I remember it well, the moment my college dormitory neighbors glanced furtively around my room and audaciously asked, "What smells?"
It was me.
I'm not a blame-oriented person to be sure, but the reason my room began to smell was all because of bible camp!
I had been a counselor for two summers at Camp Metigoshe, tucked into the Turtle Mountains on Pelican Lake. The summer before I met my honest college dormitory neighbors was just after my second and last summer at camp.
Camp Metigoshe is a unique camp in that it still practices a sense of rustic stewardship of creation.
For example, if you work at Camp Metigoshe as a counselor, you do not use a normal bathroom like your college buddies who live in non-rustic places. You use an outhouse. You also learn how to clean an outhouse. (Yes, there is such a thing as a clean outhouse.)
You teach kids how to put the leftover food on your plate by composting any compost-able foods. You teach kids how to conserve electricity because there is one single light bulb in each very simple cabin.
And here is the culprit of my smelly room and smelly self in my dorm. If you are a counselor at Camp Metigoshe, you rarely shower all...summer...long. There are showers, but they are reserved for the weekends, when campers (who are also not shown a shower all week long) have made their way home. Instead, there is a lovely lake and a refreshing sauna.
And after weeks and weeks of living in such a way, it becomes a lovely connection with the land and the water to know you are not using too much of it. Or really, hardly any of it.
So perhaps there should have been some kind of re-integration class for camp counselors like me when it was time to drive away from camp. I still really liked the idea of minimal showering to conserve water.
But looking back, I shouldn't have been so conservative. After the moment of truth from my friends, I did actually "clean up my act", so to say, with daily visits to the shower. I got used to it. =)
I've been thinking about this story because of the gospel coming up, which is called the Transfiguration story in Luke 9. You can read it, but the moment of truth comes when Jesus takes Peter and two other disciples to the top of a mountain and something incredibly cool happens. Something that would never happen to them again. A mountain-top moment, as they say.
Just as I was not ready to end my time as a counselor in a place that is sacred to me, Peter wasn't ready to leave the mountain. And even when I did leave the Turtle Mountains (okay, so truly they are hills), I tried to keep living like I was still there.
But I wasn't. It had re-entered a place in the world that offered a daily shower. With soap and everything!
Leaving the mountain meant experiencing new things with new people (honest people who encouraged me to shower).
Comments