Snow Camp

      We started early in the morning that cold February day when a chain of events changed my life. Something that I needed changed was that I was always afraid to talk to girls in person. 

        “I thought we were going to take the church van.” I said as Nick and I piled our luggage into the back of our youth pastor’s minivan.

        “No, since us three are the only people from our church going, Bro. Sansom lent us his minivan!” said Matt our driver.

        When we left, it was just barely dawn and the sun was almost behind the mountains and still peeking over them. We got there in record time compared to our usual eight to ten hour trips. This, we figured was because there weren’t any girls with us. We only stopped three times in the four hours it took for us to get there and only one was important. That stop was at Hoover Dam and then we only stopped for a restroom break before going on our way.

        When we got to snow camp, we had to wait for some kid to park his car because he’d never steered a vehicle in the icy snow of the Las Vegas Mountains. Snow camp began with unpacking our luggage, remembering forgotten items and finding out too late to turn back and get them, and finding out that that we were without a counselor (a.k.a. chaperone) in our cabin. Meeting our roommates I found that not only were we the only Tucsonans, but also the only other church in our cabin. This was interesting because it was one of the factors that changed me.

        I’d always had a counselor before this camp. The other roommates were mixed up group. The line up went something like this: Adrian, a fourteen-year-old ladies’ man dating a nineteen-year-old, we gave him the nickname “Mental“ because we thought it was so young and dating someone five years older than yourself. The three other guys were Andre “Fire Alarm”, nicknamed for setting of his nickname, Tony, a sixteen-year-old who wanted to go out with a thirteen-year-old but her grandfather forbid it, and Nick my best friend and fellow Tucsonan . We had a recipe for disaster with wild hormones going crazy to add some suspense.

        We would go drink coffee and hot cocoa during lunch, dinner and afternoons, when we would play in the snow building forts and snow men. In the mornings, we teaching worship and at night we had preaching worship. It was great. God’s presence was so powerful that people would be laying on the floor laughing at everything they saw, including other people, at first I thought that they were being disrespectful but when they started pointing at other people who were also laughing I realized they were doing it in the holy ghost, in fact God’s presence was so strong that when me and nick went back to the kitchen that night, Nick thought that Adrian was speaking Spanish, but Adrian didn’t know any Spanish, because he had had a supernatural experience were god literally comes inside of you with the evidence of speaking in a language we don't know ,also known as tongues, this is what we call the holy ghost.    

        We had an especially fun time the last night, staying up late in the kitchen and sipping our hot cocoa and coffee around the dying fire. After that we went outside and talked to the girls who our associates liked, fortunately for us they were all in the same cabin and our counselors were husband and wife so we could stay up later than usual. Because of this I got to talk to the girls a lot more than I usually did and it really helped that all of us were talking to the girls too. Going to our cabins, we hadn’t yet exhausted our energy yet. We stayed up late and I waited by the window waiting for the other guys to come back from tossing icicles in the younger boys' cabin. We decided to go running around.

Stealthily moving to the restrooms, we sat and talked awhile, and then threw a snowball at the girls' cabin door, before going to bed.

When we woke up the next morning we wrote a letter saying goodbye and how much fun we'd had to the girls we had talked to in the kitchen and outside the night before. I went away with a better attitude than I came with, and after that I was more outgoing with girls than I had been before. This was the best camp I had ever been to and it is one of my favorite memories.