Camp of the Woods

Hello Friends and Family!

Your help is needed.

This summer, I had the great pleasure and delight of working at Camp of the Woods, which is a camp for kids and teens just outside of Dinorwic, Ontario. If you don’t know where that is, it’s on the other side of the Ontario road map (for those of us that still use those), and about 45 minutes from my dear town of Sioux Lookout, Ontario.

I’d never been to a kid’s camp growing up, but in working at COTW this summer, I not only got to see the impact of camp and learning about Jesus on the lives of kids and teens, but was also blessed in return when I stepped out in obedience and let God grow my own faith.

This may not be known to a lot of you, and while it’s personal, I know I need to share it all so I can testify to how God has been faithful and ever present in my life as of late. After living for fifteen years in NW Ontario, coming back to my home here in Southern Ontario was something I’d thought on and prayed about for some time. I loved (and still love) everything about living in the North, the life I had built there, and the people that had become my family. But after three years of working as a nurse in the pandemic, ‘coming back home’ had weighed on me heavily and had been something I’d prayed about for some time. In January of this year, I got a ‘yes’ from God, and applied to five different jobs. Some replied with a ‘thanks but no’, others just didn’t reply, and I had a few interviews, but in the end, it was still a ‘no’ from each job. At first I was just plain frustrated. Why had God given me the go ahead, only for me to be told ‘no’? Surely He had a plan.

At the beginning of April of this year, I realized that I was burnt out at work and that my mental health had taken a steep turn for the worst. It wasn’t until a few days before my birthday that one day at church, I was faced and challenged by a sermon at church and I asked myself the question, “How can I even share the Gospel when I don’t love people or myself right now?”.

It kept me awake at night for a few days, and plagued me while I struggled to make it through ‘just one more day’. The next day I decided I couldn’t push through “just one more day”. Not if I couldn’t love on people or even myself. In the days of counselling and alone time with God that followed, I was continually thinking, “Well, what’s next God?”

Our Ladies Bible study at church had been doing a study on the book of Joshua by Jen Wilkin (which I HIGHLY recommend), and now with suddenly being off work, there were more than a few themes from the study that stood out to me. One, being that God is always faithful, two, that when God calls, to step out in faith, and thirdly, to live wholly devoted to Him.

During my time at Bible Study, Billie, Becky and Lauren shared about their worries for summer staffing for Camp of the Woods. They needed help in the kitchen, summer support staff, camp counsellors, and a camp nurse for a few weeks. While I knew I could help out in the kitchen, the prospect of volunteering to be camp nurse intrigued me. I was already burnt out from my job and struggling through how to find a sense of normal for myself. I didn’t know where to begin, and like everything I had been learning from our Bible study, I knew I needed to submit it to God and let Him work out the details and give up all my worries to Him. As a nurse who works in the Operating Room, I knew that working as a nurse at camp and primarily with children and teens would be quite the change, and I wasn’t sure I was up for it. Every time I felt anxious about it, I was reminded again and again to give it to God, and to trust as I followed His leading.

One day when I was out at camp helping with a spring cleaning day, I remember confiding in Becky in the camp kitchen about a number of fears. She sat me down in a chair with a video for me to listen to, and walked away while it played. The man spoke about being in a small plane in Alaska, when suddenly his pilot passed out and he was left in control of the small aircraft. He was able to radio for help, and with the guidance from the radio controller, miraculously landed the plane. The conversation ends with the radio controller saying, ‘Thank you for listening to the voice. So often they don’t listen, and they crash and burn’, while making the comparison about how we as Christians need to listen to God’s voice. To not look at the storm of circumstances, but focus in on the voice of our great God, and follow Him in trust. I knew then that God was leading me to summer at Camp of the Woods, though being human, decided I needed to pray on it some more.

