We packed old photo albums and Sunday whites.  We unpacked some parts of our hearts we hadn't thought about in decades. 

Many people hopped on planes and flew across the country or even an ocean with old songs playing in their earbuds. I woke up early and drove to Hill country. I turned on that winding Farm to Market Road just past Kerrvile, one I hadn’t been down in decades, but I remembered every turn. My body knew. At one point I had to pull over to put my feet in the Guadalupe and wipe my eyes. I was returning, not just to a place but to a version of myself that needed remembering. 

One by one people piled out of cars. We sat on crappy seat cushions that had been there since we were teens and we ate junk food and drank wine from paper cups. We were the exactly the same and we were completely different people. We took golf carts up to the top of the hill and laid out on the stone benches to stare at the stars. We stayed up late laughing in the lobby and our abs all ached in the morning. On Saturday we wrote messages in the rocks and lounged in the rapids. We went down the terrifying slide, bobbed in canoes or jumped off the rope swing (some of us still fully dressed). We clambered across the catwalk and poured through photographs. We took a hundred new ones. We caught up with old friends and made new ones. 

Saturday night after dinner we filled all the rows in the tiny chapel. We started to sing and it was perfect and holy and thin. One by one girls got up to share what this place had meant to them. Who they had become and some of the hard in between. I rarely pass up an opportunity to speak, but I had said enough. This night I sat quietly in my pew and listened and beamed and wept. Afterwards we went to the campfire (despite a burn ban) and sang until our voices scratched. Sunday we climbed the hill again and an old camper, now ordained, shared a beautiful message, broke bread and poured the wine. We told the same stories and sang the same old songs but they hit in an entirely new way. We made new memories in an old place. We remembered who we had been and we remembered who we could be. We were both. The whole adult in the exact same space that had been so important to our aching younger selves. We crammed three weeks into three days. We remembered who we had been and we remembered who we could be.  We looked back and moved forwards.  We belonged then and we belong still. We were exactly the same, and yet we all went home changed. 

A few years ago my pastor did a big holiday sermon and asked us what it meant to go home. In that season of my life, my mom was ill and I was returning home often to help with care. I had a permanent bag packed and returning was hard. The pastor spoke of returning to a place you are seen and known and loved –but because of the circumstances, at that time returning home just felt hard.  On the last morning of our reunion, I woke up early and slipped out  before most people got up. I walked up the hill just as the sun was rising. I sat there alone and finally got it. This is what it means to return. This is what it means to be home. At twelve and twenty this was the safest, holiest place I knew, I think that still holds up in my mid-forties. That Sunday, felt so much like the last Sunday at camp We were tired. Many of us eager to go home to our families (and much softer beds). But in the same moment, I didn’t want to leave. That reunion, if it taught me nothing else…

Taught me that there are places that even if you leave stay with you. That you can always return home. To yourself, your faith and each other.