“Shipping Out”
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Well, this weekend we here on the homefront are headed to Camp Good News to work for a week. Anna will be the only one who isn’t working, actually! Erik will be home holding down the fort, and working his job, but the rest of us will live at camp as we do our various tasks to serve children who come to learn about God.
Funny how life goes on. Inside there is so much different about me, Fran, our family and our life, yet, on the outside everything else goes on normally. Always the same, with nary a change. Camp happens every year at the same place. Yard sales down the street. Church on Sunday. Politics. Newspapers. Telemarketers. Amazing how everything is so predictable. Family reunion on the 1st Saturday in August. Back to school sales at Walmart in July. Used Curriculum Sale in Augusta. People wanting copies of my Maine Studies curriculum. Questions on whether or not this is the year for New England to get a hurricane. Or, is this the year for another blizzard for the northeast. How come everything else is so normal, and I don’t feel normal at all?
Fran is usually a Senior Counselor for 12 year old boys when we go to camp. Instead, he is bunking with men of various ages, skills, faiths, and outlooks. So, while we endeavor to reach the children with the gospel, he is endeavoring to live a life worthy of the grace that God has shown all of us. He will do his duty, and try with God’s power to live a life that is an example and a light to the men he works and lives with for the next year. Maybe he can speak words of hope and strength when the days get dark and difficult.
So, as I was saying, we are all headed to camp, but one day before the week is out, Fran will board a plane for the middle east. We don’t know when. We can’t know when. Even he doesn’t know when. He will just keep calling me on his cell phone until he can’t anymore.