The Accountant at the Christian Camping Seminar: An Original Story

The director of a large regional camp center had just returned from a large Christian Camping conference when he decided to host an all-day meeting for directors of smaller facilities who would never be able to attend such an event.     He gathered the names of about a dozen small places from around the state, found 14 people who were interested in coming and amazingly found a Tuesday that they could meet.

Some of them only ran day camps, and one of them had a parcel of land that only operated as a camp for only two weeks out of the summer.     He shared some things that had taken place at the conference but was careful not to be the big camp telling the small camps how to do things.    They watched a few video clips, ate lunch together, and gave a tour of his site to those who hadn’t seen it before.

Mostly, he led discussions.   Realizing that it was becoming a one-man show, he tried to get someone to come as a speaker to wrap up the thing before dinner.    Everybody he picked, including members of his own staff and board, were tied up that day, so he invited a guy from his church who was a good Bible teacher but honestly wouldn’t know the difference between a camping facility and a dairy farm.

At 4:00 PM, his friend arrived, coming straight from the office in the city still wearing a suit and tie.    Not a jacket and tie, but a suit that looked like he had just stepped off a New York subway into downtown Manhattan.     He stood and stared at the group of nine men and five women who were wearing mostly jeans and golf shirts.

If he didn’t feel out of place enough for that reason, he had also realized about half-way through the day that he’d left his Bible and his notes somewhere else.  However as he kept driving — and praying — a backup plan slowly began to take shape, so that when he was introduced, he knew the exact direction he wanted their time together to go.

“I don’t really know much about what you do;” he started, “but I want to ask you just three questions about your facilities.  The first question is, ‘Do you have hard water or soft water?'”

This took everyone by surprise, including the person who had invited him.    But it recovered quickly into a lively discussion on how all water is not the same, and how it affects everything from laundry to making coffee.

“The second question,” he continued,  “is, ‘Do you have hard soil or soft soil?”

This time around they knew the drill, and discussed not only the growth of plants and trees, but how soil type affects drainage during a storm, or putting up new buildings.

After another few minutes on that one, he put up his hand to calm the discussion and asked a third question.

“The final question,” he said, “is, ‘Do you have hard people or soft people?”

One person laughed out loud but mostly there was silence.

At this point he said, “You know, I got invited here because I teach the Bible at our church, but the truth is I’ve checked my car twice at lunchtime and my Bible and notes aren’t there, and I’m lost without them.

“But I really felt directed to talk about this.    In any organization there are people.    Some work behind the scenes and only interact with the other staff.    Some work on the frontlines and interact with the broader community.   But all of us need to be people who the Holy Spirit can work through and can be seen working through.    All of us need to lose the tough and rough edge and be people who have been softened, so that the higher purpose of what we do is evident to anyone who meets us.    All of us need to develop the ability to communicate the love of God to people, not over the course of several days or hours, but over the course of several seconds.    It needs to be something we wear on our faces.   There needs to be a difference.   The problem — and I expect it’s true in Christian camping as much or more as anywhere else — is that we’re so task driven and so physically stretched that we lose sight of being the people God wants us to be in encouraging others and being salt and light in the bigger world.   We miss an opportunity to show that what we sing or confess on Sunday morning is a real factor in our lives.   We appear to have it all together, when in fact, Christianity is meant to be a community of broken people.   We give the impression that the job at hand is more important than the people we’re doing it with.

“I guess that’s it;” he concluded.   He had driven for an hour out to the country to deliver less than 300 words of exhortation.

He decided the closing prayer would take the form of silence, with each person praying their own benediction on the time they had spent together.

So… here’s the question:  In your church, in your ministry organization, in your family, do you have hard people or soft people?

~PW, July 15, 2006