Monday, September 1, 2008

So Long, Farewell

And just like that, it's over. I can hear yells of "Good-bye!" and "See ya next year!" as the church vans pull away from camp to their destinations across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, & British Columbia. It was a great group of kids out here this year. You can tell that they truly plan to make a difference in this world. There's just no question about it in their minds. It's part of who they are as a generation. As one of the speakers pointed out, if you had asked us what or who "Darfur" is when we were teens, we would have been speechless. Yet these teens know the plight of Darfur; they don "Invisible Children" t-shirts; they can tell you the names of the kid they sponsor in Guatemala. When buckets were passed around for dropping in change to help a mission effort, these kids dropped in over $1300 yesterday, and more came today. Teenagers were bidding hundreds of dollars on pictures of Ugandan children during the auction this morning. That's the kind of group this is. This is not the church of tomorrow; they are the church of today. And that's a very good thing.