Sports Camp - Yadkin County

The staff arrived at Forbush Friends on Saturday the 13th. That left us about half a week to get ready for our  shorter camp taking place in Yadkin County. The SOUL week in Yadkin was really more of a weekend. The participants arrived on Thursday, which is earlier than normal. On Friday we did all of our get-to-know-you and group building games. Then we spent the afternoon going over stations for the Sports Rally on Saturday.

Because the weekend was shorter than our normal weeks, instead of a camp that was four days long, we had a one day Sports Rally that Saturday. That meant that on Friday we prepped for a the whole afternoon, to get ready for Saturday
, from  9am to 3pm. That's a long day to be out in the sun running around. But we did it.

Saturday morning came and everyone got up bright and early to head out to the community park and set up. We got to the park about 8:00, registration starting at 8:30. It being out first year at this location, we weren't expecting too many kids to come out. But total we had almost 30 come for camp. Not including the participants running the stations.

The group of participants that we had at Forbush was very different than the group that we had at Up River. Mostly because our Up River group was a group of high school-ers and the group we had at Forbush was middle schoolers. I'm going to be completely honest and tell you that we were a little worried that the participants wouldn't be able to handle leading the stations if we had any older kids come to camp. But, in the end that wasn't a problem. All of our campers were, for the most part, younger than our participants. As you can see, some of the pictures are of kids painting sun catchers. That, ironically enough, is because a large storm came looming over us about lunch time. Once the lightning started, it was time to pull out the rainy day supplies and do other activities.

At the end of the day we all headed back to Forbush to shower and re-energize before our amazing speaker came back that night. Nick Poindexter was our speaker on Friday night as well as Saturday night. I don't want to give away too much of our theme (just wait, since next week is our last week I can let you in on absolutely everything). BUT! Nick did an amazing job of connecting the words to the middle schoolers. Since I was sitting in the back I got to see how into it they were, reacting to his stories, reflecting on themselves. It was amazing. He even pulled from 2 Kings (which is in the Old Testament) and connected it to Jesus and the rest of our theme. I love when people make it clear how the whole Bible is one long story.