Nearing the time I was due to return to work, I was surprised when I got a phone call and a subsequent interview with a hospital I had applied to back in January that had never reached back out to me. They offered me a job a few days later, and in praying on it, I got a resounding, “YES” from God. I wrote up a list of pros and cons about quitting my job of nine years, selling my house, moving 22 hours away and starting a job in an OR that was MUCH bigger than I was used to, with only a part time job offered. With everything, the good and the bad, I prayed and gave it all over to God, asking Him to lead me each step of the day. I couldn’t make it through “just one more day” on my own, and I knew that I could only do this if I let God lead me through each day, every step of the way. I quit my job of nine years, and instead of anxiety, I had only peace. Peace I hadn’t felt in years. While I had quit my job, I now needed to sell my house, pack everything up, find a new home and move. While I considered that there wasn’t a lot time to do all of that, I knew I needed to entrust all of that over to God too. If God had been faithful in leading me, He was sure to be faithful to keep leading me. I called up my real estate agent and said, “I know this is a little crazy. I know there’s not a lot of time. I need to sell my house…and I’m going to go work at Camp of the Woods for two weeks”, and was able to share with him of how God had been faithful so far and how I just wanted to walk in obedience, and he in turn, encouraged me to do just that; to follow where God called.

From July 11-21, I started at Camp of the Woods as camp nurse, and on the first day I wasn’t entirely sure what I had gotten myself into, but the excitement was undeniable and I knew then that God had put me there for a reason. Even if I wasn’t sure about spending a week with a bunch of enthusiastic kids and strangers, looking back, I can see now that it was the staff and the campers who loved on me first when I got there. While I had come to dread the title of ‘nurse’ with work, hearing the excited calls of “Nurse!” And “Oh good! The nurse is here!” slowly began to grow on me.

My second night at Camp of the Woods got interesting when we got a good rainstorm as a game of capture the flag was happening. It wound up in a line of injuries of varying degrees, though thankfully, everyone was able to return to camp by that evening. Over the next few days, I began to see that while a bandaid and a pack of ice could do wonders for physical injuries, the kids had other hurts too. Sometimes they came to sit with me even though they weren’t injured at all. They needed someone to just sit and listen to them, to invest in their lives, to have fun in a safe space with them. Or to just sit quietly in silence with them. We talked about school, we talked about cool injuries, we talked about food (of which, is VERY good at camp), but my favourite chats were when they asked questions about the verses they were memorizing or the story that they’d heard from Pam while on their daily walk.

While I could see how important time at Camp of the Woods was for the kids, I slowly began to see how it was just as important for me. Even when I thought I couldn’t love on people and that I was ready to walk away from nursing altogether, I was reminded and shown that when we live wholly surrendered to God, He can do miraculous things and in ways we don’t expect.

Sure, it was mostly bandaids and ice packs most days, but administering basic first aid over the span of two weeks reaffirmed for me that yes, the love for nursing was still there, even if it was hurt and feeling fragile. And that was okay. More importantly in that, that when we choose to turn over our broken bits to God, only He can make them whole again, and into something beautiful.

While at camp, the campers had verses that they could memorize for points to be tallied up at the end of the week. I figured that surely most kids would focus more on the fun of being at camp then learning verses, but they took to memorizing verses like learning to ride a bike. It was the coolest thing I’d seen in a long time, and challenged me in my own walk with God. One verse that was one of the many on the list was Micah 7:7, which stuck with me for the rest of my time at camp:

“But as for me, I will look to the Lord

I will wait for the God of my salvation;

My God will hear me”.

On that second crazy night at camp, I also got a call from my real estate agent, telling me that there was an offer on my house, and two days later, my house had sold, no conditions. Is our God not a great one?

Friends, life is so much better when we live wholly surrendered to Him and His calling on our lives. Whether we’re called to serve at home, in our community or just love those we come in contact with, we need to do so without fear of what may come. If He calls us, we can be so assured that He goes with us and is faithful to see us through.

Camp of the Woods has such a special place in my heart, even though I was only there for two weeks. At the end of each week, all the staff gathers together for a debriefing where we talked about any issues throughout the week that came up, but mostly just to share and encourage one another in how we saw God working that week, not just in the lives of the campers, but in our own lives too. I know camp is there for the campers, but I came away from that week knowing that while I had seen God working in the lives of the kids, I knew that I had been obedient in letting God work in my life through my time at camp. And in that, I want to live the rest of my life, wholly devoted, to where He calls me to go and with what He calls me to do.

Friends, Camp of the Woods needs your help. With the last few years of the pandemic, it’s really cut back on the number of volunteers that are normally able to come up from the United States, and even the number of campers that ‘age out’, who then return as counsellors and camp staff. They need volunteers! Go for a week, or for two. And if you’re worried about the summer in the NW Ontario, it’s beautiful, just dress for the weather and wear bug spray. (They even have winter camps). They’ve got training weeks if you think you don’t have any experience, and if you’ve got questions about how you can volunteer and even donate, they’re happy to answer them.