At Sonlight Camp, in Pagosa Springs, Colorado:
At seven thousand, eight hundred feet above sea level, the aspens stand tall and regal in white bunches among the thick ponderosa pines. The mornings are crisp with the thin air of the Rocky Mountains, but the June days are hot with the sun of the American Southwest. The atmosphere smells of green, and patches of larkspur and dandelion paint pointillistic galaxies in the meadows. Jagged peaks wink down from their lofty heights, poking through the branches with their mountainous grandeur. Birds chirp a waking symphony as the sun fingers its way across the landscape at dawn. A heavy coolness settles over the world in the evening.
We’re at camp. For the kids who come here during the summer weeks, it’s a retreat from the world. For the staff and counselors, it’s a time of rigorous planning, heavy labour, and great meals. There is always maintenance to be done, always another event to prepare for the kids. It’s work. But it’s work in a gorgeous place, with days punctuated by the smells of the campfire and the taste of fresh coffee. Life is rustic and basic, but the liturgy of daily tasks leaves little room for frills or extravagance. Instead, we find excitement in the little things, like consistently good food, each other’s company, and a good night’s sleep.
For all of us, camper and staffer alike, it’s a place to find God at work. Not that God evacuates the cities and towns for the sake of a dozen cabins in the wilderness, but the silence of one hundred forty acres of undeveloped land and the loving service of a young and vibrant staff seem to amplify the divine voice. Sonlight is a place where the word of God is preached daily in deed, thought, and word. It’s a place where kids can get a break from the world and, at the same time, discover what the world is really all about. We’re in the right place.
The camp pulses with the energetic natural history of a dream. The owners of the camp, a wonderful couple whose last twenty-six years have fueled Sonlight, followed the vision that God gave them for a place where kids can come to know the fullness of the life Jesus Christ has for them. It started with two backpackers in the wilderness. Then came a modest lodge built with volunteer labour. Then a meadow cleared of boulders. Then a cabin . . . and another, and another. The five buildings that make up the nucleus of Sonlight sit calmly but proudly on the edge of the meadow, a living testimony to the Lord at work in the lives of this founding couple, not to mention the thousands of youth who have come to play and learn at the camp. The pine logs, soaked with twenty-six years of oil, are dark with the summer sun of as many years, aging quietly under the shade of the majestic ponderosas.
The camp, designed to meet the needs of campers looking for adventure and fun, requires maintenance every day. It makes for a wonderful routine: cutting firewood, mowing grass, fixing machinery, repairing teams’ course obstacles, and inventing ways to make the place better. There is no end to the tasks, but these tasks demand only commitment, not urgency. They allow for a steady rhythm rather than a frenzied acceleration. So I (while Sara finds her own rhythm in the kitchen) pace the track from lodge to workshop to climbing wall to workshop to mealtime to lodge and back to the workshop again. The days are full of accomplishment. Occasionally there is a masterpiece, like cutting a set of coasters, ornate with the natural grain of the wood, from a piece of hedgeapple that was doomed for the campfire. Most tasks are mundane, but fulfilling all the same. Sonlight is a good place to be.
All the while we work with assurance that we have joined the dance of the camp’s founders, a dance choreographed to display the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world. We do not plod through meaningless toil; rather, we lay the pieces of a puzzle that God designed, the puzzle that will one day image the faith of countless youth and those they lead. We are part of a voice that cries out in the wilderness, a wind that blows through the trees and speaks in still, small tones to the young hearts of tomorrow’s Christian leaders. Yes, it is a good place to be.
