Camp Week 3 - . . . in the details

It is said the devil is in the details, and perhaps he is so devious that he can create details that derail us. But he is not the only one with a grasp on the details.

Some days when the chaos of 230 some campers hits home it's hard to even grasp the details. When yet another lunch bag, backpack or pair of water sandals goes missing, when I can't find the craft supplies that were set aside yesterday for an activity group, or when it takes a minor scavenger hunt to find a working thermometer.

The more you get to see a large operation like this, the more you realize that you are not in control - like not in control at all.
You can plan,
you can pray,
you can follow it with organization and hours of work,
but control is elusive.

Maybe control was never meant to be a human domain.

But those details can stack up. And some days you can drown in them.
But when you think your head is about to go under,
interesting things happen.

Things like the wavering over whether to make a Walmart run for more
bait during fishing.
Wavering that might have gone on and on until a camper accidentally dumped another bait box out.
I went inside to see if we could use some of the staples from my fishing days as a child - things like marshmallow bits or hot dog buns. However our pond is stocked and that includes some regulations on bait - wax worms, night crawlers, no foodstuffs that we had laying around in storage.

So I hastily typed "Walmart" into my GPS and realized why the wavering was as steep as it had been, 16 minutes to the nearest location - 32 round trip if I could teleport inside the store and find the bait effortlessly, get through the check-out and make it through traffic. 30-ish minutes was do-able, after all there was still some bait left.

Maybe it would be bad to say that I enjoyed the first part of those 16 minutes. The road, the quiet cocoon of my car. It was a moment of pulling back that I needed.

Well, until I missed the first turn-off in traffic and the GPS recalculated to 20 minutes. I sighed, traffic was not conducive to turning around, so I swallowed and tried not to worry about getting there too late.

Then I pulled up to the Walmart in question realizing that there weren't a lot of cars in the lot, but hoping for some really short register lines.

Nope. The Walmart was relocated.

I considered calling it a day and just heading back sans bait.

But then I figured I'd see how far out of the way the second location was.

Turns out it was much closer to camp.

A helpful Walmart employee got me set up almost immediately and I walked out with my three boxes of wax worms.

I gulped a little as I saw the clock in the car. But the bait was bought.

I pulled into the closest space in the lot to the pond and stumbled down the hill with a handful of bait only to hear an excited cheer.

"We just used our last worm."

On my journey to get bait,  I'd missed the three messages from my daughter on the phone.

"Hey, can you get 5 bins of worms instead of 3. . . we need a lot more."

"The fish keep eating them."

"I also stabbed myself with the hook."


In the end, while most of the kids caught multiple fish, they did stop feeding quite as insanely fast (one group of campers had caught 27 fish on their pole in the 45 minute period they had at the pond - thus the "fish keep eating them" comment from my daughter.) The three boxes were enough with a few worms left-over to throw in the water sans hooks at the end as a peace offering. My daughter's run-in with the sharp end of the fishing line was not serious (which I could have surmised since it was a text complete with punctuation.) And we had a whole lot of ecstatic campers, who all got to fish.

Details don't seem quite that big of a deal some days, and other days they become all that matter.

When they pile up and start to become overwhelming there is often a reminder of who really holds control. On that day it was a reminder that Jesus controlled fishing before and he knew how many fish those nets would hold and he certainly knew how much bait we were going to need on what time schedule.

If he has the hairs on our head numbered, the bait in the boxes is no big deal at all.

And some days I can see and rest in that knowledge and control that he has. I can remember how big God's hands are.

Some days.

Other days, I sink.
I thrash like Peter trying to walk on water.
I forget just how big God is.
I forget he holds every atom in existence effortlessly.

So I find myself writing about wax worms so that on those days, I can remember better.
So that when the big things hit I can remind myself that they are just accumulated details.