Windy Gap
If I was at home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, my day would be drawing to a close by 7:30 p.m. But I’m not at home. I’m at Young Life camp. The last event tonight won’t even start until 10:30 or so.
I’m at Windy Gap, a Young Life camp in Weaverville, North Carolina. It’s a beautiful location in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I learned today that this 2,000 acre property was donated to Young Life by one family over forty years ago.
One of the things I’ve struggled with over the past few years is trying to explain the ministry of Young Life to those who are unfamiliar with it. My wife, Robyn, is the area director in Fayetteville and so I’m around the ministry a lot as a spouse and a volunteer. And yet it’s not easy to describe just exactly what Young Life is. It’s especially difficult to paint a picture of what Young Life camp is like.
When I was a teenager, the only camps I ever attended were football camps. The facilities usually weren’t great. The food was probably adequate, but forgettable. And the program was…well, the program was geared around football, not fun.
Young Life has camps all over the United States. I’ve only been to four of them. Each are different, but there are some common denominators. The locations are awe-inspiring. The landscaping is beautiful. The facilities are first-class. The food, well, it’s not your typical camp food–it’s delicious and almost all the meals are made from scratch every day. The programming is creative, fun and highly-entertaining. Relationship-building is a top priority. And the activities are awesome: go-karts, zip lines, swimming, giant swings, horseback riding and more.
Central to Young Life camp is the gospel of Jesus Christ. He’s the point of it all. This incredible properties, their full and part-time staff and the thousands of volunteers are all focused on one purpose: helping kids come to know Christ. That’s it.
Most of what I’ve described are the features of the camp and the overall purpose, but unless you’ve experienced it, it’s impossible to fully understand it.
When I worked in Christian publishing, we worked to create products that were more than just books. We created products for husbands and wives or parents and their children to experience. Together. We didn’t just talk about romance. We created products to help a couple experience romance. We didn’t just talk about the true meaning of Christmas–we created a product that fostered interaction between a parent and child and brought the story to life.
Most of us don’t need more information. We need an experience.
And that’s the magic of Young Life camp. The experience.
But experience is only one ingredient in the Young Life recipe.
Just like the products we created when I was in publishing, the Young Life camp experience is so powerful because of the unique combination of ingredients:
Truth + Relationship + Experience = Changed Lives
Remove “truth” and you’ve got a vacation at Disney World. Remove “relationship” and it’s like seeing a beautiful sunset or a shooting star, but having no one to share it with. Remove “experience” and you really just have a Bible study in someone’s living room. Not bad, but not all it could be.
Young Life takes all of this one step further though. They add in several other ingredients that take the recipe to another whole level. Those special spices are: mystery, anticipation and surprise. Stir those in to truth, relationship and experience and you create a week kids will never forget. Adults won’t forget it either.
There’s a meeting starting in about half an hour, so I need to go. After that, the campers will experience a surprise or two. They never know what’s coming, so there’s always an air of mystery and anticipation.
If you’d like more information about Young Life in your area or Young Life camp, you can email my wife, Robyn, at: robynstutts@gmail.com. She can connect you with the right person in your area. She’s busy for the next couple of weeks, but she’ll get back to you.