A Week at Laurelville

Joy Cotchen, Youth Pastor for Allegheny Mennnonite Conference had asked me if I would be the speaker for a week of camp.  It was the 10-12 year old group, which was the week that Clara was going, and the whole family got to stay at Laurelville, so we decided to do it.

It was also a great way to come down off the draining experience of being in Orlando.  So from Orlando's intensity, fly back to Boston, drive to Western Massachusetts to Caren's aunt and uncle's place, then to Mount Pleasant and Laurelville to make a 2:30 staff meeting... whew

The week's theme was Go and Do Likewise and was based on Jesus' parable of The Good Samaritan.  Now, I agreed to do this before I found out there were 10 sessions that I was responsible for.  Ten sessions on one parable... gulp.

But pretty soon I realized that this actually was a great thing and allowed us to really dig deep into the story.  It also meant, speaking to 10-12 year-olds for a week, that it would have to be fun and funny or things would get really bad.

So I created a bunch of skits, most of which featured Professor Mansplain Biblebrain, a semi-idiotic professor who was way less clever than he thought.  My favorite skit that did not feature the professor was the new gameshow, ARE THESE PEOPLE WORTH ANYTHING.  The contestants were all Samaritans and none of them were ever worth anything.  This is what we call fun.

As for the actual story we were studying, we spent a lot of time exploring what it meant that Jesus took a Samaritan, a culturally and theologically despised person, and put him at the center as the hero of a story about faithfulness to God.  The one for whom it was supposed to be impossible to serve, love, or worship the God of Israel is held up as the true worshipper... fascinating stuff.  The kids did a wonderful job thinking about what it might look like today to tell such a story and imagining who might be brought to the center of the story.  It was fascinating and fun to see these kids imagine their way into a narrative, familiar to most of them in a way that was foreign, maybe to all of them.

They asked such good questions.

Another blessing of the week was that I got a lot of time to read and study.  I had a morning and evening session with a good amount of time in the afternoons to spend time with Caren and Benny and read.

Last, one of the highlights of the week was getting to see Sam Stucky, who grew up at PMC, our church, lead as the camp director.  Sam was incredibly organized, kept a wonderful professional attitude, had great energy and enthusiasm inherited directly from his mom, Lynda, and displayed pure dead pan humor inherited from his dad, Max.  It was awesome to see him in his element.

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