The End of Summer, The End of a Season

The last time I wrote, I was still in Sweden and the summer camps were still in full swing. Now I'm back in Canada and decompressing from my time in Sweden and reintegrating into life here.

Where did I leave off? Oh yeah...

German family camp was awesome, probably one of my favourite camps of the summer even though it was exhausting. I 'talked' quite a bit with Valerie, the 12-year-old girl I met; she asked me to sit with her for quite a few meals, and we biked to the lake on Thursday afternoon with her younger brother Pascal, who was in my group for the kids program. We swam a bit, but the water was so cold my toes went numb!

Airwalk!

Eating Lunch in the Trees!

At the end of that week, we lost the first two members of our SATeam; Dan and MC had to return to Canada to start school again. It was really hard to say goodbye and strange to try and put the team back together and continue with one more teen camp and a few day groups without them. Before they left, the SAT went up into ropes course just for fun; we clowned around and knocked each other off the wires and bounced and slid into each other and just laughed together. We had lunch together before we put our feet back on the ground.


Then we went to the Holsby gym to play some innebandy (which is sort of life floorhockey) and basketball together.

Elke, the Holsby house-mother, and I made piñatas for a Mexican goodbye party for EJ, Leah, and Achim. We glued paper on the outside of balloons, let it harden, and popped the balloons. Then we glued tissue paper balls to the outside of them to turn into a flower, a light bulb, and an elephant. We spent hours working on them, talking the time away, and had great fun trying to keep it all a secret from the three who were leaving.

Slip and Slide Fun with the German Teens!

The week after the German family camp, we had a one-week German teen camp. The first few days I came down with a horrible cold, but going to bed early didn't help because I couldn't fall asleep. It was more intimidating to speak German to the teens than to the kids, but they knew a lot more English so it wasn't as big a deal. Since I started out so tired from being sick, it was difficult for me to connect with this group, but I did have a few good interactions with the girls.


On September 2, EJ and I walked/ran the Holsby Half Marathon route in 2 hours and 28 minutes. The weather for the day was perfect, some sun but cool enough to run comfortably. I'd wanted to run it back in May when it was a school event, but I wasn't able to because my knee hurt too much for me to train. I decided I wanted to walk or run it before I left, and I asked EJ to do it with me. My idea was to run as much as we could and then walk the rest since neither of us had really trained, but EJ figured if we took it in intervals, running 10 minutes and walking 1 minute, we could make it the whole way. Since we didn't pay that close attention to the clock, we ended up running longer intervals and walking longer intervals, too, but we made it the whole way!

Peeling, Coring, and Chopping Apples for the next school year
We look so innocent, who would guess we'd have an apple core
fight?

The last few weeks were more low-key, cleaning up the campus and our gear, some repairs to the ropes course and giant swing, and other miscellaneous things to take care. We had a few day groups, which were fun. One group we only started sending up the second half of them into the ropes course at 7:30pm so that by the time the last person came down, it was almost completely dark and they had no idea what would greet them at the bottom of the zipline!




We had a last 'hoorah' with SAT before the rest of us splintered to the corners of the earth. We went rock climbing together, which was really chill, climbing a bit and a lot of hanging out or belaying at the bottom of the cliff watching others climb. Afterwards we picked up pizza and went to a lake to eat it, but it wasn't as fun as it sounded because it was just a little too cold and windy. Andrei lured in some ducks with pizza crust and on the third try he managed to catch one! Then in pooped on him and ruined the appetite of some of the girls.

Josie and Me

My friend Josefin came to visit me my last weekend at Holsby. We knew each other when I lived in the Philippines, and I went to visit her and her family in Stockholm back at the beginning of April. The highlight of the weekend was Saturday afternoon when we went to a team-building house. It was sort of like being in a video game; it had sets of rooms that were linked so that you had to solve the puzzle in the first room before the door would open for you to get into the second one, etc. If you didn't solve the puzzle correctly within the time limit, you had to start all over again at the first room. The first part of every puzzle was figuring out what the puzzle was since they had minimal to no written instructions. Some were mental challenges and some were more physical. We spent a lot of time on one that started with a DDR-like mat and then a work-out step up and bike and then an obstacle course where we weren't allowed to touch the floor. Saturday evening we had a campfire with singing and stick bread.

