Spending a week at summer church camp was something of a rite of passage for the boys in my family, of which I was the youngest. “You gotta go to church camp,” Mark told me when I initially resisted the idea of a week at the Baptist encampment nestled in the Quartz Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma, just 20 miles from our home in Altus, Oklahoma.
I’d listened with rapt attention as Mark told how miserably hot it was in the unairconditioned tabernacle, how the food was barely tolerable, and how nasty the bathrooms were by the end of the week. “But you gotta go,” he concluded, as he regaled me with camp adventures: sneaking Rice Crispies in the camp counselor’s bed, the evening worship services, Bible studies, softball, volleyball, swimming—boys and girls always separate, of course, at the Baptist camp.
“You gotta go,” he repeated.
And so, I did.
Southwest Baptist Assembly was for preteen boys and girls. We called it “junior camp,” and it was, at least for me, the initial venue for that mysterious amalgam of spiritual fervor with shadowy guilt.
I had made an initial commitment to Christ earlier and been baptized, but it was nonetheless there, at junior camp, that I first heard the preacher making the prolonged altar call, if not for a commitment to Christ, at least for “rededication.”
Beneath the sun’s unrelenting blaze on that barren, rocky, scorpion-infested campground, guilt can burn, like blistered feet on the hot pavement, if not arising naturally—then sometimes saddled on unsuspecting youth by otherwise well-meaning adults.
I had just finished lunch: bad, but not as disgusting as my brother had described, when I strolled across the campground, mindlessly meandering my way to our church’s cabin, hoping to find some relief from the heat under the air conditioner, a single window outfit, before it would be time for the boys to swim. In my wandering, I passed the swimming pool, where to my surprise—and some intrigue—I noticed that the girls were swimming. I paused, pondering the situation with eyes wide-open, when minutes later, a camp counselor, a preacher no doubt, stopped, admonishing my waywardness, shooing me back to my cabin as if I were an eleven-year-old voyeur. Trudging back to the cabin, like Pilgrim through the Slough of Despond, carrying the burden, the preacher’s donning me with guilt.
And so, the next night, at the evening tabernacle, I arrived, laden with yesterday’s swimming pool experience, singing along, stanza upon stanza, of “Just as I Am” after listening to the preacher for what had seemed like hours, with the ceiling fan whirring in the sultry open-air tabernacle, inducing in me a melodic trance, the sweaty palms of my hands gripping the pew in front of me, my eyes glued to the floor below me, when at last: I bolted, finding my way to the front, surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of other kids, guilty of something, even if we didn’t know quite what, all of us at that quasi-innocent age, standing on the precipice, tip-toeing into that pool of hormones, which would no doubt soon swoosh us into the vortex of teenagery.
Years later, I would find myself on the other side, up on the platform, at another church youth camp, Falls Creek, preaching during children’s week, signaling to the accompanist to play “one more stanza” of “Just as I Am,” and then another, and another, as dozens of kids streamed forward, counselors waiting for them.
And I couldn’t help but wonder, later—when alone, how many had stumbled across the swimming pool at the wrong time.