Judith Trusting the Safeties

I had the opportunity to brief and debrief the ropes course twice; I talked about how trusting God is like trusting in your safeties to catch you if you slip up in the ropes course. At first, you kind of trust them because you're told they work and you see other people using them and then you start to experience it at different levels of risk and begin to trust them from your own experience. Trusting is a continuous choice because at any point you can ask to be taken out of the ropes course. Trusting God is the same in that you trust God at first because you're told he's trustworthy and you read about his character and how he came through for people in the Bible. Then if you choose to, you start to experience his trustworthiness in your own life. Trusting God is also a continual choice because at any point you can decide to withdraw your trust and go your own way, and he won't make you trust him. Like the ropes course, even after experience God's trustworthiness, it can still be difficult and scary to trust, but it's totally worth it. When I talked to the youth, I felt like I repeated myself a bit and my examples were a little vague, especially the first time, but I think it was encouraging for me to tell them, to put into words what I believe and really want them to know.

After one group left, the SAT decided to do the giant swing in the dark! We hooked in by flashlight and double-checked everything but turned off all the lights before the person on the swing pulled the release. At the top, the darkness was nearly complete, save for the contrast between the trees and sky. We had to be quiet to keep from waking the neighbors. It was thrilling to face into the dark and pull the release, knowing but not seeing what was to come, the freefall and rush towards the ground and then up again into the air.

The last day group was a confirmation group from Holsby. It was small enough that instead of standing at certain stations in the ropes course and supervising the guests as they went past, we went up with two or three people to supervise and go through the course with. It was a special treat for me since I got to go up with a girl I'd gotten to know a bit over the summer; she was comfortable enough we could have a little extra fun, swinging in our safeties and knocking each other off the leaning rope.

On my second last day, my friend Angela, the woman from my outreach who I ran with, came to visit me from Norrkoping. We went for a walk together, supper, drove to Vetlanda, and then came back and had tea together. Just before it was time for her to leave, we started talking about the Bible and about God. We talked for around two and a half hours, and I presented the gospel to her as clearly as I could and tried to answer her questions; she's really seeking, reading her Bible more than a lot of Christians and thinking seriously about God, but somehow she wasn't ready to make a commitment that night. Please pray that God continues to work in her life and brings people into her life who can show her his love and answer her questions and point her to him.

I tried to make good use of my free time that last week in the midst of packing, visiting my favourite places like sunrise hill (which was also the first walk I ever did at Holsby), spending time with Trista and the twins, Sarah, Elke and the few other friends who were still there I had to leave behind. People left almost every day, and each goodbye was tough. I spent my last night sleeping over at Sarah and Elke's house; I finished painting my mug that I had started back in April while Elke worked on clay key chains and Sarah read a book. Then Elke and I wrote an email together for EJ and ended up FB chatting with EJ and laughing and joking together and everything was funnier because we were so tired. We even got to Skype with EJ for about ten minutes; it was the best last night I could have asked for, unless EJ could have been with us. I left Holsby at 7:30am Saturday morning to catch a train to Nassjo, changed trains there and then on to Copenhagen. It was quite a task to drag my 23kg/50lb suitcases between trains since they didn't really role properly. I caught the plane in Copenhagen without much trouble, switched planes in Iceland and landed in Seattle where my parents, Nan, and Aunt Roxi picked me up. We went to Ikea for dinner (I have to readjust to North America slowly, you know... ) before driving north to beautiful British Columbia and home. I arrived home at around 10pm  BC time, which was 7am Sweden time, about 24 hours after I left Holsby.

And thus ends another season and slice of my life, a great adventure that is so different from 'normal' life but has forever changed me and therefore will continue to influence my 'normal' life from here on. My South African friend Yiskah gave me a quote that sums up pretty well some of the things I've been thinking and feeling: "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged, to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." *Nelson Mandela. And yet this place has changed too, in my absence, and my role here has also changed, so the next adventure will be figure out what life will look like in light of all I've experienced and learned. At least it won't be boring!